slips were -- with a clothespin were passed on a string down to the cashier and they would come back promptly -- and everything worked functionally. and i knew, of course, that chinese people elsewhere, especially in the united states but also in indonesia and throughout asia, when turned loose in an entrepreneurial fashion, had enormous creativity and work ethic, which i never saw in the soviet union. and i remember saying to somebody, if these people are ever turned loose, watch out. >> you and napoleon. >> right. >> mike, watching this hour, you see very early the sort of beginnings of this sort of cat-and-mouse game between the press and the chinese government, which continues in different permutations.

this must have been familiar territory to you. >> i first went to china in 1973. so the cat and mouse part of it and you get to see the show commune and the -- i went to hospital on my '73 trip and we saw the acupuncture, anesthesia, which was the first big exposure of that kind of tightly controlled, showcased tourism. that became the mainstay of what a lot of visitors did. and part of the story of the american press over the last 30, 40 years has been this interaction with the system and pushing and pushing and then the system pushing back. i think in fairness, it's in many ways night and day to today in china for all of the problems. and there are still many from the point of view of reporters.

there's no comparison because i think to quote ron walker, they had no idea what was going to hit them. it's true. they never had -- when you think about who was there, all the top network anchors, all the most powerful people -- and then this other kind of collection of people that nixon liked and people like william f. buckley and james michner, it was an odd collection -- >> tourists. >> people certainly didn't know a lot about china. but all of them, significant figures here, all wanting something and all bringing their own prejudices and so on. what's amazing to me is for all of the things that could have gone wrong and sort of did go wrong at one level, that there wasn't some sort of catastrophic media disaster that poisoned the whole trip.

i think that's partly because of the sheer newness and freshness and exoticness of it and the historic import of an american president being there outweighed all these other petty aggravations. so that's not the ultimate takeaway, even though that was central to the experience of a lot of the reporters then. the other interesting observation that struck me is the relation to the diplomacy. here you have nixon and mao spending a week together literally almost every single day, meetings, meals, touring, a lot of time talking casually and so on. i should say parenthetically, we were very lucky in this film to get a lot of those images because we learned in the course of the research that nixon hired a film crew through david wolper, a filmmaker, he made "root" and this crew was for nixon's personal use. they had, in addition to the

access to all the news events, all this behind-the-scenes access. it was never intended to be shown publicly. it was for nixon himself. it sat there for almost 40 years while they tried to figure out whether it belonged to the nixon family or the nixon estate. eventually it was decided to belonged to the national archives and we got access to in the fall. but you can imagine today an american president and a chinese president having this easy banter. it's a two-hour formal dinner and that's it. and absent a whole week of that, you wouldn't have had quite the same degree of mutual confidence that allowed the leadership on both sides to move ahead with the risks that they had undertaken into the whole trip happening at all. >> so, nick, how do you think meeting with zhou enlai and mao, albeit in a much shorter time frame, how you that affected william rogers, henry kissinger

and nixon, what was their sentiment besides their sense of triumph of having gotten there and accomplished something rather significant? what do you think the personal sentiments were that they took away from their trip? >> well, nixon, i think, took away a sense of satisfaction. he told me at one time i had a conversation with him, he said, from now on, you china boys are going to have a lot more to do. and that turned out to be true. that's why my book is called "china boys." but in any case, i think kissinger also came away with a sense of achievement. and he and zhou had developed a relationship which was to be used for -- until zhou died. it was a very important relationship because nixon was gone within a year -- two years, i guess it was, august of '74,

he was out. and that relationship carried our u.s./china relationship forward. rogers comes across as kind of a zeroid in this combination of personalities. but, in fact, rogers played, i think, a fairly important role in that he was -- his advice was listened to very carefully by kissinger and nixon and so forth, when talking about how to frame these issues for the public and for the congress. rogers was kind of the resident rightist on the delegation. i think he was personally

humiliated by being left out of the meeting with mao. but zhou enlai made a point of calling on him secretly during the trip, partly to, i think, assuage some of this humiliation but also to find out whether there really was a split in the u.s. delegation, whether the kind of objections that rogers and marshall green had raised meant that the delegation was divided and that this whole thing was going to disintegrate as soon as we got back to the united states. and rogers satisfied him on this score. rogers was a thoroughly grown-up gent. and he did not have the role in the making of foreign policy that kissinger did. but he was a good explainer and

a good presenter and a team player. >> before we open it up to questions from you all, let me just ask all of you just to comment very briefly -- do you think that the opening of of china to the world in a much more exaggerated fashion could have happened without this visit in 1972? >> i don't know enough about chinese politics, honestly, as to whether it could have happened on their end. i think on american side, yes, i think the public was way ahead of the nixon trip and its readiness to change attitudes about communist china, not that it would be an admiring attitude but open to a relationship -- >> pragmatic? >> pardon? >> pragmatic?

>> pragmatic relationship. the american public was ready for it. the fact that the quick switch that was developed at the united nations where taiwan was unceremoniously thrown out, practically, with no real public reaction to it. that's proof of that. so i think on our end, we were ready. i defer to the china scholars on -- >> i think you can make a pretty good argument that without the nixon trip and the success of the nixon trip and the american feather in mao and zhou's cap, i think that did strengthen people in the chinese leadership who were looking to kind of move away from the ideological extremism of the cultural revolution and take a more pragmatic approach to china and china's dealings with the world. i don't think it's entirely a coincidence that a year later, in '73 deng is brought back when

the liaison office is opening. that would have been a factor in strengthening the hand of people who would see a role for somebody like deng as china kind of settled down and connected again with the world. >> it was zhou enlai's baby, mao agreed, assented. but zhou did it and deng xiaoping was his legacy. >> my table at the banquet, the first night, was full of people who had been sent to the countryside. distinguished physicians, trained at yale, who were being reeducated in the countryside, they were suddenly rehabilitated. it was a clear signal within elite circles in china that there was a new wind. >> i don't think deng could have -- i think he would have done it in due course. but i think that the nixon trip gave the relationship a jump-start. and the creation of the channels

through which we invested, traded, did exchanges, education, so on and so forth, all followed very, very quickly during the liaison office days. and you'll have to remember that it was berzin ski and carter who actually fashioned and negotiated the formal recognition of china. and it was deng who rode on that. he came to the united states right after we'd formally recognized. and the negotiation process was very tortuous and very difficult. and there was a lot of infighting in the american government, too. but i can't see deng being able

to normalize, to pull things off, to manage his own reforms as quickly as he did without having been given the impetus of the nixon trip. >> sort of broke the ice. okay. it's ten past 8:00. let's do ten or 15 minutes of questions for you. i urge you all to keep them short. and we'll try to keep the answers short. there are microphones. please raise your hands. let's see. i see one way in the back. any other hands? yeah, back on the left. put your hand up again so that you can be seen. >> thank you. my name is ben. my question is for ambassador platt. knowing about nixon's sort of plan for the trip and what he wanted to achieve, if nixon was looking at u.s./china relations now, do you think that he

would -- what would he think about how they've developed with what he envisioned? >> i think nixon would have been astonished. none of us had a clue that china was going to develop economically so rapidly or that economic and people-to-people relationships between the u.s. and china were going to play such an important role in our overall relationship now or grow to such a gigantic size. he was interested in the trilateral diplomacy and in trying to put the soviets off-balance, get them to be more responsive to his policies, his desire to get out of vietnam. his arms control arrangements and so forth.

but after the soviet union collapsed and so forth, the relationship had to survive these great blows to the relationship. and did so on the basis of the people-to-people contacts to which he and nixon relegated to the state department. anyway, i think he would have been astonished at the size of the relationship and quite delighted with the role that he played in starting it all. >> i think it would be fair to say that all four of us, given our experience in china in the early and mid '70s are astonished by what's happened in china. another question. right here? >> you mentioned a little bit earlier about your visit to the

cia to sort of get some background work before going on the trip. i was just wondering, to the extent that you can say, what sorts of documents or media that you consumed to prepare you for what you might encounter? how did you come to understand the culture, the geography, the manners? anything? what sorts of things did you consult for study before you went over? >> i'd be curious to know, too, max, if you feel the cia had it when you were reading or talking with them before you went? >> i didn't mean to make it such a great mystery. the cia, as you know, functions in two halves. there is the secret operational part of the cia that i could never get anywhere near, of course. i went to the analytical side, where ever since the mccarthy period, most of the experience china hands were left in the american government because they

were hounded out of the state department in mccarthy's day by the republicans, led, among others, by the likes of nixon. and so the best talent for analyzing china was at the cia. and it's those people that i sought out. and i was largely interested in the biographies of the people that i was likely to be covering so that i could write with some knowledge as to who these people were, who role they had played in the cultural revolution, et cetera, what the relationship might be between zhou enlai and mao and representing different factions of outlook on the world. and insofar as i could tell, they had it pretty right, yes. >> if i could add a point, the cia was quite public about briefing people on the geography and the economy and so forth. i have an atlas that was

published by the cia at that document, very detailed and informative. i also know from having been an analyst for many years that 98% of the information that we got was based on basically public sources. how we got them was not necessarily unclassified. but this was pretty much public stuff, the really clandestine stuff of things was not very well developed. >> i spoke to my father on the phone and told him that i was coming here tonight and he told me to ask you that because he helped to write that atlas you referred to. he was a china analyst at that time. so -- >> who is your father? >> i'm not telling you that part. >> thank you. >> when i repeat those answers to him, he's going to be thrilled.

so thank you very much. >> we have a question right here. >> this has been a wonderful film and a fascinating discussion. but i think what could be useful is to add a few more words about the context in the 1960s that led to the trip. the idea for the secret trip of henry kissinger in july '71 didn't come out of the head of zeus. it began with the fullbright hearings of 1966. that showed what max frankel said that, despite the beginning of the cultural revolution -- and this is the irony -- a growing american support for a new china policy. that's why we had the national committee on u.s./china relations formed at that time. that's why nixon just had a brief mention in his '67 foreign

affairs article. in '68, our harvard m.i.t. group gave nixon and kissinger the idea for the secret trip. this was coming. the democrats were trying very hard to be the first in china. the democrats were split. the administration was saying, we're in vietnam because china is behind it. on the other hand, mcgovern and kennedy said, we need a new china policy. and jim thompson and others who saw the need for this were pushing it. so you had a gradual evolution in the late '60s and henry and company were trying gingerly to take this issue away from the democrats. teddy kennedy went up to ottawa in may '71 to see the new ambassador in the hope of being the first to go to china before nixon and kissinger. but the chinese weren't having any, especially because ted

kennedy refused to say that taiwan was part of china and under beijing's jurisdiction. had he been willing to give taiwan away, he might have had a chance to go. been willing to g taiwan away, he was willing to go. this was part of the democrat-republican preparation for the 72 election and part of a rising american opinion for china change. i remember arthur hommel, the secretary of state told us it was only the full bright committee hearings that showed american support for a new china policy. i said to him, you mean it's the function of the congress to lead public opinion on foreign policy and the function of the state department to follow it? we had to say this in the context of democratic party people trying to take over this issue and nixon and kissinger very cleverly took it away. >> the price of admission was to

give taiwan away and you were willing to do that. how ironic. >> if you head the transcripts, it's amazing how blunt they are and how cavalier they are in the meetings with them in saying it's not that important. figure it out. make a big fuss about it. they are ready. then of course kissinger came back and there was a period when nixon and kissinger said we will maintain the relationship even though they indicated to the chinese. >> in chinese terms, they were giving it away as an issue. they claimed it as their birth right internally and they were really saying we will let this thing ride for generations. they have. >> they remained in charge of

their own deft tee. >> not a bad strategy. it's okay if it takes seven years. >> i think it was done. it was time for more question. who has the question to end-all questions? maybe right here. pretty sure. >> one element that was mentioned was the low key reception. you mentioned it and the cars zipping through, but i thought more of a staged event was more of the chinese or what was going on behind the scenes that caused it to be so low key and what did it symbolize. >> my theory is that the chinese people who are running them wanted to downplay this until they had found out what mao's reaction was going to be.

once mao met nixon, everybody relaxed and there was a lot more people around. i remember when we were going in this motorcade, you could see that there were a lot of people down halfway down the blocks that we passed who were being held behind barriers and so on and so forth. i think there was a sense of holding their breath at the outset until the actual laying on of hands by mao. >> that makes sense. >> this experience on the other side, it was one of the most amazing things that i encountered walking around beijing. the number of small children who were frightened to death at the sight of me. this hairy character with a big nose, they would literally bury their faces in mama or grandma's

skirt and go away crying. as i walked along one wall of the little villages that were surrounded by a wall with every block or so having an entrance, as i walked along that wall, i could see through the opening that there was a crowd of about 50 youngsters on the other side of the wall following me along. i could only see them every time there was an opening in the wall. we were from mars as far as they were concerned. the strangeness of the experience both ways. >> just for those of you who can't get enough of it, it's available on the website and there is a version of the chinese subtitles there as well if you have chinese friend who is are interested in watching.

>> before we sign off, i want to thank our staff and all of the other folks helping us put these kinds of events together and thanks to the three panelists for a wonderful thing. >> you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of people and events that help document the american story. all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. all weekend long, american history tv joins the comcast cable partners in louisiana to showcase its history and literary cultu.ounded in 1836 ha

population of about 200,000 people and is located about miles northwest of baton rouge. you are watching american history tv on c-span 3. . >> we are standing in the cemetery that dates back to 1847. it was the primary city cemetery until about 1895 or so. one of the r important to the city is that the great yellow favor epidemic decimated the city and changed the course of the history of north louisiana and the city in particular. within two weeks, we lost a quarter of the population in the city inside the city limits. 800 to 1,000 people are in this cemetery. if you pan over and look at the

top of the hill, that's the yellow fever mound. with 824 people confirmed in it, then there other folks who died and were either moved or put in here. it killed almost all the doctors and all the nurses. it killed many, many prominent people in the city. it was devastating. the city was quarantined by railroads and rivers. nothing was allowed to come in and go out. money was raised from new york and washington and new orleans from chicago. it was a national event. nation will last another four years.

in shreveport andno louisiana, shreveport is luckyr the army leaves to save itself. redemption as itas in this state. local rule returns at that time. on the negative side, shreveport stunted for many,an unhealthy many decades. it ends up returning, but it's going to take a while. this is the monument and grave of the united states army corps of engineers first lieutenant, eugene august us wood ruff. he graduated near the top of his class and allowed by their rules

to be an engineer. he is sitting here with a detachment. during reconstruction in 1872 to clear the great log jam and his brother was his second in command. he had a good attachment and he completed the work that began. they had to do some work to get rid of the log jam. they did it. they used nitroglycerin the first time it was used in a large project. in 1873 in augt, while they were working, pretty close to finishing the route and knocking it out and tearing it up, whatever they needed to do, yellow fever broke out in shreveport. the army ordered this detachment out.