Panelist Comments

SUSSER: Thank you. Why don't we start by allowing each of you to comment on what your colleagues have said. And let me please encourage members of the audience, if you would like to pose a question to the panel, please write it on the card and hand them in.

Ambassador.

LORD: I wanted to comment on something Zbig said, and unfortunately he's had to leave. I caught him briefly. But I mentioned that seven American presidents of both parties have carried this relationship forward, and that is indeed true. And in fact, Zbig and Carter did play a crucial role. I, of course, was only commenting on the '72 period.

The fact is that after this dramatic opening, Nixon indicated to the Chinese he would normalize relations in his second term, and then Watergate, of course, intervened and that proved impossible. And then Ford indicated he would normalize relations in his next term, but he was constrained leading up to that election because he was being challenged by Reagan on the right, including on the Taiwan issue. And meanwhile, Deng Xiaoping was fighting a succession struggle in China -- this was in the mid '70s -- with the Gang of Four so he couldn't be flexible. So the Taiwan issue was strictly -- now, I think Brent would agree with that. In fact, the Ford trip to Beijing, through no fault of the President's, was not one of the more crowning successes because both sides were constrained by their domestic environment.

So it was left to the Carter Administration to take and bite the bullet on normalization, both the strategic dimension which Zbig mentioned, the Afghanistan and the cooperation vis-à-vis the Soviets in the intelligence field, but normalization, which came under some attacks, but I and others certainly supported it. And I think it was remarkable that the Carter Administration managed to get in as part of the agreement the fact they could continue to sell arms to Taiwan. So I just wanted to make clear that important as the opening was, as I indicated in my remarks, the Carter Administration and subsequent presidents, including Ford and people after Carter, certainly carried this forward. Thank you.

SCOWCROFT: I'd like to make one general comment, and that is it's important to remember what an emotional issue Taiwan has been through all this, not just for the Chinese but for the United States. The Taiwan issue came up in the late '40s really with the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists moving over to Taiwan. There was a domestic repercussion, big debate about who lost China. That was carried over into, for example, the McCarthy hearings about communist infiltration of the State Department and so on. And that, plus the 20 years of hostility and alienation, have left an emotional overcharge, and that has infected over and over again our ability and our freedom of action on China. And that's one of the reasons many of these things were done in secret.

And I remember after Tiananmen Square when Congress came back into session, they passed a resolution, a law really, to allow the Chinese students who were in the United States -- and there were thousands of them -- to stay indefinitely. Well, we decided that would shut off all the students coming because the Chinese would not permit that, so the President vetoed it. And we did a head count. It was hopeless in the House. We did a head count in the Senate. We counted five senators of the 35 you needed that were on our side. I've never worked so hard in my life. He sustained the veto. But that sort of gets overlooked in the kind of drag that there has been on this relation. It is a very emotional issue in this country and residually still so.

FREEMAN: I just wanted to make two footnotes on subjects that actually Dick Smyser mentioned. One was the Japanese shock at the Nixon trip. The fact is that long before the July 15, 1971 announcement that Kissinger had been in Beijing, the United States had embraced the theme -- some of the themes that Phil Zelikow was talking about earlier of inclusion versus exclusion. And I distinctly remember a very intelligent and now very famous Japanese diplomat, Sato Yukio, coming to me right after that announcement and saying, "I could kick myself. You and everyone else have been saying things that made it logical for this to happen." So the overall policy framework had, in fact, not been anywhere near as secretive as people imagined. The overall policy framework had shifted. There had been these numerous signals. And if people don't take policy frameworks seriously and then are surprised by things that happen as a result of them, I'm not sure that that's anybody's fault but their own.

The second point is this, that when you read the volume you will find that, as I think some of the introductory material suggests, there was quite an effort during this entire period to keep our friends in Taiwan informed of the general process and to offer reassurances about what we were not doing. And I would say it's very interesting; there was a comparable effort on the part of the Chinese with regard to the Vietnamese, and some years ago the Vietnamese, apparently on their own, published the entire record of those briefings and discussions between Beijing and Hanoi as this diplomacy we're talking about unfolded. That has been translated into Chinese and I have seen copies of that book in Beijing.

And my point here is that even as this material is made public and accessible here, one must realize there is an enormous amount of material that has been made available in China as well. And this is a story with several narratives, all of which have to be read to understand what happened.

LORD: Let me comment further on the Japanese dimension, which gets into the whole question of the secrecy of the trips. Zbig maintained that what some of the stuff that his administration did as well as the Nixon-Kissinger opener had to be secret. Other people have challenged that. Let me just give the rationale. It might not be totally persuasive for why this was secret, at least secret from the world.

We didn't know when we went to China in July that, in fact, it was going to be able to move forward as it did. We thought we would, but it was a risky gamble. It looks easy in retrospect, but it really was uncharted territory. And therefore, to have a public announcement or a public trip would raise expectations and it would be a tremendous diplomatic fallout if it, in fact, didn't succeed, so we wanted to be sure in secret that it would work before it was unveiled.

But more fundamentally, and Zbig alluded to this, if you indicate in advance you're doing something as dramatic as a trip, first you have the conservatives and the Taiwan lobby here, who have some genuine concerns and we try to keep that into account as Chas. mentioned; nevertheless, there'd be a tremendous backlash and political firestorm. After all, Kissinger's bedrock support was often from this general area. And other countries, including Japan and others, would be weighing in and locking us into positions before we could even explore with the Chinese. So these are the reasons it was kept secret. One can debate them, but I think on balance it had to be done.

Now with respect to Japan, which is the most painful because we had held Japan back for a decade or more saying you can't go ahead with China, and then we leapfrog them and it was very embarrassing and we suffered greatly in the short term. We did repair the relationship. Kissinger kept going back there, and over time the Japanese moved quickly of course and the relationship was repaired and the U.S.-Japan alliance, as I said, was sold to the Chinese as a stabilizing factor, so this was all a plus.

Nevertheless, and this is retrospect -- I did not argue this at the time -- I think after the secret trip and before the announcement a few days later, Holdridge or I should have peeled off and been sent to Tokyo to at least tell the Emperor in advance -- not the Emperor, the Prime Minister in advance what was coming. He could at least then save face and said he knew about it. He'd be in a tough position because would he tell his cabinet, does it leak out in the Japanese press? Nevertheless, I think that might have been done. You can even argue maybe send one of us low profile in advance of the visit, but then again everyone was worried about the leaks for the reasons we mentioned. So we paid a price temporary with Japan. That is the rationale for it.