Ambassador Charles Freeman

SUSSER: Ambassador Freeman.

AMBASSADOR CHARLES FREEMAN: General Scowcroft and Dr. Brzezinski have said just about everything I wanted to say, but before you get your hopes up and think I won't say anything, I'm afraid this leaves me with no alternative but to address the topic of the conference, so I will.

I would start by saying that I wondered why I was invited to this, if not for comic relief than perhaps because I probably have the greatest continuity of involvement with China and this relationship of any Chinese language officer in the Foreign Service. I became interested in the opening to China in the fall of 1964 when I was attempting to find reasons to leave Harvard Law School and discovered strategic geometry. And it seemed obvious to me that if there were three powers, two of which (a) and (b) were at odds, and (c) was at odds with both, that (a) and (b) would either have to attempt a new relationship with (c), and I decided I wanted to be there when that happened. And by a stroke of great luck, I was, as a worker bee and as interpreter mostly for Secretary Rogers. So I was involved for 15 years off and on during the Nixon period, later opening the liaison office in Beijing, as Director for Chinese Affairs here, as Chargé and DCM in Beijing, and later in 1993, ten years after that, as Assistant Secretary of Defense reopening military dialogue with the Chinese.

I'm going to speak about three basic points in light of this. First, underneath the very large relationships and issues that are discussed in the Foreign Relations volume and which have been discussed today, of course there is a great deal of texture and detail. I counted 41 separate signals to the Chinese bureaucratically in preparation for the opening that Kissinger and Nixon brokered. When you work in the government, the last thing on earth you want to have happen is somebody notice you, and so I wrote an article about this and felt very good that no one ever noticed it. But for anyone who's interested, all 41 moves are detailed in something called Sino-American Normalization and Its Policy Implications, which was a book that came out in the mid '70s.

This was an interesting process. When you try to turn the ship of state, a lot of people have to run around and pull lines and reset things and it doesn't happen easily. And I think in my case I was called back from home leave early in April of 1971 for reasons which were not explained on the telephone, but I ended up basically working full time for Dr. Kissinger without his being aware of that because the boss in the office at that time, Al Jenkins, claimed he was doing all the work on his own and I had to pretend to my colleagues that I was doing special projects. And so at any rate, it wasn't the case, I think, that Kissinger didn't know how to use the State Department or didn't; he used it a great deal, but he used it outside the chain of command. What I did never went up to the seventh floor, nor did what Jenkins did go up to the seventh floor.

In fact, in preparation for the Nixon trip, to jump ahead a little bit, I looked at the fitness report for that year. It says that I wrote 47 percent of the material that was supplied to the President, not all of which was recognized by the White House as originating at the State Department. There was a habit of our colleagues in the White House of taking State Department-produced material and retyping the front page so that it would appear that it had been produced there.

As a result of this, something called Department of State briefing paper, which is still in use, was invented by Nick Platt, then the head of the Secretariat. In those days, you actually had to retype things, and this managed to ensure that both the front page and the back page and everything in between had to be retyped, which was too much work for our friends to do.

So -- and I also, I should say, somebody at the last minute decided Mrs. Nixon needed a briefing book, and I had 48 hours to write that. I wrote the whole thing with a lot of help from Nagels Encyclopedia Guide, which I commend to your attention.

But some of the things that happened are really quite interesting. We were asked, for example, after the President made a statement about changing controls on the use of the U.S. dollar by China to find out why the Treasury hadn't implemented this. And I had the head of the Office of Foreign Assets Control to lunch and I gave him the Presidential statement and explained it to him. And he said, "This is very interesting." He said, "That may be the President's policy, but it's not the Treasury's." (Laughter.)

And so you shouldn't -- anyway, I'm just saying this is a very complex process and I'm very pleased that some of this material at least apparently is made available on an internet supplement to the volume, which undoubtedly will be interesting.

Two further points. I went on this trip not as the producer of material but as interpreter, but nobody ever told me that I was going to go in any capacity. I found out -- this is a very secretive White House we're dealing with. I found out when luggage tags were shoved through the mail slot on my front door at home. Nobody told me what I was to do. I remember meeting this skinny guy on a beach in Hawaii, Brent Scowcroft, I think a newly promoted brigadier, and asking him if he had any idea what I was to do. And he said no, no, no, as Pat Buchanan, who was the speechwriter. And I did, and I learned from Pat Buchanan that he had put some of Chairman Mao's poetry, with Dick Solomon's help, into the banquet toasts. And that was useful information, but I didn't know what I -- didn't find out what I was to do.

And in fact, when we arrived in Beijing I still didn't know what I was to do. And the President didn't tell me, although we met. He went off to see Chairman Mao. A banquet occurred. An hour before the banquet, I was called over to the President's villa by Dwight Chapin and said -- told, "The President wants you to interpret the banquet toast." And I said, "Fine. May I have the text, please?" And he said, "Well, I don't think there is a text. I think he's going to do it extemporaneously." And I said, "I think you're quite wrong about that." (Laughter.) "But you know, really this isn't French or Spanish and I really would like to look at the text if I could."

So he went back in to see the President, came out and said, "The President says there is no text and he orders you to do it." (Laughter.) And I said -- well, mind you, I'm 28 years old. I said, "I think there's a mistake here. I don't think you talked to the President." He said, "I did." He went back in, came out and said, "The President orders you to interpret the speech." I said, "Mr. Chapin, it might interest you to know that I wrote the original draft for tonight's toast and I know that some of Chairman Mao's poetry is in it, but I don't know which stanzas. And if you think I'm going to get up in front of the world and ad lib Chinese poetry back from English, you're out of your," and then I used a foul word, "mind." (Laughter.)

Well, Mr. Chapin never explained why, but two days later the President did. He apologized with tears in his eyes -- again, quite an experience for someone who had expected the end of his career -- and explained that he liked to appear -- he liked to memorize speeches and appear to be giving them extemporaneously and that he understood I'd done a fine job and it wasn't personal and so forth.

There are many other anecdotes I won't mention, and I'll just say one final thing. I at least, partly because I come from a family with a long involvement with China, a great grandfather who was the original designer of the Three Gorges Dam for Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Beijing University Social Science Department and one of the co-founders of the Chinese steel industry in the 19th century, whose ring I wear. As we drove around Beijing, thought long and hard about what the impact of this visit was likely to be. Never in my wildest dreams did I believe it would have the long-term impact on China that it has had.

And I must say I was absolutely stunned -- Dr. Brzezinski has left -- but I was absolutely stunned about six years ago in speaking with some people at the Central Party School in Beijing who showed me documents from the normalization period to discover that Deng Xiaoping's motivations for normalization, although they were in part foreign policy related, were mainly to introduce an American influence that would help a reform process inside China that he sought to inaugurate.

The result, of course, has been that from that 1972 Nixon visit period when China was a cultural desert, when it was a colorless and lifeless place, we've seen the lights come on, the people dress up and the return of the traditional philosophy of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who said, (in Chinese); that is, "Gluttony and luster, what it's all about." This is something the Chinese have rediscovered with a policy and a program that are based on pragmatism, eclectic borrowing from abroad, and now more and more innovation.

Meanwhile, the Taiwan issue which focused -- which was the principal focus in 1972, seems to me to be moving toward resolution. This is an extraordinary story and it's not over yet. Thank you. (Applause.)