Episode 71: RICHARD NIXON 1972 The Foundation of Peace (Part 2) EUREKA!! Putting the trip to China Together

In this episode we look backwards at how the China initiative came together. Richard Nixon had envisioned reaching out to China long before he became President of the United States. He wrote an article for Foreign Affairs magazine in 1967 where he talked briefly about Asia after Vietnam and the importance of reaching out to China. There were hints in his inaugural Address about building a world in which no one lived "in angry isolation"

This was such a different approach than was being considered in diplomatic circles or in the basic tenants of American foreign policy that when Nixon started talking to Henry Kissinger about making the approach, Kissinger thought he had lost his mind. When they identified Warsaw , Poland as a place where they could make that move to China, the American Ambassador to Poland did not believe the direction was actually from the President. He refused to do it. Nixon had to call the man home to instruct him to do it so he would believe the order was real. 

It was a far different world than what we live in today. A world Richard Nixon largely had the vision to create. Here we will relive all the various cloak and dagger operations that the administration had to do to keep the initiative secret and get it to finally bare fruit.  Here is the story of the secretive messages, the ping pong diplomacy,  and the trickery it took to get our secret envoy, Henry Kissinger into China, and then the moment (Eureka!!!) that it all came together with the invite to China. 

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