Gstaad
Margaret MacMillan’s new book, Nixon and Mao, brought back pleasant memories. It was February 1972, and I’d just returned to Saigon from Phu Bai and Hue in the north, where I was reporting for National Review. I was eager to get back to civilisation and some skiing in Gstaad, when President Nixon’s trip to Beijing took us all by surprise. Not Bill Buckley, however, my nominal boss at NR, who had accompanied Richard Nixon to the land Imperial England had permanently ‘turned on’ with its opium. MacMillan writes that Nixon, a lifelong anti-communist and cold warrior par excellence, was moved when Mao took his hand and would not let go. The handholding did not impress Buckley, however. Alone among the accompanying journalists, Bill complained that it was ‘as if the prosecutors at Nuremberg had suddenly embraced the defendants begging them to join them in the making of a better world’.
Writing for NR back then was like being employed by one’s uncle in the local family newspaper.
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