Page 186 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE PERSUASIVE

Union led the mainland Chinese to feel diplomatically strained and iso-
lated. President Nixon, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and
other top-ranking U.S. officials were convinced that improved relations
with the PRC would tip the balance of power toward the United States
in its Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. Opening up trade with
the PRC would be a windfall for American commerce too. However, the
White House was worried: Would President Nixon be able to convince
the American people that the time was right for détente between the
United States and China? Was the nation ready to see its president
embracing “the enemy”?
“Here was China, a country that was killing millions of their own peo-
ple in the middle of their cultural revolution,” McFarlane said. “Here was a
country that was providing arms to Vietnam, that was killing Americans,
and here was a communist government. I mean, if the president had just
announced that he was going to China to open talks with that government
and that was that, people would have said, ‘What in the dickens are we
doing, Nixon?’ But he first employed strategies to engage his three key
constituencies—Congress, our allies, and the American people—and those
are the constituencies a president has to tend to if he’s going to get his ideas
adopted, shared, supported, funded, and ultimately made successful. So it
was only through privately, clandestinely nurturing the idea and, impor-
tantly, publicly outlining all the strategic advantages it would give us against
the Soviet Union that he achieved such a dramatic, historic leap forward.”
In July 1971, President Nixon secretly sent Kissinger to China to meet
with Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai to make all the arrangements
for Nixon’s upcoming visit. Kissinger was supposed to be in Pakistan that
day, but he pretended to be sick and gave the press the slip. Less than a
week later, President Nixon announced that he had been invited to the
PRC and would be meeting with Chairman Mao. A majority of Americans
supported the trip, and in February 1972, McFarlane watched along with
the rest of the world as President Nixon and Chairman Mao greeted
each other with a warm—and historic—handshake. Nixon’s approval rating
soared.
Although McFarlane’s Fellowship year ended in August 1972, his time
in Washington did not. Henry Kissinger asked McFarlane to stay on and
be his military assistant. In that role he engaged in sensitive intelligence
interactions with Chinese officials and accompanied Dr. Kissinger on trips

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