Thought I would share this passage from the beginning of T White’s 1972 “Making of a President” as it illuminates the current debate between Hillary and Obama on the wisdom and desirabilty of “meeting with the enemy”;
The Chinese had persisted only briefly in the mood of Yenan. They had pleaded with Americans, in 1945, that they be allowed to send two delegates of their Politburo to talk to the President of the United States in Washington. They had been rebuffed. By 1952, in Korea, Chinese and Americans were killing each other. And the hate had persited ever since, all dialogue between the two countries frozen into paranoia, the whole world paralyzed for the entire postwar era by two systems of power which could not understand each other”.
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and later when Nixon first flew over to open relations withChina;
The presence of Chou gave the greeting its meaning – the sparse gathering of Chinese newsman and functionaries might otherwise have been an Oriental snub. Eighteen years before, at the Geneva conference on Vietnam, Chou En-Lai had extended his hand in friendship to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; Chou had remembered ever since how Dulles had spurned it, had turned his back and walked away. Nixon now extended his hand first; Chou took it in view of all the cameras, smiled, and in sight of millions of Americans watching back home, China was erased as the enemy.
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Thank you for posting it, Pericles.