An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy

12. BUILDING THE SECURITY RELATIONSHIP

130 12 BUILDING THE SECURITY RELATIONSHIP Everyone, it seemed, wanted to meet the diminutive but charismatic Chinese vice premier . But the first dinner, at Zbigniew Brzezinski’s home on Sunday, January 28, 1979, wasaprivateaffair.UsinggoodSovietvodka(agiftfromAnatolyDobrynin),Brzezinski toasted Deng Xiaoping with Leonid Brezhnev’s favorite drink. Cyrus Vance—along with Richard Holbrooke, Leonard Woodcock, and Mike Oksenberg—was merely an invited guest. Washingtonians with sensitive political antennae would note that a shift in power had taken place within President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy inner circle.1 At the formal White House affair, Deng dined with former Secretary of State Kissinger and former President Richard Nixon and many others. At a lunch with eighty-five senators, several anxiously awaited their turn to catch Deng’s ear and get his autograph.Even Senator Henry Jackson,who created so many problems for the administration on the SALT II talks,was captivated by Deng,saying,“He is determined to find a peaceful solution, but strong leaders never throw away their last option.” At a special gala given at the Kennedy Center for the Arts, Deng met the Harlem Globetrotters, showing—as some newspapers would note—that he had the skills of an American politician.2 Deng ended his stay in Washington with a question-and-answer luncheon on January 31 at Blair House and an interview later that afternoon with noted newsmen Walter Cronkite, Jim Lehrer, Frank Reynolds, and David Brinkley.3 At one of the events, National Security Council (NSC) aide Michel Oksenberg passed a note to political advisor Hamilton Jordan that said, “This is a historic meeting—you’re witnessing the takeoff of Sino-American relations.” Carter himself called the visit“one of the most historic in our nation’s history.”4 Escorted by Ambassador Woodcock and Richard Holbrooke, Deng then visited three other U.S. cities. In Atlanta, Deng received a standing ovation from businessmen at a chamber of commerce dinner. The following day, he stopped by Martin Luther King Jr.’s grave and toured a Ford Motor Company plant with Henry Ford II and Woodcock. In Houston, Deng inspected some of the U.S. technology he admired, played on a space shuttle simulator, and donned a“ten-gallon” cowboy hat. In Seattle, Deng courted the public by kissing babies and shaking hands.Deng’s appearance in the United States, Newsweek noted,“seemed to tap deep into a long hidden wellspring of American goodwill toward China.”5 Deng also had a political mission.The Chinese had come to terms with the United States partly out of a desire to solicit support in their battles vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Deng warned administration officials that the Soviet Union could lead the world into another war and advocated an “alliance of the United States, China, Japan, Western BUILDING THE SECURITY RELATIONSHIP 131 Europe and the Third World against Moscow.”6 At the lunch at Blair House he addressed the issues of hegemony in depth, called the Vietnamese “the Cubans of the Orient,” and acknowledged that the Chinese had shipped weapons to the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Behind the scenes, a highly secret plan for permanently sharing intelligence regarding Soviet capabilities in western China was finalized.The objective was to replace the monitoring capabilities that the United States had lost in Iran with the overthrow of the shah. Stations would be staffed by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials with help from the National Security Agency and the Chinese. Deng and Carter also signed other agreements for cooperation in“science, technology, space and cultural exchanges.”7 The final communiqué of the United States and the People’s Republic of China also included,at Brzezinski’s urging,a reference to the threat of “hegemony”—a phrase clearly directed against the Soviet Union.8 Vance had objected to the inclusion of that term in the communiqué,but had settled for a compromise offered by Brzezinski—the addition of another phrase“or domination over others.”An additional statement Vance proffered, which would note the continued importance of Soviet-U.S. cooperation, was rejected out of hand.At the foreign affairs breakfast on February 2, Carter handed the proposed statement back to Vance without even seriously reading it. He muttered, “Is it another apology?”9 At a more immediate level, Deng’s goal was to keep the United States neutral in the attack China was planning against Vietnam. Shortly after the opening of the FIGURE 9. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Deng Xiaoping in a toast at Brzezinski’s...