Richard Nixon’s Long March

En route. Everywhere we turn, we come upon the logo of this voyage. “The Visit of President Richard M. Nixon to the People’s Republic of China.” It is thus emblazoned on our baggage tags, stationery, rucksacks. At first it puts you off. But if you sit down and doodle, asking yourself: what is a self-effacing way to say it, answers leap not instantly to mind. It is, after all, a visit. The U.S. principal is, after all, the President of the United States. And there is no getting around it that his name is Richard M. Nixon, or that his destination is—caution. It may appear stilted that every time one alludes to the area in question, one speaks of it as the “People’s Republic of China.” Actually, it is not only proper but reassuring that we continue to do so. You see, we recognize a government which is called “The Republic of China,” and that government sits in Taiwan. Strictly speaking it is bad form to visit a territory of a government you recognize, which territory is in mutinous contention with the recognized government. Thus one would not, a few years ago, have dispatched the Queen of England to Biafra. And if one had done so, one would have avoided designating it as a visit to Nigeria. Accordingly, the constant references to PRC were, one supposed, diplomatic appeasers, for the benefit of Chiang Kai-shek. About the last he would get.

Even so there is the narcissistic overtone, which mocks republican tradition, reminding us of the distance we have traveled since Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, the exemplar and the ideologue of republican anti-pomp. There is Bonapartism in the air in these parts—Lyndon Johnson would not have ventured to a Bar-B-Q without the Presidential seal engraved on his blue jeans, and there is the beginning, in Nixon’s court, of Transylvanian chrome. After all, it would have sufficed, for purposes of communication, to refer to the “Presidential Visit to the People’s Republic of China,” leaving it to our grandchildren to reach for the almanac to remind themselves who was President of the United States at the Peking Summit, and to their grandfathers to hope that the almanac in question will be written in English, rather than Chinese.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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En route. Everywhere we turn, we come upon the logo of this voyage. “The Visit of President Richard M. Nixon to the People’s Republic of China.” It is thus emblazoned on our baggage tags, stationery, rucksacks. At first it puts you off. But if you sit down and doodle, asking yourself: what is a self-effacing way to say it, answers leap not instantly to mind. It is, after all, a visit. The U.S. principal is, after all, the President of the United States. And there is no getting around it that his name is Richard M. Nixon, or that his destination is—caution. It may appear stilted that every time one alludes to the area in question, one speaks of it as the “People’s Republic of China.” Actually, it is not only proper but reassuring that we continue to do so. You see, we recognize a government which is called “The Republic of China,” and that government sits in Taiwan. Strictly speaking it is bad form to visit a territory of a government you recognize, which territory is in mutinous contention with the recognized government. Thus one would not, a few years ago, have dispatched the Queen of England to Biafra. And if one had done so, one would have avoided designating it as a visit to Nigeria. Accordingly, the constant references to PRC were, one supposed, diplomatic appeasers, for the benefit of Chiang Kai-shek. About the last he would get.

Even so there is the narcissistic overtone, which mocks republican tradition, reminding us of the distance we have traveled since Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, the exemplar and the ideologue of republican anti-pomp. There is Bonapartism in the air in these parts—Lyndon Johnson would not have ventured to a Bar-B-Q without the Presidential seal engraved on his blue jeans, and there is the beginning, in Nixon’s court, of Transylvanian chrome. After all, it would have sufficed, for purposes of communication, to refer to the “Presidential Visit to the People’s Republic of China,” leaving it to our grandchildren to reach for the almanac to remind themselves who was President of the United States at the Peking Summit, and to their grandfathers to hope that the almanac in question will be written in English, rather than Chinese.