Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan Reviewed by Erik Spanberg
Christian Science Monitor
"Thirty-five years ago, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger completed a diplomatic masterpiece. In 1972, after 23 years of frozen relations between the two nations, Nixon went to China. This being Nixon, plenty of oddities and insecurities surrounded the week-long trip. There were no daily press briefings, a symptom of the administration's paranoid and dismissive attitude toward a media corps it nonetheless monitored with a gimlet eye. Even more oddly, Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser, conspired with the President to omit secretary of State William Rogers from high-level negotiations as well as the unprecedented meeting between the American head of state and Chairman Mao Zedong...." Read the entire Christian Science Monitor review.