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CHINA
11/22/71
THE FALL OF MAO'S
HEIR
*
Outsiders have sought for more than two
months to make sense of portents from
Peking suggesting an epic struggle for
power in China. Last week they claimed to
have some tangible evidence. Lin Piao,
Defense Minister and Mao Tse-tung's
political heir, is very possibly dead.
Western experts learned that Lin Piao had
made three attempts on Mao's life over an
18-month period. Lin was found out, and
tried to flee China with his wife and son,
but Lin's own daughter Lin Tou-tou
betrayed them. Can the tale be true? What
was evident was that Lin had been in a
showdown with Mao, and had
lost.
DIPLOMACY
7/26/71
ON TO PEKING
*
The words seem
slightly grandiloquent in a McLuhanesque
age when all is known at once, the future
long discounted and the uninformed options
line up by the numbers. Yet the words were
justified. From a California TV studio,
President Richard Nixon
last week made an announcement that
altered many assumptions and patterns of
postwar diplomacy. The President would go
to Peking to meet with China's Mao
Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai before
next May. The arrangements had been made
by his National Security Adviser, Henry
Kissinger. The aim of the meeting, said
the President, "is to seek the
normalization of relations between the two
countries and also to exchange views on
questions of concern to the two sides."
The deceptively modest formulation brought
an instant and exuberant response. "This
is a turning point in world history,"
declared England's Lord Caradon, former
ambassador to the United Nations.
After the announcement Nixon, Kissinger
and four aides skipped off to dinner at a
Los Angeles restaurant, where they
celebrated with a $40 bottle of Chateau
Lafite Rothschild (1961).
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VIETNAM
2/9/68
TET IN THE YEAR OF THE
MONKEY
*
Though ominous harbingers of
trouble had been in the air for days, most of South
Vietnam lazed in uneasy truce, savoring Tet, the
happiest and holiest holiday of the Vietnamese
year. The Year of the Monkey had begun, and every
Vietnamese knew that it was wise to make merry
while there was yet time; in the 12-year Buddhist
lunar cycle, 1968 is a grimly inauspicious
year.
Through the streets of Saigon and
in the dark approaches to dozens of towns and
military installations, other Vietnamese made their
furtive way. After the merrymakers had retired,
they struck with a fierceness and bloody
destructiveness that Vietnam has not seen even in
three decades of nearly continuous warfare. More
than 36,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers
launched a general offensive against airfields,
military bases, government buildings, population
centers and just plain civilians.
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