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Nixon, the old Communist baiter, may yet do more than any other U.S. leader to rid the U.S. of an obsessive and restrictive fear of Communism. His motive was unassailable, whatever the personal political benefits. He perhaps expressed it best in a recent briefing of newspaper editors in Kansas City. China, Nixon argued, will one day be "an enormous economic power," and its continued isolation from international dialogue must be ended before it becomes a threat to peace. The Soviet Union cannot reach out to China now, Nixon said, "because of differences that at the present time seem to be irreconcilable; we were the only other power that could take those steps." Nixon also looked 15 or 20 years into the future: "Mainland China, outside the world community, completely isolated, with its leaders not in communication with world leaders, would be a danger to the whole world that would be unacceptable to us and unacceptable to others as well."
More personally, Nixon has recently talked often to his staff about how Chinese-American communities on the West Coast of the U.S. lifted themselves from poverty and were law-abiding. He speaks of the Chinese as the most "creative, industrious" people of Asia, and claims that those in mainland China will one day furnish a huge "reservoir of talent" for an "era of peace." Yes, they are Communists and therefore still adversaries—but that no longer seems an overriding or irredeemable fault to Richard Nixon. One of the lasting benefits of his imaginative odyssey to the Orient could be the assertion of an urgent truth: ideology is becoming less important than the need of the world's billions to live peaceably in an age when so many could die so swiftly.