THE U.N. vote admitting mainland China and expelling Taiwan stung many Americans, but none more than Richard Nixon's vocal constituents of the Republican right. Uneasy about the President's policy since his wooing of Peking began, they exploded in choleric anger as the U.N. resolution confirmed their worst fears. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona urged the U.S. to withdraw from the U.N. and expel its headquarters to "some place like Moscow or Peking." California's Governor Ronald Reagan cabled Chiang Kai-shek that the U.N. has been "reduced to the level of a kangaroo court." Said Thomas S. Winter, editor of the rightist magazine Human Events, "Conservatives are furious. I think the Administration hoped it could save Taiwan, but if it was a choice of getting Red China in or sacrificing Taiwan, then I think they wanted Red China."
Hot Pants. The sense of outrage seemed a little tired, a little artificial, but it was not confined to the right. Capitol Hill was boiling all week. The normally mild-mannered Senate minority leader, Pennsylvania Republican Hugh Scott, spoke scornfully of "hotpants principalities" that had opposed the U.S. He and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana concurred in recommending that the U.S. share of U.N. support be cut back from its present 31.52% of the U.N. budget. The Senate later passed a resolution, sponsored by New York Republican-Conservative James Buckley, urging the President to negotiate a reduction of that share to 25%.
The Senator's brother, William F. Buckley Jr., mandarin editor of the National Review, delivered an extraordinary speech in Manhattan that combined eloquence and caustic wit with touches of Chinese opera. Peking, he asserted, "struggles in its endless ordeal against human nature," and executed between 10 million and 50 million people "in the course of giving flesh to the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung." Taiwan, on the other hand, "is the West Berlin of China." The Chinese on Taiwan have a special mission, said Buckley, because "in the years and decades to come, their separated brothers on the mainland will look all the more wistfully to Taiwan in consideration of what it has done for its people, and permitted to its people." The West, he added, "did not have the guts" to overthrow Mao's regime, and the dream that Chiang Kai-shek would reconquer the mainland was, alas, "a little counter-revolutionary vision." Turning to the U.N., he described Albania, sponsor of the successful anti-Taiwan resolution, as "a little, reclusive country composed primarily of rocks and serfs, with here and there a slave master, whose principal export is Maoism." Buckley's recommendation: the President should instruct the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. to abstain forthwith from voting in the General Assembly.