(2 of 2)
After testing the winds for 21 days, Nixon moved to protect his right flank. The President huddled with Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, then sent him forth to denounce to newsmen "the shocking demonstration and undisguised glee among some of the delegates following the vote" in the U.N. Ziegler warned that the anti-U.S. manifestation "could have a detrimental effect on American public support for the U.N." The demonstration that the President referred to was epitomized by a Tanzanian delegate dancing an impromptu jig after the vote, an image that will rankle in U.N. annals with Nikita Khrushchev's celebrated shoe banging on his delegation's desk in 1960.
The President had a point. It was a sophomoric and unseemly display. Chiang's China was, after all, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council by virtue of its role as a victorious member of the World War II Allies. With a population of 14 million, it has more people than three-fourths of the countries in the U.N.
The Price of Propping. But the "glee factor" was essentially a minor irritation. The fact remained that the setback at the U.N. was largely the U.S.'s own doing. Washington had clung through successive postwar Administrations to an unrealistic policy, and clung to it so insistently and so long that it was too late to engineer a two-China compromise that might have kept both Peking and Taipei in the U.N. More important, Nixon had made too much of his forthcoming visit to Peking for most delegates to take the arm-twisting by the American representatives seriously. The fact that Presidential Aide Henry Kissinger was supping with the Chinese Communists in Peking as the debate took place in New York did not enhance the image of Washington's unswerving devotion to Taipei. Against that background, the President's threat, through Ziegler, that U.S. financial support for the U.N. might be cut back seemed petty.
The vote did not mean, as West Germany's Neue Ruhr Zeitung suggested, that the U.S. "has stepped back to second rank on the international scene." Nor, in fact, is the U.S. defeat at the U.N. likely to do much permanent damage to Nixon's political fortunes at home. Probably to most Americans, the President's China policy is a popular recognition that the situation had long since become absurd; the expulsion of Taiwan is the price of propping it up artificially for too long. If that kind of realism is widespread, then anger should soon fade and the U.S. can get on with its diplomatic business in a drastically changing world.