Audition (38 page)

The print journalists were already deeply resentful of the large contingent from television in the China press corps. While the White House had limited the print media to one writer per newspaper or magazine and to a pool of photographers, they had permitted the networks to send large crews of TV technicians and cameramen. The Nixon White House cleverly anticipated the public relations value of images of the president in exotic, forbidden China being beamed live, by satellite, into America’s living rooms and they were bending over backward to accommodate the television contingent. The television staffers were often provided cars to ferry them around, for example, while disgruntled print journalists had to ride on buses.

The resentment of the newspaper and magazine reporters was well-founded. It was Richard Nixon’s television show from beginning to end. He didn’t trust the Washington press corps, who he felt were “liberals” and responsible for the public outcry against the war in Vietnam. Nixon wanted to bypass the press and go directly to the American people, and live television was the perfect vehicle.

Unfortunately I got caught in the cross fire.

The print journalists couldn’t really take out their anger on seasoned television journalists like the beloved Walter Cronkite or the universally respected John Chancellor. So whom did they single out? Yup, me.

A few photographers went so far as to circulate a story that they had dumped a whole pile of ruined film on the floor outside my hotel room. If they did, I never saw it. They claimed that I had stuck so close to Mrs. Nixon that I was in every one of their images of her. I doubt it. I was usually no closer to Mrs. Nixon than the male reporters. Another story, that some photographers had dumped their smelly long johns in the wastebasket in my hotel room knowing the hotel would return them to me, absolutely did not happen. Just an adolescent locker-room fantasy.

What did happen is that, basically, the print reporters shut me out. When they gathered together at the end of the day for a drink, I was not included. When they sat and chatted on one of the bus rides, I was not asked to join in the conversation.

Even Max Frankel, the future executive editor of the
New York Times
, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the China trip, turned me away. One evening he was going out to eat with a few colleagues, and when I asked if I could join them, Max made up some lame excuse and off they went without me. Years later Max apologized to me and told me how badly he still felt about it, but the truth is they just didn’t want me along. I was the upstart. I was the
Today
show, which was getting attention and for which they had no respect.

But I certainly didn’t understand that then. What have I done to these guys? I kept thinking. What have I done to make them hate me?

I thought of things like the dinner party in Hawaii and my private conversation with Kissinger, and, while standing with the president, the smiles of recognition he would sometimes give me. I was beginning to look like the teacher’s pet. And you know how people feel about the teacher’s pet.

Then there was Haldeman, who was running around China with his own movie camera. My interview with him had been just a few weeks before, and he kept smiling at me in China, and even winked at me on occasion. That might have set the other reporters’ teeth on edge. They’d never so much as managed to interview Haldeman and here I was, on a winking basis with the president’s chief of staff.

Looking back on it now, I can better understand the hostility. Every other television correspondent had worked, at some point, in print. Though the print people considered them sellouts to the vulgar, higher-paying positions in television, they still shared common backgrounds. I didn’t. I was a child of television. Plus I was a woman, while they were all members of the old boys’ club. But I didn’t get it then.

However, my colleagues from NBC, especially John Chancellor, were very friendly and supportive. That helped make up for the others. I was also fascinated by China during that epic week. It was my personal life that was unsettled and contributed a great deal to my sense of loneliness.

Because of the satellite it was easy to call home, but I didn’t have anyone to call. I couldn’t call Lee. After all, we had just separated. I couldn’t call my parents either. They were already worried about me going to so distant a part of the world. A phone call would just lead to all kinds of anxious questions. I was also concerned about leaving my little girl. What if something happened to her or she got sick and I was on the other side of the world? I knew that Zelle was fully capable of handling anything that could go wrong, so that was one call I could make. I telephoned home whenever I could, told Jackie I missed her and loved her dearly and asked Zelle to turn on the
Today
show before Jackie went off to nursery school so she could see her mommy in that strange land called China. Then I hung up the phone, felt even lonelier, and went back to work.

After another long day following Mrs. Nixon, I went to my broadcasting booth to report on the major cultural event of the visit: a special ballet to be performed at the Great Hall of the People. All the Westerners, reporters, technicians—everybody—had been invited to see what was billed as
The Red Detachment of Women.
The theme of
The Red Detachment
had to do mostly with female soldiers kicking the hell out of anyone who opposed the Communist regime. Hardly
Swan Lake.
But the big news was offstage because the invitations to the event had been extended by the most important woman in China, the wife of Mao Tse-tung, who was known by her maiden name, Chiang Ching. She herself was attending the performance.

Madame Chiang was what we would call a piece of work. Everyone was dying to meet her. She was Mao’s fourth wife, a generation younger than he, a former actress, beautiful and, many thought, evil. Mao had divorced his third wife to marry her. No one knew if they had children. Probably didn’t dare ask.

Anyway, up until the 1960s, little was heard from Miss Chiang. Then, during the Cultural Revolution, she rose like the Dragon Lady to form the infamous Gang of Four, which brutally purged intellectuals, writers, and revisionist government officials. She had many of them put to death. She also took it upon herself to revise China’s repertoire of ballets and operas, banning anything that had to do with China’s rich cultural past and replacing them with eight revolutionary Maoist works. This ballet was one of them.

Her brutal, dictatorial ways would catch up with her. When her husband died four years later, she was tried, sentenced first to death, then to life in prison, and is said to have committed suicide in 1991. But on the night of the ballet, sitting with her husband between the Nixons, she was an imposing and fascinating figure. In my little booth miles away from the ballet, I could only describe her for the
Today
show audience from my television monitor. We never met.

After the ballet was over at about 11:00 p.m., we were told that a bus would take us to the Friendship Shop, as the store for foreigners in every major Chinese city was called. It was open twenty-four hours a day and you could buy a jade ring for $4,000 or an emerald necklace for $20,000. It was there that I bought the presents for Henry Kissinger and some beautiful silk brocade for myself. (I still wear the skirt I had made from the brocade.) At the shop I became a bit more popular with the other members of the press. Several of them asked my advice about presents to bring back home for their wives or kids. The ice was melting. Back to bed by 1:00 a.m. Up again for the Chinese chicken noodle soup at 6:00 a.m.

The week went by in a blur. Visits to more factories, schools with tiny tots dressed alike in their uniforms, singing the praises of Chairman Mao. Mrs. Nixon told me she thought the children were receiving a surprisingly well-rounded education. She said that in the second grade they were doing math she couldn’t do. “I wish I could stay longer,” she mused.

But my anxiety level remained high. I had no idea how my live reporting was coming across in New York and whether they were even running the filmed stories I sent back. I felt extremely inadequate, especially when I was broadcasting from the jerry-built communications center. The walls were paper thin, and I could hear Walter Cronkite broadcasting from one small studio, Harry Reasoner in the next studio, and John Chancellor across the hall. How could I possibly compete with those titans?

Ironically it was President Nixon who reassured me that I was doing a good job. We were all at the Great Wall of China, the zenith of Nixon’s television week, with cameras positioned to beam his every step back to America as he strolled casually along with the Chinese premier, Chou En-lai. When the stroll ended and the cameras were turned off, he came over to compliment me on a report I’d done on a gymnastics event the night before. “How do you know about it?” I asked the president. “Oh, I get word by telephone every morning,” he said. So the canny television-savvy president was keeping track of the ratings during his trip to China. That said a lot about him, but regardless, it was music to my ears.

Yet it almost left me stranded at the Great Wall. The chat with the president left me little time to find the NBC car I was assigned to. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake I had made with the CBS crew, but then I wasn’t about to spend the next five years trying to get back to the hotel from the Great Wall on my own. To my relief I saw Av Westin getting into a car. I had worked with Av years before at CBS and he was now the executive producer of
ABC Nightly News.
I asked if I could hitch a ride with him and he said sure and squeezed me in next to the chief ABC correspondent, Harry Reasoner, who could not have been more jolly. (I would remember this happy ride years later when I went to ABC and thought I must have dreamt it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

That night, our last in Peking, the Chinese press, all twenty-six of them, invited the American press to dinner. I joined the group when I got off the air. Conversation at the table, me to a very bright Chinese journalist on my left:

“We’ve asked you so many questions. Anything you are curious about concerning America or Americans?”

“No.”

“Anything you desire like a car, or another bicycle?”

“No. I have all I want.”

“You have two sons. What do you hope for them?”

“That they do not have bad habits and grow up to serve the people.”

I mention all this because so many of us have now visited China or read about it and, once more, it is almost impossible to see how that closed, regimented society blossomed into the modern society, albeit Communist, it is today.

On the sixth day of the trip, we flew to beautiful Hangzhou, known as the “Venice of China.” In the bad old days, the city was the home of rich beautiful women, of beautiful silk, and of the best tea in China. It was like a picture book, with its lakes, pagodas, and temples. President and Mrs. Nixon took a boat ride on West Lake and so did we. The president was in great humor. It was lovely and relaxing, and as it was the weekend, I didn’t have to work that night.

I also attended my first banquet. Since I had been living on the ubiquitous tangerines and breakfast soup, everything tasted so delicious to me that I wrote down every single item we were served. There were small plates of roast chicken, fish in sweet-and-sour sauce, shrimp with green tea leaves, fried duck in spices, fried chicken squares with onions and peanuts, bamboo shoots stewed in peanut oil, bean soup with scallops, chrysanthemum cakes, egg rolls with sugar and sesame fillings, lotus seeds in rock sugar, and fruit. Divine.

After the banquet, another first. The president walked slowly through the room greeting us and finally introducing us to the legendary Chou En-lai, a slim, elegant gentleman who spoke some English. “This is Helen Thomas,” the president said, introducing the veteran UPI reporter. “She’s been reporting on the White House for sixty years.” (The remarkable Helen retired in 2000, just shy of her eightieth birthday.) And then the president introduced me to the premier. “This is Barbara Walters,” he said to him. “We’re just breaking her in.”

At our last stop, Shanghai, President Nixon signed a joint communiqué with his hosts, dealing with delicate future relations with Taiwan and a joint pledge for a gradual increase in American-Chinese contacts and exchange. At the end of the communiqué Nixon announced, “This was the week that changed the world.”

It changed the world of news as well. The China trip probably marked the seminal moment in which television assumed superiority as America’s primary source of news. The print reporters were furious.
Life
magazine’s Hugh Sidey complained that the White House “seemed to treat writers as an unnecessary evil.” When we got back, an editorial in the
New York Times
claimed that television had taken control of news coverage.

The week in China also changed me. I learned more about reporting than at any time before or since, and I saw a country, before almost any other Westerners, emerge from the shadows into a new era.

I would return to China several times over the years, including a trip with President Gerald Ford in 1975. But nothing would ever come close to that first visit in 1972. I felt humbled and grateful. What an extraordinary job I had! I was so fortunate. On my last afternoon in that atheist country I said a little prayer of thanks.

Our final night in China, I was again sharing a room with Fay. We were still up at two in the morning throwing away our old notes and trying to figure out a way to prevent the Chinese from returning our trash, when there was a knock on the door. Two grave-looking Chinese men entered and dumped large gift-wrapped boxes into our laps. They weighed about thirty pounds each. “Candy, compliments of the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Government,” said the one who could speak English. Fay and I burst out laughing. Two in the morning and thirty pounds of candy to take home. We couldn’t leave it there. The Chinese would never have forgiven us. Or allowed it.