Seize the Hour - When Nixon Met Mao
by Margaret MacMillan
John Murray, HK$148
Former US president Richard Nixon didn't so much seize the hour as fawn throughout his 65-minute audience with the Great Helmsman in February 1972. He was basking in the minutely planned television coverage - the four-hour banquet was broadcast live by the US networks - and the huge jump in popularity helped him to a landslide re-election. Mao Zedong, a 'crafty realist' who wanted rapprochement as much as Nixon, kept his guest waiting in what one diplomat considered the manner of a Chinese emperor. Nixon, ignorant that Mao was dying of heart failure, declared 'the Chairman's writings moved a nation and have changed the world' and felt honoured when Mao replied: 'Your book, The Six Crises, is not a bad book.' And so it went, what Nixon himself dubbed 'the week that changed the world'. But by Margaret MacMillan's telling in Seize the Hour - When Nixon Met Mao, it was 'a remarkably shabby human tale'. Her narrative is gripping - what Percy Cradock in The Sunday Telegraph called 'diplomatic history at its most lively and accessible' - and she fleshes out the familiar story with contemporary context and ample anecdotes about Nixon and Mao, and their lieutenants Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai.