It's whispered in hushed tones in the backways of the REGJB. "It was tonight, wasn't it? Around 10:30 p.m if I recall correctly. in 1972 right?"
We are talking about the seminal shift in US foreign policy when President Richard M. Nixon arrived in the People's Republic of China, the first US president to visit the country.
What made Nixon's opening to China so startling- is that he was an American President who built his reputation as one of the staunchest anti-communist politicians in the country. Which in turn made the phrase "Only Nixon could have gone to China" a powerful philosophical statement of a politician being able to achieve a breakthrough by doing the one thing he or she would seemingly be the unlikeliest to do.
Prior to the visit, the U.S. had refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Chinese communist government and instead recognized the government of Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of China.
Nixon built his political career on anti-communism starting with the Alger Hiss case.
Senator Nixon accused Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, of being a Communist spy in 1948. The accusations were made during a highly publicized trial, which centered on Hiss's alleged involvement in passing classified documents to the Soviet Union. Nixon played a key role in bringing the case to the attention of the public, and his pursuit of the case helped to establish him as a rising political star.
When Nixon first ran for the senate - as any 30 something federalist society scholar-judge can tell you- it was against incumbent Helen Gahagan Douglas, who Nixon dubbed "the pink lady" accusing her of communist ties and "being pink right down to her underwear."
The possibility of Nixon going to China is like asking the most conservative judge to sentence someone leniently; or asking the 3rd DCA to throw out evidence of drugs after a bad stop based on the police officers not being believable; or getting an ASA to say "although the victim want's the Max, we are going to offer a reasonable plea commensurate with the crime and the lack of priors so as to fulfill our duty to seek justice and not just be a mouthpiece for victims who are understandably emotional about the loss of their heirloom rake and bag of cut grass."
Our point is that there is a lesson in reaching beyond your boundaries- doing things that you are not used to doing, or which are against long held beliefs. Winston Spencer Churchill said "those who don't change their minds don't change anything" and what Nixon did changed the world (plus he created the EPA but that's another story).
So perhaps the next time one of our learned federalist judges is contemplating just calling balls and strikes, maybe a more in-depth and nuanced analysis might be helpful. Or when one of our rabid defense colleagues contemplates engaging in a Rumpolian tirade against a lying police officer, pausing and seeing the issue from the officer's point of view might be helpful in resolving the case.
In any event, like the most important things in life, like the solution to the Kobayashi Maru simulation, Star Trek provides most of the answers:
You are right as much as you are wrong. It is easy and intellectually lazy for pundits to posit this poilcy as some sort of shift in priorities akin to a mea culpa about Nixon's orginal position vis a vis China. Nixon was no dummy and neither was Kissinger. Remember, the Soviet Union was expanding its military might and territorial ambitions back then. There was a real fear that they could join forces with China and challenge the US in Africa, the Middle East and Pacific. Nixon, the ultimate geopolitical chess player, knew China and Russia distrusted each other and were themselves competing for the title of World's Top Commie. It was all realpolitik as they liked to say in that era. Times change. It is difficult to name one major country in the world with which we have good relations with now and were not at war with at some time in our history and vice versa. As the French say, plus ca la change, plus ca la meme chose.
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