what had happened. Nixon's spokesman Ron Ziegler declared that Nixon had been
outraged by the "spectacle" of the "cheering, handclapping, and dancing" delegates after
the vote, which Nixon had seen as a "shocking demonstration" of undisguised glee" and
"personal animosity." Notice that Ziegler had nothing to say against the vote, or against
Peking, but concentrated the fire on the third world delegates, who were also threatened
with a cutoff of US foreign aid.
This was the line that Bush would slavishly follow. On the last day of October the papers
quoted him saying that the demonstration after the vote was "something ugly, something
harsh that transcended normal disappoijntment or elation." "I really thought we were
going to win," said Bush, still with a straight face. "I'm so...disappointed." "There wasn't
just clapping and enthusiasm "after the vote, he whined. "When I went up to speak I was
hissed and booed. I don't think it's good for the United Nations and that's the point I feel
very strongly about." In the view of a Washington Post staff writer, "the boyish looking
US ambassador to the United Nations looked considerably the worse for wear. But he
still conveys the impression of an earnest fellow tryint to be the class valedictorian, as he
once was described." [ fn 13] Bush expected the Peking delegation to arrive in new York
soon, because they probably wanted to take over the presidency of the Security Council,
which rotated on a monthly basis. "But why anybody would want an early case of
chicken pox, I don't know," said Bush.
When the Peking delegation did arrive, Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Ch'aio Kuan-
hua delivered a maiden speech full of ideological bombast along the lines of passages
Kissinger had convinced Chou to cut out of the draft text of the Shanghai communique
some days before. Kissinger then telephoned Bush to say in his own speech that the US
regretted that the Chinese had elected to inaugurate their participation in the UN by
"firing these empty cannons of rhetoric." Bush, like a ventriloquist's dummy, obediently
mouthed Kissinger's one-liner as a kind of coded message to Peking that all the public
bluster meant nothing between the two secret and increasingly public allies.
The farce of Bush's pantomime in support of the Kissinger China card very nearly turned
into the tragedy of general war later in 1971. This involved the December, 1971 war
between India and Pakistan which led to the creation of an independent state of
Bengladesh, and which must be counted as one of the least-known thermonuclear
confrontations of the US and the USSR. For Kissinger and Bush, what was at stake in this
crisis was the consolidation of the China card.
In 1970, Yahya Khan, the British-connected, Sandhurst-educated dictator of Pakistan,
was forced to announce that elections would be held in the entire country. It will be
recalled that Pakistan was at that time two separate regions, east and west, with India in
between. In East Pakistan or Bengal, the Awami League of Sheik Mujibur Rahman
campaigned on a platform of autonomy for Bengal, accusing the central government in
far-off Islamabad of ineptitude and exploitation. The resentment in East Pakistan was
made more acute by the fact that Bengal had just been hit by a typhoon, which had
caused extensive flooding and devastation, and by the failure of the government in west
Pakistan to organize and effective relief effort. In the elections, the Awami league won