come visit ?" "I would be honored," Bush replied according to his own account, "but I'm afraid
you're very busy." "Oh, I'm not busy," said Mao."I don'international news. You should really come visit." t look after internal affairs. I only read the
Bush claims [fn 17] that he never accepted Chairman Mao's invitation to come around for private
talks. Bush says that he was convinced by members of his own staff that Mao did not really mean to
invite him, but was only being polite. Was Bush really so reticent, or is this another one of thefalsifications with which his official biographies are studded? The world must await the opening of (^)
the Beijing and Foggy Bottom archives. In the meantime, we must take a moment to contemplate
that gathering of October, 1975 in Chairman Mao's private villa, secluded behind many courtyards
and screens in the Chungnanhai enclave of Chinese rulers not far from the Great Hall of the People
and Tien An Men, where less than a year later an initial round of pro-dewould be put down in blood in the wake of the funeral of Zhou En-lai. mocracy demonstrations
Mao, Kissinger, and Bush: has history ever seen a tete-a-tete of such mass murderers? Mao,
identifying himself with Chin Shih Huang, the first emperor of all of China and founder of the Chin
dynasty, who had built the Great Wall, burned the books, and killed the ConfucMao had massacred ten per cent of his own people, ravaged Korea, strangled Tibet. Kissinger'sian scholars-- this
crimes were endless, from the Middle East to Vietnam, from the oil crisis of 73-74 with the endless
death in the Sahel to India-Pakistan, Chile, and many more. Kissinger, Mao, and Bush had
collaborated to install the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which was now approaching
the zenith of its genocidal career. Compared to the other two, Bush may have appeared as anapprentice of genocide: he had done some filibustering in the Caribbean, had been part of the (^)
cheering section for the Indonesia massacres of 1965, and then he had become a part of the
Kissinger apparatus, sharing in the responsibility for India-Pakistan, the Middle East, Cambodia.
But as Bush advanced through his personal cursus honorum, his power and his genocidal dexterity
were growing, foreDecember, 1989, and his later masterwork of savagery, the Gulf war of 1991. By tshadowing such future triumphs as the devastation of El Chorillo in Panama inhe time of Bush's (^)
administration, Anglo-American finance and the International Monetary Fund were averaging some
50,000,000 needless deaths per year in the developing sector.
But Mao, Kissinger, and Bush exchanged pleasantries that day in Mao's sitting roomChungnanhai. If the shades of Hitler or Stalin had sought admission to that colloqium, they might in (^)
have been denied entrance. Later, in early December, Gerald Ford, accompanied by his hapless wife
and daughter, came to see the moribund Mao for what amounted to a photo opportunity with a
living cadaver. The AP wire issued that day hyped the fact that Mao had talked with Ford for 1 hour
and fifty minutes, nearly twice as long as the Great Steersman had given to Nixon in 1972.Participants in this meeting included Kissinger, Bush, Scowcroft, and Winston Lord. Even such (^)
Kissingerian heavies as Undersecretary of State Joseph Sisco, Assistant Secretary of State for East
Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Richard Solomon of the NSC were not allowed to stay for the
meeting. Bush was now truly a leading Kissinger clone. A joint communique issued after this
session said that Mao and Ford had had "earnest and significant discussions ...on wide-rangingissues in a friendly atmosphere." At this meeting, Chairman Mao greeted Bush with the words, (^)
"You've been promoted." Mao turned to Ford, and added: "We hate to see him go." At a private
lunch with Vice Premier Deng Xiao-ping, the rising star of the post-Mao succession, Deng assured
Bush that he was considered a friend of the Chinese Communist hierarchy who would always be
welcome in China, "even as head of the CIA." For, as we will see, this was to be the next stop onBush's cursus honorum. Later Kissinger and Bush also met with Qiao Guanhua, still the Foreign
Minister. According to newspaper accounts, the phraseology of the joint communique suggested
that the meeting had been more than usually cordial. There had also been a two-hour meeting with
Deng Xiao-ping reported by the Ford White House as "a constructive exchange of views on a wide
range of international issues." At a banquet, Deng used a toast for an anti-Soviet tirade which the