George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

impact whatever on the UN vote. On October 25, the General Assembly defeated the US
resolution to make the China seat an Important Question by a vote of 59 to 54, with 15
abstentions. Ninety minutes later came the vote on the Albanian resolution to seat Peking
and expel Taipei, which passed by a vote of 76 to 35. Bush then cast the US vote to seat
Peking, and then hurried to escort the ROC delegate, Liu Chieh, out of the hall for the last
time. The General Assembly was the scene of a jubilant demonstration led by third world
delegates over the fact that Red China had been admitted, and even more so that the US
had been defeated. The Tanzanian delegate danced a jig in the aisle. Henry Kissinger,
flying back from Peking, got the news on his teletype and praised Bush's "valiant efforts."
Having connived in selling Taiwan down the river, it was now an easy matter for the
Nixon regime to fake a great deal of indignation for domestic political consumption about
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 Kuanhua
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