Chapter 16
Last Hurrah

By 1970 the most violent and chaotic phase of the Cultural Revolution had ended, the unruly and destructive Red Guards had been disbanded, ultra-leftist extremists purged, and a stage of military-dominated consolidation was in progress. Under these circumstances, and with renewed Chinese interest in détente with America, Snow was once more on his way back. This time Lois was along for her rapturous first China experience. A call had come from the Chinese embassy in Paris in June; visas issued in early July, and the two Snows were off by Swissair from Geneva to Hong Kong at the end of that month. There had been hurried arrangements for the house, children, and financing. Chris, a commuter student at the University of Geneva, remained home in Eysins with house-sitting friends of the Snows; Sian would leave later for Boston to the Howard Snows, on her way to enter Antioch College in Ohio. Ed had worked out agreements with his European journalistic outlets, and the unfulfilled Macmillan book contract had been taken over by Random House.^[1]

Ed was still weak and recuperating from his surgeries; in Hong Kong he came down with a high fever and was hospitalized for a week with recurrence of a postoperative urinary infection. Illness and exhaustion would plague him throughout the six-month stay in the East. By mid-August he and Lois were in Canton, to begin a grueling round of travel and of Mao Thought-style briefings he soon found had a tedious and long-winded ritualistic sameness that lowered his spirits further. "China is a country with a single scenario," he noted shortly after arrival.^[2]

In Beijing, Snow found Rewi Alley aging and alone. Foreigners were isolated now, and Rewi no longer saw his adopted Chinese sons and their families. "He spoke quietly in a mix of nostalgia and loneliness and cautious hope," Ed recorded. The Chinese diplomat Huang Hua, Snow's old Yanjing student and interpreter, was just back from a May Seventh School for "re-educating" cadres, to shepherd the Snows around. He gave Ed a euphoric picture of the "new" new China. In discussions with Huang and others, Snow was told, "We disdain money and possessions. We desire to create socialist society and a new and nobler man." He also learned that his wartime Indusco colleague Chen Hansheng (now in his seventies) had "got caught up in the same evil wind that trapped Eppy [Epstein]."^[3]

Though quite fatigued, he was soon summoned one evening to see Premier Zhou during a North Korean-Chinese ping-pong match at a sports arena (only in China!). Snow had probably read reports by the Red Guards, the premier told him, "of things he [Zhou] had said and hadn't said." The Red Guards, Zhou continued, used what they wanted of his remarks, ignored the rest, or "invented things that had not been said." Zhou's statement was a telling commentary on the general level of revolutionary political discourse in China.^[4]

"The extent to which Mao dominates thinking and activity here," Snow noted after a few weeks, "is greater than I thought." The largest bookstore in Beijing now offered "nothing but Mao" and a few shelves of Marxist-Leninist works. ("Very few customers incidentally," he added.) Everybody in all spheres of activity was "catechismically" reciting and memorizing Red Book phrases. Snow wondered in his diary whether Maoist "self-reliance" could be "misinterpreted" as chauvinism. "What is internationalism except sharing of tasks with foreign comrades?" Lois, Ed recorded, "thinks she had found pure, sincere, selfless people—the ideal of the convent-bred—and of course she has, they exist. But one must ask at what sacrifice of truth, self-contradiction, etc." More disquieting was a documentary Snow was shown of Zhou Enlai's May visit to North Korea. Kim Il Sung "swaggers" and was surrounded by "black-suited hoods" and a "goosestepping" honor guard. "Perfect mechanical men. The whole thing in bad taste," Ed felt. Yet he could also ponder that China's Red Guards had been "a great adventure for millions.... It brought out leadership in young."^[5]

Snow endured four days of born-again confessional recitals at Qinghua University (a former "bastion of U.S. cultural imperialism," he was told). As he took notes on one of these evidently rehearsed group narrations, he

parenthetically added of a "fast-talking" young female student, "She knows her Mao. What am I doing here, wasting my time, and I have so little left." And as one interminable account followed another, "It's like a religious service, over and over again. How many times must it be repeated." Of an exposition by a member of the People's Liberation Army propaganda team at the university, Snow recorded, "This officer speaks as if he really believes it's only a matter of studying Mao to know the answers, as convinced as any Jesuit. He looks self-righteous but thinks he is kind, reasonable.^[6]

In the northwest, the Snows visited Yan'an, a May Seventh cadre school at Nanniwan, near Yan'an, and then went to Bao'an—Snow's first return there since 1936. At the cadre school, where Mao's directive on "going down to do manual labor" was being implemented, conditions seemed to Snow as hard as a prisoner's life. In Bao'an Snow saw his famous photo of Mao, taken in 1936, adorning the wall of Mao's old cave dwelling. They had arrived in Bao'an in a cavalcade of cars, not the way he came in 1936, Ed recorded. "We are receiving Vip treatment, a bit too much for my liking," he wrote editor Mary Heathcote. "What can I do?" Of his many briefings on the northwestern trip, Snow glumly noted, "Might as well stay in Peking and read Mao's works—memorize them." Back in Xi'an, Snow tried a lighter touch with his Chinese companions. "Mao Tsetung was a poet of note," he scribbled, "who lived by writing things to quote." They "did not think it was funny at all," he jotted. Snow pondered privately on all this: "All rival or complementary thought or doctrine being heresy as interpreted in the eyes of a rising new priestcraft which will soon be powerfully installed in the Party with army support." The "future bureaucrat—the product of the present ferment," will have "enormous power," he thought.^[7]

The Snows were back in Beijing for the October 1 National Day celebrations, and were invited to be on the Tiananmen balcony for the big parade. As they stood watching the spectacle, there was a tug on Snow's sleeve. It was the premier, who led the two to Mao, who gave Ed a smile of welcome and (as Lois afterward remarked to Ed) turned to look Lois over appraisingly, "Up and down," a few times. The famous photo of "friendly American personage" Snow standing beside the chairman at the rostrum balustrade was perhaps meant primarily as a signal to the Chinese people that the portrayal of America as the Great Imperialist Satan might be in for some official revision. (Henry Kissinger later wrote that the signal had been "so oblique that our crude Occidental minds completely missed the point.") Mao's next signal through Snow would be much more obviously and unmistakably directed to Washington.^[8]

There were many layers and complexities in Snow's attitudes and responses to the China he perceived in 1970. His extremely alienated view of Vietnam-era America played a critical part. When he had lived in opium-ridden old China, he told a veteran Red commander in Beijing, "I never thought that the U.S. would become saturated with dope [no longer a menace in China]—and that a big percentage of youths would be trying it." Snow went on: "I spoke of moral-political crisis: lack of respect for authority, breakdown in the law, lack of confidence in leaders—much of it traceable to Vietnam."^[9]

On a visit to Beijing University, now situated on the original Yanjing campus where he had lectured, it was "a bit shocking" to Ed "to hear Peita [Beijing University]—Yenching history summarized as 'cultural imperialist institution' and then go on to its [new] beginnings after Liberation." Snow was alerted to await an imminent meeting with Mao and spent time preparing and "waiting for Lefty." But his get-together with the chairman was put off for over two months until mid-December. (Ed would have preferred not to spend the winter in China. "I can't conceive myself working here without being forced to join the team.")^[10]

At another meeting with Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall, Snow was acutely aware of the toll on the premier of his unceasing, round-the-clock efforts to keep some sort of lid on cultural revolutionary anarchy. Zhou spoke of his aging, of heart problems, and said that he had not had a vacation in eleven years. His hand shook as he offered Snow sugar for his coffee. He had not had time for exercise and was up too many nights fill three a.m. or all night, he told Ed. But the indefatigable administrator took pains to work out Snow's itinerary for his remaining time in China. Zhou even made sure the two Snows would have warm overcoats made for their travel to the northeast (Manchuria), their "Zhou coats," Lois and Ed later called them.^[11]

In Beijing again in November, Alley confided to Ed on the political troubles his adopted son Allen had encountered through the years culminating in his imprisonment in the northwest on false charges after the Cultural Revolution began. He managed to escape and found haven with Alley and the Harems in Beijing, and was finally "liberated" through the intervention of Zhou Enlai. While in prison, "all around him comrades were dying of beatings, starvation, exposure and suicide," Snow was told. Alley's other son, Mike, had been digging ditches for two years. Snow pondered on the problems China would face restoring morale among those sent down to the countryside—whether actors and musicians, writers who had stopped writing, foreigners who were se-

questered, technicians (like Alley's son) digging ditches, doctors tilling the soil, or high-level bureaucrats tending pigs.^[12]

As Snow ruminated on all these aspects of the China scene, he tried to take the long view, but he hardly seemed to be convincing himself. "Injustice or violence vs history may be done and be unavoidable in the struggle for power in a given situation," he jotted in his diary, but the "record cannot be erased forever," and the "balance will be redressed in time." It "is not hard to die for the revolution but what is hard is to die for the revolution or be prepared to die for the revolution," he went on, "knowing that it may be tallied as a counter-revolutionary act by those temporarily in charge of the account books. Again the only solace is the impartiality of time." It was evidently a solace Snow himself sought to find in the situation.^[13]

Snow made the rounds of communes, factories, workshops, schools, hospitals, public works projects, and much else and was dearly impressed with what he observed. Alongside the numbing and all-pervasive and repetitive ideological cant he was subjected to, Snow seemed persuaded that Mao had steered the revolution back on its original peasant-populist track. In his posthumously published Long Revolution , Snow saw broad horizons ahead "as town and city meet to join farmer, worker, and intellectual in a one-class society," keeping "China fully occupied with peaceful works—carried out in a revolutionary way—till the year 2000." Though he was often skeptical of Lois's fresh and glowing response to China's seemingly squeaky-clean morality and proclaimed selfless devotion to the commonweal, Ed was nevertheless attracted by the possibilities (as were many others in the West at the time) of an ethical breakthrough to a new "socialist man." In writing to Mary Heathcote ostensibly on Lois's reactions but with obvious relevance to himself: "She loves the Chinese and they reciprocate. Their message gets through, she is impressed by their purity and dedication, and by the country they have scrubbed and are refurbishing—making green and great." ("For me," Lois wrote Dorothy and Howard Snow from Beijing, "it's all new, exciting, moving, interesting.") But contradictory realities were always intruding. Of a meeting with new revolutionary committee members in Shanghai, Snow recorded, "a sullen crowd," adding, "Few smiles. No gaiety, no joy. It's all revolution." Snow might applaud the Maoist remolding of people and society—but at arm's length.^[14]

As before, what ultimately carried the day for Snow were his one-on-one interviews and conversations with the Mao-Zhou twosome, who represented for Ed the abiding revolutionary verities of the Red star he

had known since 1936. And for the Red leaders, Snow remained the "friendly American" who offered the most suitable and reliable public channel for reaching out to America. In a November meeting with Zhou, the premier restated the principles he had first spelled out to Snow in 1960 for resolution of the Taiwan problem. Evidently responding to feelers already emanating from Washington, Zhou told Snow, "The door is open but it depends on whether the United States is serious in dealing with the Taiwan question." Mao would soon speak more bluntly to Snow on these matters.^[15]

As he continued to wait for "Lefty" in December, Snow came down with his usual sinusitis, plus bronchitis, and stayed in bed for a few days. ("I still tire too easily and need too much rest," he had earlier written Heathcote.) One mid-December morning while still asleep, he was peremptorily summoned to see Mao. They met in Mao's home, had breakfast together, and talked until past noon. The Chairman was down with a cold also and was sitting clothed in a dressing gown and with a blanket over him. The Cultural Revolution, Mao told Ed with equanimity, was "an all-round civil war," with factional fighting everywhere and in each organization, institution, and government ministry. From the Great Helmsman's loftily and abstractly ideological perspective, this was all to the good—"it wouldn't do if you didn't have this." Counter-revolutionaries and capitalist-roaders had to be struggled against and exposed. Conversely, Mao complained of the widespread violence and the maltreatment of "captives," neatly absolving himself of responsibility. Foreigners had been correct, he divulged, in saying that "China was in great chaos."^[16]

Snow, now more troubled than ever at the extremes of the Mao cult he had witnessed on this visit, pressed the chairman on the matter to a surprisingly frank degree. He brought up questions he had privately raised with Chinese official friends on his previous China trip regarding the "glorification" of the Red leader. It had seemed to him excessive and unnecessary. After all, he told Mao, "everybody knew that you were the main author of the revolution." Mao carefully responded with a combination of personal disclaimer (as well as justification—everyone wants to be "worshipped"), political necessity, and the "nuisance" of the still-prevalent Chinese tradition of "emperor worship." (This last, of course, the Mao deification had cynically exploited and magnified.) Mao reminded Snow of their 1965 talk, when he had linked Khrushchev's fall to the latter's lack of a personality cult. The subsequent massive propagation of the Mao cult, he now confided to his American friend, had been es-

sential in order to recapture the political high ground from the Liu Shaoqi-led "revisionists" who had gained control of the party apparatus.

Liu, a major Communist figure since the 1920s second only to Mao in party status and prestige, and president (until his downfall) of the People's Republic since 1959, was now dismissed by Mao as "a reactionary who had wormed his way into the Party." (Over a year before the time Mao related all this to Snow, Liu had died in solitary confinement of pneumonia, aggravated by ill treatment and neglect. His death and its circumstances would not be disclosed for years.) Now, Mao reassured Snow, the time had come to "cool down" Mao worship. "I don't like all this. We're going to put an end to it." He quickly added, however (in Snow's paraphrased notes), "we can't do it at once. Otherwise that would have the wrong impression too—meaning that Mao is sinking."^[17]

The Chinese leader shrugged off as "overdone" the "four greats" description of himself (Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander, and Great Helmsman). Only the simple "teacher" title will be retained; the rest would be got rid of "sooner or later." Mao's aspiring wise teacher role was far from a modest proposal in the Chinese cultural context. It seemed to have more in common with the place Confucius and his thought had held for two millennia as China's great sage and teacher. Adding to the ironies, while Mao was pointing to his schoolteacher background image as his preferred legacy, his Cultural Revolution had been reviling China's academic community in generic class-action terms as bourgeois "stinking intellectuals." On a rather similar note, in his Life article on the Mao conversation, Snow had cited Mao's apparent final comment to him: "he said he was not a complicated man but really very simple. He was, he said, only a lone monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella." But Snow's translator-companion in China, Yao Wei, wrote him that he had gotten this wrong. A "better translation," he told Ed, would be: "Like a monk holding an umbrella, I defy laws human and divine."^[18]

Snow's query to Mao on the prospects for improvement in Sino-Soviet relations elicited a Maoist tirade against Moscow. "Those Russians," he ended, "they look down upon the Chinese, they look down upon people of many countries; they think they have only to say a word and people will all listen to them. They do not expect there are people who won't, and one of them is my humble self." His battle with the Soviets, Mao underscored, was at the root of the current Chinese political straggle. "Basically," he told the journalist, "it is a question of revisionism or anti-revisionism. Those in China who practice revisionism are bound to compromise with the Soviet Union."^[19]

Turning to the United States, Mao made his open direct response to private signals coming from Washington on the possibilities of a Nixon visit. He preferred dealing with the Republicans rather than the Democrats, he averred, possibly thinking back to the (Democratic) Truman-initiated Taiwan intervention. If Nixon "wants to come to Peking, you may bring him a message," Mao told Snow. Nixon could come secretly if he wished. He "can just get on a plane and come." But Mao was also shrewdly aware of the potential political spin-off for Nixon of a China journey. The American president would likely come, he surmised, in the early part of 1972, before the next presidential elections. Nixon's journey to Beijing in February 1972 would indeed be far from a secret one. His arrival on Air Force One, covered by a vast media entourage, would be a television spectacle.^[20]

In his whimsically paradoxical Taoist manner, Mao declared Nixon to be "a good fellow"—the Red leader liked those "who were the most reactionary in the world." They "helped" the world revolutionary cause much as the Japanese had earlier done for China. "You just say [to Nixon]," Mao went on in this vein, "he is a good fellow! The No. 1 good fellow in the world. That Brezhnev is no good." More to the point, the chairman noted that problems with America could not then be resolved with "the middle or the left," but only with Nixon as "the representative of the monopoly capitalists." (In his meeting with Nixon, Mao told the president, "We do not like those presidents from Truman to Johnson [but] I cast a vote for your election.... I like rightists.")^[21]

Mao was undoubtedly also thinking of his own biological calendar in pressing an American opening. "I'm not all that well," he confided to Ed, repeating a probably exaggerated motif from his I965 talk with the American on the eve of his political comeback. "I'm 77 and I'm soon going to heaven." It would be Snow, not Mao, for whom time ran out before the Nixon journey. On an odd, lighter note, Mao chided Snow for the latter's failure to include the two young women interpreter-secretaries present, in a toast to the chairman. This Maoist defense of women's rights resonates incongruously with the recently published account of Mao's private life by his personal physician (now living in the U.S.), with its lurid details of the older Mao's "imperial" sexual penchant for young women.^[22]

When the two men parted for the last time, Mao dwelt for a moment on their mutually trustful thirty-five-year relationship. "I never lie to you and I believe you do not lie to me either." For China's supreme leader the "bourgeois" American journalist was perhaps closer to a genuinely

dependable friend, and confidant of sorts than he could find among his proletarian Chinese cohorts in the conflict-ridden and often paranoid sub rosa world of Communist politics. And while their special relationship had given Snow unique and invaluable advantages as a journalist, it had placed an inevitable psychological (and political) burden on him as well. The Mao-Snow phenomenon was the ultimate example of the Chinese concept of guanxi (special connections), in which friendship carried its obligations. Despite Snow's reservations on the Mao cult, he remained to the end deeply conscious of and inescapably swayed by Mao's exceptional consideration for and oft-expressed confidence in him.^[23]

On December 21 Lois left via Canton and Hong Kong, to be with her family in California for Christmas. She took with her material she had collected on China's new "revolutionary" opera and ballet for the book she would write, China On Stage . Ed had his holiday dinner at the Hatems, with Alley and other foreign friends also there. He prepared his Zhou interviews for publication, wrapped up other matters, and made the rounds of his Beijing friends. He continued to be very tired, was concerned at signs of renewed bladder infection and urinary problems. He was relying on "too much coffee, brandy, and cigarettes" to keep him going. He was anxious to finish and leave China, missed Lois; and felt "toute seule," he forlornly noted at the end of January. On top of this, at a dinner with his Chinese official hosts he raised provocative questions. "It was a bad evening. I did not have Lois to kick me under the table." There was also a disquieting conversation with Carmelita Hinton, daughter of William Hinton, who had been brought up and educated in China. She recounted the confusing experiences of students during the recent chaotic years. The youths were really working off their grievances against the system, she told him. "How can foreigners know anything about China," she quoted the Chinese students as saying, "when we don't understand it ourselves." As his China stay ended, Snow listed some of the minor and major irritations he had felt: the overfeeding, and the separation of foreign guests from the people; the retelling of the same shopworn stories to the visiting writers; the difficulties in getting information on major questions of the army, party, and economy; and the constant blare of political songs and slogans on planes and trains. Snow left by plane for Canton on February 6, 1971, and then by train to Hong Kong. He was exhausted, dispirited, and as troubled as he was inspired by his China experience, probably already in the early stages of the cancer that would end his life just a year later.^[24]

Snow's tardy departure from China changed original plans for him to join Lois in California. Instead, he returned directly to their Eysins home, while Lois proceeded to New York and there handled some of Ed's publications business. (The New York Times offered to publish only a "bowdlerized" version of his Zhou interviews, which Snow angrily rejected.) A phone call from Chris, telling his mother that Ed had arrived "terribly tired," quickly brought Lois home. Over the next weeks, Ed worked on articles, primarily for the Italian weekly Epoca that had largely financed his China trip, As he labored, events were moving toward the Sino-American rapprochement Snow had so ardently advocated since the establishment of the People's Republic. During the fall of 1970 Nixon had begun secret approaches to Beijing (obliquely referred to by Mao in the December meeting with Snow), through Pakistani and Romanian go-betweens. With encouraging responses from Zhou Enlai, these private exchanges went on through the early months of 1971. In Washington this process was orchestrated in the White House through Nixon's national security adviser (later secretary of state), Henry Kissinger, thus circumventing the state department bureaucracy.^[25]

In early April, in a characteristically subtle but dramatically unmistakable public signal exhibiting Zhou's diplomatic skills at its best, Beijing invited to China an American table tennis team then competing in world championships in Japan. In Beijing, the team was given a reception by the premier in the Great Hall, where Zhou stressed the friendship theme. The Americans duly invited the China team to the United States. This ping-pong diplomacy was further advanced with the publication in Life at the end of that month of Snow's write-up of his December conversation with Mao. The chairman had arranged for Snow to have formal notes of their talk that Ed could use for "guidance" and background, "from time to time, when needed." Evidently, the moment had now come. (Huang Hua had given an affirmative signal in response to Ed's urgent cabled query on publishing the Mao material.) "Mao would be happy to talk with [Nixon] either as tourist or President," Snow reported in the Life piece. He subsequently wrote the chairman that, "With the arrival of the table tennis players and other openings to Americans, the timing of the release seemed politically right." (On his own role in all this, Snow rather arrestingly wrote the Chinese consul, Xu [Hsu], in Geneva, "I hope all that I have written here and before is going to be helpful. I can only assume that there is a purpose to all interviews given to me which is not for me to judge or entirely comprehend.") Though Kissinger later downplayed the significance of the

Snow channel in the negotiations, he added, "Nevertheless, Snow's interview with Mao is interesting for what it tells us about the state of mind of China's leaders in December 1970. It shows that they were considering a Presidential visit at that early date, an idea not yet broached officially in any of our communications." In his annual report to Con-gross just before undertaking the China trip, Nixon gave a bit more weight to Snow's account, "which confirmed private signals we had already received of Chinese interest in my visiting China." It remained for Secretary of State William Rogers, out of the loop at the time, to react in the reflexes of the past. In a television appearance in London on April 29, he declared that the Nixon invitation, as reported by Snow in Life , was "fairly casually made," and he did not believe it was "a serious invitation."^[26]

On July 9 Kissinger embarked on an historic secret journey to Beijing via Pakistan, for direct talks with Zhou that would finalize the Nixon visit. He spent seventeen hours with the Chinese premier over a two-day stay, the first of many lengthy encounters between these two diplomatic protagonists. The personal assessment of Zhou Enlai by this highly sophisticated, hardheaded representative of "monopoly capitalist" America was well in line with that of "friendly American" Snow. "Urbane, infinitely patient, extraordinarily intelligent, subtle," Kissinger later recounted of the premier, "he moved through our discussions with an easy grace that penetrated to the essence of our new relationship as if there were no sensible alternative." That the two nations "would seek rapprochement in the early 1970s was inherent in the world environment. That it should occur so rapidly and develop so naturally owed no little to the luminous personality and extraordinary perception of the Chinese Premier." In making his dramatic televised announcement on July 15 of his forthcoming China trip, Nixon declared, "there can be no stable and enduring peace without the participation of the People's Republic of China and its 750 million people." All this, in essence, was the message Snow had tried to deliver to other American leaders a decade earlier.^[27]

In April, Lois and Ed drove to Sperlonga on the Italian Mediterranean coast above Naples for a desperately needed rest. On the way home they visited with Oliver Clubb and his family. Oliver, a political scientist, was the son of Ed's longtime friend O. Edmund Clubb, China hand and U.S. foreign service officer, and was then teaching in Syracuse University's program abroad in Florence. He remembered Snow's preoccupation with his health, and Ed's "somber" moments as wall as his

more typically warm, amiable, and "alive" qualities. Back in Switzerland, Ed found himself with a newly enhanced prominence in the rush of China developments. He was deluged, by phone and correspondence, with demands on his China expertise, on-the-spot experience, and unique connections—everyone, it seemed, wanted to visit China and expected (wrongly) that Ed could help them get there. (He was being bombarded by "an endless stream of people," he wrote Mao after returning home, "who think I am on the 'hot line' to the Peking visa department.") In response to Snow's pleas, his former Random House and Grove Press editor and warmly affectionate friend Mary Heathcote came over to Eysins in August to help Ed with his book. She arrived on crutches (an ankle fracture) and stayed on until December, when Snow's illness made further work on the incomplete volume impossible. Though Ed was dearly unwell, suffering from severe back pains he attributed to lumbago, the trio worked as best they could. Lois, herself incubating a severe case of hepatitis, concentrated on her book, and Mary and Ed on his. In October, Snow wrote John Simon of Random House that he had been "considerably set back in my work because of illness. I never knew what lumbago was before," he went on, "but in my case it has immobilized me." He was unable to sit at the typewriter for more than twenty minutes without resting for at least an hour, "and even that was against doctor's orders." In an effort to restore his vitality and spirits, Ed took off by himself for ten days in the sun and warmth of a beach on the Moroccan coast. He returned looking tanned, but it would be downhill for both Snows in the bleak and agonizing winter months ahead.^[28]

While Snow's niche as a pioneer China bridge-builder was now being widely recognized and acclaimed, it had a bitter taste for him, underlined of course, by his grave illness. In the era of Vietnam, he felt a sense of personal betrayal at an America gone wrong. And in a final rejection of his old belief that America could be a liberating force in the world, he wrote Owen Lattimore in May 1970 that his own earlier views on American exceptionalism had been "a mirage." "American imperialism," he told Lattimore, was especially dangerous precisely "because the people, thinking themselves free, could not imagine carrying anything but freedom elsewhere." And in March 1971, after his return from China, he wrote liberal Democratic Senator George McGovern ("in strict confidence ") on what he had learned in Beijing of Nixon's secret approaches to the Chinese on a presidential visit. "It is assumed there that, as China debate waxes hotter in the U.S., Nixon may attempt to get hold of the

China issue through some such stunt." To this future 1972 Nixon presidential opponent, Snow added, "I would like to see you get there first." In December, Snow confided to Hatem, "I never thought Nixon would invite himself to dinner with Mao." And in a press interview, evidently in Geneva, at the time he published his Life article on Mao's invitation to Nixon, Snow seemed to put the coming event in an oddly adversarial context. "Now some people say that because Mao offers to shake Nixon's hand he is ready to be 'taken in' by Wall Street and the Pentagon. They forget," he noted, "that Mao shook hands with Chiang Kai-shek to negotiate in 1945 and shook hands also to talk with American Ambassador Patrick Hurley. Where did that get them?" When Nixon sent Snow a brief letter two weeks before Ed's death, acknowledging the journalist's "distinguished career and achievements," Lois Snow later recounted, "We didn't answer the letter and we didn't hear again." A few weeks after Ed's passing, Lois wrote to their friend Charles Hogan, "The Nixon letter was sheerly political. I dismiss him with the contempt he deserves. "^[29]

As Snow reacted to the impending Nixon encounter with the Chinese, the foregoing not-unfounded political animosities and disillusionments inevitably affected his perception of the full significance and historic dimensions of these developments. In another Life article in July 1971 on the forthcoming presidential journey, Snow insisted that it was the Chinese who would be dealing from "a position of strength." With "a fierce domestic purge safely behind him," Mao saw "America's Vietnam venture a shambles" and believed "its political and economic position to be in trouble abroad and at home," Ed wrote. "Now, if there was a chance for China to recover Taiwan—Mao's last national goal of unification—and for China to be accepted as an equal in recognition of her great size, achievements, and potential, why not look at it?"—particularly in view of the Soviet threat from the north.^[30]

Snow concluded his assessment of future Sino-American prospects on a "two-cheers" admonitory note. "The millennium seems distant and the immediate prospect is for the toughest kind of adjustment and struggle." A "more realistic world is in sight," he continued, but "popular illusions that it will consist of a sweet mix of ideologies, or an end to China's faith in revolutionary means, could only serve to deepen the abyss again when disillusionment occurs." Reaffirming his own belief in the continuing imperatives for revolutionary. change in the world, with a Maoist China as its leading proponent, Snow added, "A world without change by revolutions—a world in which China's closest friends would

not be revolutionary states—is inconceivable to Peking. But a world of relative peace between states is as necessary to China as to America. To hope for more is to court disenchantment."^[31]

In fact the Sino-American détente ushered in both the post-Vietnam era of retreat from America's imperial interventionism in Asia, and the post-revolutionary era for China, at home and abroad. Zhou Enlai, the negotiator of the American opening, would also be the harbinger of the "four modernizations" policies that would soon mark the end of the Maoist epoch. (Zhou "is a builder, not a poet," Snow wrote in comparing him to Mao.) Perhaps Zhou was sending out some signals of his own on this, when in their July 1971 talks he rather strangely gave Kissinger an exposition on the Cultural Revolution. As Kissinger has described this singular episode: "With grace masking undoubted anguish, Chou described China as being torn between the fear of bureaucratization and the excesses of ideological zeal" which had put in jeopardy the fruits of fifty years of struggle. "He had doubted the necessity of such drastic measures, but Mao had been wiser; he had the vision to look far into the future. In retrospect," Kissinger remarked, "I doubt that Chou would have raised the point at all had he not wanted to disassociate himself from the Cultural Revolution at least to some extent and to indicate that it was over."^[32]

The dilemmas that may have faced Zhou as "Mao's indispensable alter ego," in Snow's words, could well have applied also to the American journalist as Mao's admiring Boswell. Snow had first come to the revolution in its initial Maoist emergence; he had been its most effective publicist, and he had witnessed Maoism's climactic final phase on his last visit. Perhaps the strikingly different temperaments and traits of the two extraordinary Red leaders with whom Snow's entire Red star experience had been linked, mirrored (and helped resolve) the nagging doubts and conflicts that his commitment to the revolution engendered. Ed summed it all up most revealingly in the letter he wrote Mao in July I969, at a time when his requests to return to China were being ignored and when he appeared to be under a cloud in the frenzied politics of the Cultural Revolution. In seeking the chairman's help for a China visit, Snow exhibited the aggrieved hurt of a true friend spurned while simultaneously highlighting and reaffirming his past contributions to Mao's cause and indeed his cult. "I hope that you will not forget that I have been for many years a firm supporter of your great leadership," he told the Great Helmsman. "I feel rarely fortunate to have, by chance, been privileged to know you and talk to you, and for that reason to have been able to help make known

to the world the life and work of a revolutionary fully the peer of Lenin. I hope that my work has not been useless." Now, as his own life ebbed away, so did the "Snow era" of Maoist communism.^[33]

In the broader perspective the Sino-American détente of 1972—looking beyond immediate political calculations, personalities, and cold war maneuverings—was clearly a triumph (if bittersweet) and vindication for Snow. He had persistently argued in the 1930s that an independent, united, and strong China was central to American strategic interests in the Pacific, at a time when Washington's neutrality policies were serving the needs of Japanese aggression against China. In bringing the Chinese Communists to the sympathetic attention of the West, in Red Star and much other writing, Snow consistently pictured the Reds as both patriots and revolutionaries. On the eve of full Communist victory in 1949, Snow had written (and later reiterated in Journey and Red China Today ) that "in the long run the Chinese Communist Party probably cannot and will not subordinate the national interests of China to the interests of the Kremlin." If American policy "is washed clean of interventionism, history may evolve along lines for which all the necessary preconditions now exist. China will become the first Communist-run major power independent of Moscow's dictation." In line with this, during the cold war years, he urged America to make its peace with the revolution now in power. He knew that the era of viable great power intervention in China, Russian or American, was over. He insisted that it continued to be in America's (and China's) best interests for these two great nations on opposite shores of the Pacific to come to terms. ("We became friends because we had mutual interests," Nixon would later declare.) In pressing for Sino-American understanding, Snow had tended to underplay, though not ignore, ideological and political barriers. "No differences in historical experience, present social or political institutions, or conflicting national interests," he had written Mao in 1963, "could possibly justify a great war or continued great hate on both sides." But Snow believed always—if often in contradiction to his Maoist sympathies—that true human liberation ultimately demanded of all societies full economic and political empowerment of their peoples. Probably the ideals and principles of the wartime Chinese industrial cooperative movement, with its mix of individual and collective rights, interests, and responsibilities, best exemplified his notion of the good society.^[34]

In late November 1971 Snow underwent diagnostic tests that revealed pancreatic cancer that had already involved the liver. Lois was herself then in the hospital with infectious hepatitis. Still weak and not entirely recovered, she returned home as Ed prepared to enter a Lausanne hospital in

mid-December for major surgery. The grueling operative and postopera-five ordeal did nothing to arrest the mortal course of the disease. Ed was evidently made aware of his condition but tried to deny its full implications. ("Ed knows he has cancer," Lois told the Howard Snows at the end of December, "how serious it is I don't think he knows now." He wanted no one to know it was cancer, she added.) He talked of recuperation, and of his work and plans. An assignment to go to China in advance of the Nixon media influx as a correspondent for Life and Epoca had to be postponed (then canceled). In these last months, he was thus finally once again sought after and welcomed back to center stage by a mainstream (and conservative) mass-circulation American periodical, in much the fashion of his peak years with the Post . "You have fans, including me," Life's managing editor, Ralph Graves, wrote Snow in July 1971. "I would feel deeply disappointed," Graves told Ed in September, "if your report on the Nixon visit to China did not appear in LIFE."^[35]

Ed returned home at the end of December still alluding to recovery and to further work on his book. In early January he could write John Simon of Random House that he had been operated on for "pancreatitis with complications," and that the surgeon "assures me that with proper continued rest and rebuilt resistance I should be back to relatively normal health again in a month or so." And later that month he wrote Premier Zhou, "It is of course greatly disappointing not be in China now but perhaps I can be more useful later." But Snow grew steadily weaker while enduring ineffective chemotherapy treatments.^[36]

In these circumstances, the two Chinese leaders with whom his life had been so intertwined gave a valedictory expression of friendship and esteem that now rose above any further considerations of political benefit. (Snow in turn sent final poignant "Dear Friend" messages, dictated to Lois, to the chairman and the premier.) Immediately after hearing the bleak prognosis that followed Ed's surgery, Lois sent a detailed account to George Harem in Beijing, and a transcript of the medical report. In her anguished state, and with her faith in China's health care system and "miracles," she implored, "can anything be done? I have said that if anything really serious came up I'd go to China (Oh God, we were there when this horrible thing was growing in Ed!). That is why I turn to you. What do you think?" On the basis of Lois's information and appeal, a team of medical specialists and nurses was dispatched from Peking in late January to minister to the stricken journalist.^[37]

These last weeks have been movingly recorded by Lois Snow in her book on Ed's terminal illness. ("I read [the book] with tears," Soong Qingling later wrote Lois, "as the face of our dear Ed appeared on every

page.") Since Snow was already too ill and weak for the original plan to transport him to Beijing for care and treatment, the Chinese team instead transformed the Snow house into an improvised hospital, greatly easing family burdens and giving Snow as comfortable and dignified an end as was medically and humanly possible. They "released Ed from care and pain," Lois wrote Charles Hogan after Snow's death. Dr. Ma (Harem), who had trekked into Red China with Ed thirty-six years before, came as a member of the Chinese medical party. Snow slipped in and out of consciousness, rousing himself for a last time during a visit by Huang Hua, now the first ambassador of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations. As Huang and Hatem stood by his bedside, Snow quipped at this reunion of the three "bandits." Ed soon fell into a final coma and, with the Chinese medical group in attendance, died peacefully in the early morning of February 15, the first day of the Chinese lunar New Year. Less than three days later Nixon left Washington for his rendezvous with the Red leaders in Beijing. While Snow would not be among the throng covering the event, Nixon was advised by diplomatic cable from Geneva to "sample" Snow's writings, since "his name [is] likely [to] arise [in] conversation" with the Chinese leaders.^[38]

Condolences came from Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Soong Qing-ling, and tributes and warm recollections from dignitaries and friends around the world. There were memorial services in Geneva, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, and at the United Nations Chapel in New York. In Sneden's Landing, where the Snows had lived for a time after their marriage, old friends gathered to remember and reminisce. Snow some time before had left a brief will and instructions for disposing of the "evidence" after his death. These oft-cited directions distilled much of the essence of his people-centered outlook, and his dual bonds to America and China:

Please cremate the "evidence," mentioned above. Then if you don't mind, someone please scatter some of the ashes over the city of Peking, and say that I loved China, I should like part of me to stay there after death as it always did during life. America fostered and nourished me. I should like part of me to be placed by the Hudson River, before it enters the Atlantic to touch Europe and all the shores of mankind of which I felt a part, as I have known good men in almost every land.

In general accord with these wishes, Snow's ashes were interred in part in the garden of a friend's home overlooking the Hudson in Sneden's Landing, and part on a rise beside No-Name Lake on the lovely campus

of Beijing University. It was here, formerly the site of Yanjing, that Ed had taught for a time, and where he liked to stroll along the shores of the serene lake. ^[39]

Snow always reported with both heart and mind, the former state department China hand John Service wrote in remembrance. Ed recognized that "everyone of the billions of the plain people on this earth is valuable, and deserving of respect," Mary Heathcote said of him. Jim Bertram may have encapsulated his old friend's complex and contradictory makeup best: "a true liberal-democrat-radical, a rational romantic, a practical idealist," he wrote Lois and the children. Snow had given his own, more personal estimate of his life's endeavors in a 1969 letter to Howard: "All the things I thought of doing—learning, writing—increasingly seem beyond attainment and I know that I have done probably the most that I can do in this brief span."^[40]

Since Ed's death, Lois Snow has continued to live in her Eysins home, with frequent visits to family and friends in the States, and some return trips to China—but none since Tiananmen. In the first years, she did lectures and articles on China and wrote her account of Ed's final travail; in 1981 she published Edgar Snow's China , compiled from Snow's writings on China from 1928 through 1949. Chris and Sian also live in Switzerland. They both now work as translators in Geneva.

How might Snow react to post-Mao China, shorn of its egalitarian-liberationist glow, and with a severely tarnished image of the chairman to whose revolutionary vision the American was so drawn to the end? Very likely the prospect would bring even more forcefully to the surface his skeptical turn of mind, and the troubling thoughts he so often recorded on the pitfalls of authoritarian political systems, fundamentalist thinking, and infallible superleaders. (It is a consummate irony that Snow was so closely linked with a revolutionary icon whose rule came so thoroughly and lethally to epitomize these patterns.) The pain and outrage of Lois Snow, and of Christopher and Sian, to the Tiananmen events of June 1989, may tell us something here. Still, Snow would also welcome China's greater opening to the outside world and its dynamic economic progress—though with a quizzical eye at its "capitalist road" directions and seamy social spin-offs. (Viewing the energetic accomplishments of the Hong Kong Chinese during a visit there in 1968, Snow speculated that if China itself could find a "medium" between such a "selfish" money-making drive and the Maoist preoccupation with "reforming man," then "nobody else could prevail against such a [productive] force.") He would be underscoring the importance of carefully

managing the complex, mutually advantageous, but often edgy Sino-American relationship, with its risks always of stirring up cold war-like anti-Communist tendencies on the American side, and still prevalent imperialist perceptions of America on the part of the Chinese—the latter amply documented in David Shambaugh's recent study of China's professional "America Watchers." As the authors of Sentimental Imperialists observe, of the China "regained" after 1972, "the danger remained—as always in this relationship—that excessive [American] hopes and illusions would be followed by dangerous despair, disillusionment, and hostility." Snow would probably largely subscribe to the views expressed by former New York Times Beijing Bureau Chief Nicholas D. Kristof in a 1993 article: "We should be skeptical of Chinese intentions [as, he had also noted, the Chinese are of ours], without falling into hos-tility. We should maintain a dialogue with China, even if the tone is not always cordial." China, Kristof added, "is not a villain. It is not a renegade country like Iraq or Libya, but rather an ambitious nation that is becoming the behemoth of the neighborhood .... If China is able to sustain its economic miracle, then [the] readjustment of the scales will be one of the most important—and perhaps dangerous—tasks in international relations in the coming decades." For an earlier time, and in a vastly more adversarial Sino-American context, Snow had been alerting his compatriots to such realities.^[41]

But beyond China, Snow was above all a master journalist who grip-pingly and compassionately chronicled a violent and intractable world where the have-nots immensely outnumbered the have-gots. He consistently acted on the belief that he could make a difference in changing things for the better, as he saw it. It was the essence of his commitment as a journalist and of the truths he sought to convey. "My view is that writing justifies itself," he wrote a Chinese journalist in 1964, "if its results add even a very small net contribution to man's knowledge, and I believe that that cannot be done without advancing the interests of the poor and the oppressed of this world, who are the vast majority of men."^[42]

However this was never that simple, nor could it be. The revolutionary causes and liberating forces he looked to often fell disappointingly short or spawned new evils of their own. The decades of superpower contention and interventionism, of cold and hot war and nuclear-based arms races, shattered Snow's vision of a new world order—one in which an enlightened and nonimperial America could cooperate with a more benign Soviet heading an Eastern bloc of "fraternal" states, in a peaceful

international environment that could accommodate necessary radical change in the have-not regions of the world. When told in China in 1970 that Mao planned to interview him rather than the other way round, Snow reflected that he was merely a "democratic personage," not "a man of power." In essence, Snow could propose, but others disposed.^[43]

There was always in Snow a mix of hope and despair, of faith and disillusion—perhaps a mirror of the twentieth-century world he knew— one of unprecedented progress and unspeakable horrors, phenomenal advances and disheartening setbacks. In Journey Snow wrote that humankind had come to "a parting time from our pre-history, a true childhood's end when men at last have to begin behaving like Man." The world would have to mature from its "anarchy of nationalism" to "a higher concept of federated world authority," he pursued this theme in Red China Today . But in his darker moments he saw "childhood's end" as a distant prospect at best. It was "a childish sentiment" on his part, he confided to Jim Bertram in 1959, not "to see man universally as the ignorant, selfish, fearful and extremely primitive and pathetic creature he is—collectively capable of acting most dynamically only under compulsions of fear, and aggressively, despite individual potentials for behavior of nobility and love and reason."^[44]

On a similar note, in an undated fragment Snow wrote (and preserved), probably while working on Journey , he reflected on a world that failed to come up to his earlier expectations:

I see that much of my disillusionment after the war was because I still had illusions that [the] war was going to start a new world, that we could relax and enjoy the fruits of hard labor, of hard work, of honest predictions fulfilled. I myself did relax. I resented the intrusion of new dilemmas, new problems. I had forgotten that a billion people still had unsatisfied wants, that oppression of myriad kinds continued. I was satisfied but the rest of the world was not. I wanted peace but other men did not. I believed it was possible to adopt a new behavior in human relationships, international affairs, but other men did not. History had so conditioned them that they could not. Who would and could ever condition them to react in my way? ... Men do NOT have imagination; cannot be influenced by things they do not experience. See how we have forgotten Maidanek, we do not remember it and learned nothing from it.^[45]

Our contemporary age, though marked by impressive strides in human advancement, is still scarred by intensified nationalisms and ethnic, tribal, and religious extremism and conflict in many parts of the globe (magnified further with the collapse of Eastern European and So-

viet communism). There are human rights shortfalls, and a continuing gulf between the have-gots and the have-nots of the world. It speaks both to Snow's somber thoughts on collective humanity and on the urgency of his call for "childhood's end." The "richest billion people command 60 times the income of the poorest billion," according to the United Nations 1994 report on human development. "The world can never be at peace unless people have security in their daily lives," it warns. "The new demands of global human security," it adds, "require a more positive relationship among all nations of the world—leading to a new era of development cooperation." And as Bruce Urquhart recently remarked in regard to the problems of global policing and peacekeeping, "Sooner or later, the interdependent nature of the world we have created will pose the choice between a decline into chaos and a global society based on law." Snow's vistas of a demilitarized world of liberated nations and uplifted peoples, united in a collectively secure, equitable, and peaceful international order, remains an ongoing quest of our planet.^[46]