November 1, 2005

National Security Archives Wins Emmy for Nixon Documentary

BY JULIA JACOBELLI

The National Security Archives (NSA) recently won its first Emmy award for the documentary “Declassified: Nixon in China.” The documentary examines previously secret documents from the United States and China that reveal the impetus behind the warming of Chinese-American relations in the early seventies.

Founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars, the NSA is a private institute that collects and makes available US documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The archives, located on the seventh floor of GW’s Gelman Library, is the largest non-governmental library of declassified documents.

The documentary, the result of a collaboration with ABC News Productions, premiered on the Discovery Times Channel on Dec. 21, 2004. Tom Blanton, executive director of the archives, said the idea was presented to ABC the previous June. He explained that the difficulty was finding a subject compelling enough for television among the millions of declassified papers in NSA possession.

The award was specifically for “outstanding achievement in a craft,” with the craft being research according to Blanton. He believes the archives received the Emmy due to the difficulty involved in digging up the previously classified documents, among them private phone conversations between Nixon and Kissinger and secret documents from the Chinese government.

The documentary explored the change in the relationship between the United States and China, through declassified documents as well as interviews with some of the key players of the exchange and some of the leading experts on the relationship between China and the United States. It follows Nixon’s interest in using China against the Soviet Union, as well as against the Vietnamese. While similarly in China, Mao Tse-Tung — worried about the threat posed by the Soviet Union along the border — toyed with forming an alliance with America to manipulate the Russians. As there was no open mode of communication between the two countries, the documentary explores how the relationship between China and America progressed through “signals.” One of the first signals was from China, when Mao approved the publication of Nixon’s inaugural address in several Chinese newspapers.

The publication of the speech was the first step in preparing the Chinese for an open relationship with America. Historically, the Chinese were brought up to hate Americans, but the Soviet Union grew to pose a greater threat to China. In the documentary Blanton asserts that it was “barbarians vs. barbarians,” expressing the idea that the Chinese needed to team up with one in order to fight the other.

In response to Mao’s first move, Nixon began referring to China as “The People’s Republic of China,” rather than “Communist China” in speeches. Pakistani president Yahya Kahn, at Nixon’s behest, became a crucial link between the United States and China, a relationship that later became known as the “Pakistani Channel.”

Among the newly declassified documents featured in the documentary were phone conversations between Kissinger and Nixon, deciding who would go as the emissary. Kissinger ultimately went, but among the names proposed was George H.W. Bush.

“Part of diplomacy is to express existing realities,” said Kissinger in the [hour]-long program. “The most important thing we had to do was to explain each other’s thinking.”

The whole affair has been compared to a card game, but according to Kissinger, both sides came out equally.

“It wasn’t designed to have a winner,” said Kissinger. “It was designed for each country to achieve for its own reasons its fundamental objective, and I think we both won.”

“The new documents are rewriting the history of that amazing breakthrough,” said Blanton. “But the new evidence also serves as a reminder of the use and abuse of government secrecy.

“One really interesting parallel is how successful or unsuccessful we are as a government at understanding other countries’ and other peoples’ motives,” added Blanton. He believes that the declassified Nixon documents teach an important lesson on understanding your adversary through empathy, as well as raising questions about what kind of diplomacy we are practicing today.

Blanton and colleagues at the NSA are already brainstorming for the next show. The archives is considering making “Declassified” into a series with ABC because hundreds of subjects exist among documents just now being declassified.

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