The World

In March 1971, promising to ‘Garibi Hatao!’ (Abolish poverty!), she had won an election victory so sweeping that westerners nicknamed her Empress of India. Now she saw an opportunity in the disintegration of Pakistan. The resulting war, like the Arab–Israeli conflicts, was a sequel to the unfinished business of partition, which had created a new nation, Pakistan, that had inherited little of the stabilizing British-trained bureaucracy, its identity shaped by its army and Islam, united by visceral hatred for India. It was divided into two, Punjab in the west, Bengal in the east, 1,600 miles apart. Now the easterners rebelled, seeking independence from the arrogant grandees of Islamabad, driving millions of Hindu refugees into India.

The Pakistani military dictator Yahya Khan set his troops loose in the east’s capital Dhaka, machine-gunning students, mass-raping women, murdering children, killing 10,000 in days, 500,000 within months. Indira prepared for war, skirmishing with Pakistani forces in the east. But on 3 December 1971 the Pakistanis, inspired by their enemy Israel, launched air strikes on eleven Indian air bases. Indira liberated Dhaka and attacked western Pakistan too, routing its forces in a thirteen-day war. The east declared independence as Bangladesh; Indira was triumphant.^* Indians, exultant that their country had won their first victory in centuries, hailed her as Durga, invincible ten-armed goddess. ‘India is Indira,’ declared the Congress president. Having inherited the throne herself, she now started to groom her favourite son for the crown.

Nixon and Kissinger watched morosely. Earlier in the year, Kissinger had flown in to encourage conciliation, but that was his cover. Pakistan was backed by China and America, a link that brought them together. Secretly, Kissinger flew on to Beijing to meet Mao, preparing the way for the president himself …

I LIKE RIGHTISTS: AMERICAN METTERNICH AND THE PHILOSOPHER -KING OF CHINA

On 21 February 1972, Nixon and Kissinger were received by Mao in his book-heaped study at the Swimming-Pool House that resembled ‘more the retreat of a scholar than the audience room of the all-powerful leader’.

‘I voted for you,’ joked Mao to Nixon. ‘I like rightists.’

Kissinger told Mao he recommended his books to his Harvard students.

‘These writings of mine,’ said Mao, ‘aren’t anything.’

‘The Chairman’s writings,’ answered Nixon, ‘moved a nation and changed the world.’

‘I’ve only been able to change a few places,’ smiled Mao, ‘in the vicinity of Beijing.’ He damned Nixon with faint praise: ‘Your book Six Crises

isn’t bad.’ When the Americans tried to negotiate – offering to drop recognition of Taiwan as official China, Mao grandly dismissed them: ‘Troublesome problems I don’t want to get into.’ Kissinger could not help but admire ‘the philosopher-king’.

Brezhnev watched this encounter with horror and invited Nixon to Moscow, believing that in war ‘everyone loses’. Perhaps perversely he trusted Nixon more than any other US president and admired, almost envied, Kissinger. ‘There was never a good president,’ Brezhnev told Castro, ‘and probably never will be. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is unsubstantial.’ As for America, Brezhnev thought it was ‘a sick society’ where ‘gangsterism, racism and drug addiction have reached enormous proportions. The monopolies are robbing the people, having grabbed political power.’ Yet he admired Nixon and thought Kissinger ‘a cunning, smart guy’, though Kissinger was unimpressed by Lyonia. In one of their encounters, Brezhnev, a metalworker turned tsar, dressed Kissinger, German-Jewish schoolteacher’s son, in boots and khaki and took him wild-boar hunting. Kissinger refused to shoot; Brezhnev killed one boar and wounded another. Brezhnev also drove Nixon at high speed in his ZiL limousines and his speedboats. ‘Enjoy good things with impunity,’ he bellowed. When he visited Washington, Nixon gave him a Lincoln Continental. Brezhnev insisted on driving it, which the Secret Service vetoed.

‘I’ll take the flag off the car, put on dark glasses,’ said Brezhnev, ‘so they can’t see my eyebrows and drive like any American would.’

‘I’ve driven with you,’ replied Kissinger. ‘I don’t think you drive like an American!’