The Pres. asked me to go, along with Schultz to Peking in May of `77 to talk with Guofeng on establishing diplomatic relations. Before we left, Barry called and demanded to know why were appeasing the Chinese Reds, and I assured him that this was part of our anti-Soviet strategy. I moved him to the Pres., and he repeated it, but I think that Goldwater trusted us a bit less since then.
The trip went smoothly, but didn't pan out as successfully as we wanted. We got to see the Forbidden City and all that shit, as well as get diarrhea, but otherwise we didn't get anything done on anything else the Pres., and by extension myself, wanted: defense coop., trade relations, etc. All that was assured was that the new Sino-American relationship would be preserved and expanded under the Reagan admin.
As the Pres. mentioned during his State of the Union, we were not going to abandon Taiwan. This kept our base in line, but Taipei couldn't have been madder. They expected a fiercely anti-Communist line from Reagan, not this Nixon pragmatism. I told their fucking rep. in Washington, "you'll get your F-5s and Pattons, no matter what happens."
I just wished that those fuckers could have understood that it was Moscow which was our primary enemy, and that sometimes you
do have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. The dish being, in the case, the
end of fucking Soviet despotism in Eastern Europe!
In March, we submitted to Congress a new DoD budget. Our original version was heavily revised by the Joint Chiefs, but the Pres. didn't care. They knew what they were doing, and there was nothing wrong with adding to our military expenditures.
The Dems didn't like it one bit, and O'Neill personally told me "the federal government will sit on their asses for as long as you keep bringing this up." the Pres. was quite unsatisfied, and basically told me to tell the Speaker the opposite thing.
The problem was, though, the Dems would always spin it on us. People weren't interested in a shutdown, and in the case that happened they could always show old fuckers waiting outside for their Social Security checks "because Reagan wanted more missiles."
"Cut it by two percent overall," I'd say. The Pres. would proceed to put down his pen, walk into the other room, and hand me a cardboard box. "It will calm down the Dems without significantly affecting this budget." and he'd just say, "no."
So we brought it down to one and a half percent on all heavy-arms purchases and two percent on small-arms purchases, and the app. bill passed by a decisive margin. O'Neill, however, was not very happy and warned me that "there'd be consequences." that East-Coast fucker didn't know whom he was dealing with.
As promised, the Pres. decided to be more aggressive. He deployed Pershing 1's to West Germany, based at Ramstein but already authorized Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs to begin plans for a mobile defense system to carry them. The Soviet ambassador relayed that his government was "displeased" with our policies in Europe, and we told him that we were displeased with his policies in Europe.
Sure enough, a couple months after our move, a mole within the Kremlin, whom Bush referred to as BOURBON, told us that the Soviets were operating a base in Vogelsang, in the something-region of the GDR, where they were now deploying a set of their own intermediate range warheads. And the Pres. said, "Just now?"
