How I Opened The New York Times’s Beijing Bureau – with Fox Butterfield
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Hi listeners, welcome to a new episode of PK Hotel. I'm your host Leo. This week I'm sharing my conversation with Fox Butterfield at his house in Portland. Fox is an American journalist who opened the first New York Times bureau in China.

He was trained as a historian of China by John Fairbank at Harvard and reported in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Vietnam for many of his early years. He won a Pulitzer Prize as part of the NYT team behind the Pentagon Papers, which exposed government documents on how the Johnson administration misled American public and the Congress to launch the Vietnam War.

In this episode, we talked about Fox's early years as a student of China and a young reporter navigating the Vietnam War and the Cold War environment. I hope you enjoy the conversation. So a couple of thoughts occurred to me. Okay. Going back to when I first had anything to do with China. So obviously I'd been studying about China since I was an undergraduate and then a graduate student and lived in Taiwan. But my first real contact with people from the mainland

was in 1972. That time I was in Vietnam, but the New York Times got in touch with me and they said that the People's Daily wanted to send, this is long before normalization of relations, they said the People's Daily wanted to send some journalists, some reporters to the United States and have a tour.

and it being sort of the Communist outlook on things, they assumed that the New York Times was the official publication. They thought you were the counterpart. They thought the New York Times was the People's Daily of America. So they asked the New York Times to arrange a tour of their correspondence in the United States.

So the editor sent me a cable explaining that and asked me to come back from the war in Vietnam to the U.S. to act as a guide. That's a significant undertaking. So I flew back from Saigon to New York, where I met there were three men there.

And whether they were really correspondents for the People's Daily or what, to this day I don't know. They were ranking members of something. So I talked to them and we arranged a trip. And the New York Times provided a car and a driver. I was not driving. And where they wanted to go, they first got a tour of the New York Times. They saw various things in New York City.

I don't remember all of them. Then we went to Washington and then they wanted to see a farm, an American farm in Illinois, corn farm. A particular one? No, I negotiated with some agricultural organizations as to where to go. One of the things I remember, which was very striking, which is not political, but it's just the difference between Chinese agriculture and American agriculture, was that they were astonished at how tall the corn was.

I think it was August. They say this corn is amazing. It was so much taller than Chinese corn. And then they had a question. They said, "Where is the irrigation?" And the farmer said, "Irrigation?" He said, "Irrigation? We don't need irrigation. We have rainfall." And in China, you would have, because rainfall is more erratic. The United States had more predictable weather patterns. They didn't have irrigation. And the Chinese kept asking me, "Where's the irrigation?"

Again, not about politics at all, just the difference in natural conditions. But the farmer had tractors and he had trucks and he was doing all this work by himself with his family. Well, American farming is already mechanized. Yes. So that was all the way back in

1972. And then the thing they really wanted to see, they wanted to go to Detroit. And so we arranged through Ford Motor Company to take them to a Ford automobile plant. And they were again stunned by the level of mechanization. So few workers and so many machines. The United Auto Workers, which was a big union at the time, decided that they would invite the Chinese to

stay with some autoworkers at night. The three Chinese were sent to three different households and they didn't like that because they wanted to be with each other. And the autoworker said, "No, you can stay with me and you stay with us." And so it was almost a political crisis.

Whether they were concerned about being separated from each other, they wanted to keep watching on each other, or whether they were just uncomfortable being alone and being with American families. Could have been some of each. And the Americans were very hospitable and kept inviting the Chinese to eat their food, but of course the food was very different from what the Chinese were used to. So it was a very revealing trip to me.

I'm sure to them too. To them. And they were the first people from the mainland to come directly into American households. Did you ever stay in touch with any of them? For a while, but they didn't really want to stay in touch with me. And then the Cultural Revolution came along and that. Who knows what happened? Wait, this is before Cultural Revolution? So this is 1972. Yeah. Just before Nixon's visit. All these things were happening at once. The first...

steps to getting this. There were many little steps which were linked to the big steps. But this was a little step. So that was one little thing that I had before I got to China itself. And now another thing, which is a part of the normalization process,

When Deng Xiaoping came to the United States in January and February of 1979, part of the four years I was in Hong Kong, and Deng came at the invitation of President Jimmy Carter. And there was a large delegation that came, but the New York Times asked me to come back from Hong Kong and be on that trip as much as I could see and report on it.

So I got to go with the Chinese delegation. And they started in Washington where they met Jimmy Carter. Then they went to Atlanta, which was always a little strange to me why they went to Atlanta. They wanted to see the American South. But while Deng was there, they signed the first commercial agreement was with Coca-Cola to start importing Coca-Cola or start manufacturing Coke in China. I don't know what ever happened to that agreement, but

Deng was meeting with the executives of Coca-Cola. Joe Coca-Cola was very happy about it. Coca-Cola was very happy. It was unusual. And then, yes, we started in Washington, in Atlanta, the agreement with Coke. Then they went to Houston, Texas. They wanted to go to the Johnson Space Center there, where the rockets were being manufactured. The American space efforts were concentrated at that time in Houston.

Some of the Houston Chamber of Commerce arranged some other things for the Chinese to do. And they took them to an American, a Texas rodeo. Texas rodeo.

They had lots of American food, so there were baked beans and beef, enormous sides of beef. American hosts kept asking the Chinese to eat the beef. The Chinese didn't know what to do with these enormous pieces of meat. And I said, the Chinese used to have their meat cut up very small. What they can't deal with is... Look, I think the Chinese kept saying, this is very barbarian to have such large pieces of beef. Niu Rou shouldn't be...

And they probably didn't know how to use knife and fork. They had learned some, but it was the baked beans and the beef was really... and coleslaw. It was very American, but it was not very Chinese. But then in some ways, to me, one of the most interesting scenes was that the Houston professional football team had somehow, they had their cheerleaders there. And there were these very tall American women with long blonde hair

and their boobs were sticking out like this and they had very short little skirts and high boots and they kept coming over and holding the Chinese. And it was like the two cultures were not meeting very well. - Oh, they were trying to meet. - They were trying to meet but...

The Chinese kept trying, "No, please don't grab me." It was an interesting cultural misunderstanding. You were there. I was there. I wrote a story in the New York Times about it. But it was, again, a reflection of the enormous gap at that point between China and the United States. That was not something that communists had prepared Chinese for. No. Certainly not in front of their boss. Not in front of their boss, no.

And then the final stop on the trip was to go to Seattle because the Chinese were very interested in aircraft production. That's where Boeing is. Where Boeing is. In fact, ultimately they signed a deal with Boeing to start manufacturing some Boeing planes in China, which was a big leap forward for China at that point. And they were really fascinated by the Boeing plants. Boeing had these just enormous manufacturing facilities.

That was, I'm sure, made a big impression on the Chinese delegation. And the Boeing people were very friendly because they wanted to sign a deal with China. Of course. Started with selling some Boeing planes. At that time, I think it would have been 707s, the first really successful commercial jetliner.

Did anyone on that trip leave an impression on you from China or even from America? The impression I have was how excited the Chinese were to be there, how happy the Americans were to see the Chinese, and then the enormous cultural gulfs between the two countries. Particularly, I think, because China was still very closed. Things were about to change. But the American businesses were certainly very excited. They were very excited. It was very goodwill. It was just the differences between the

the two countries and the two cultures were quite profound. And what did you think of Deng Xiaoping at the time? Did you ever meet him? You met Deng Xiaoping on his trip. What was your impression? I met him a couple times. He's very short. He had a funny accent. He seemed, by comparison with other party leaders, he seemed quite moderate. The things that he had to go through that he'd been... I forgot all the things that happened to him, but he himself had encountered a lot of trouble

He was purged three times in his career. His son fell out of a window during the Cultural Revolution and completely damaged his lower body. So he seemed to have realized that there were other ways of doing things, maybe better ways. He was not going to install an American political system. Probably not. No.

But he seemed, at that time, he seemed very moderate. That's the best word. And with all the terrible things that he had seen happen. Did you meet other high officials, Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang? Zhao Ziyang I met in Sichuan. I think it's in the book. Zhao Ziyang I met while he was still a party leader in Sichuan, before he was elevated. A number of times I was asked by Chinese, did I work for the CIA? And I would say no, because I didn't.

Oh, I met Zhao in Sichuan in 1980. I went to Sichuan to see the industrial and agricultural reforms that Zhao had introduced in Sichuan, giving factories more autonomy, giving the peasants a greater say over what they planted. Oh, that's right. Zhao came to the hotel where I was staying. Yeah, I remember reading that somewhere. He agreed to the interview and then he arrived by himself. That was stunning. He didn't have his guards and handlers.

He just walked in, which is so unusual. It's on page 300. I forgot all what happened to him. After Tiananmen, he was basically locked up in his own room, put under home detention for the rest of his life. He died like 10 years ago. Oh, yeah. Now I know he was no longer alive. But when he was the party leader in Sichuan, he attempted some really forward-looking reforms. Starting to be a new China...

I mean, the cultural, an awful lot of the people that I knew were very worried that the Cultural Revolution was still going on. They weren't sure. And people still did get arrested for, the door was opening, but it was, a little light was coming in. Something, but the question I had always was, we're beginning to see these economic changes, but are we going to have political changes? Political change is going to go as far as the economic changes. Is it going to be as much

moderation or liberalization. I never was sure that that would happen. And how did you feel when China attacked Vietnam, given your time in Vietnam? That was a surprise. The Vietnamese were surprised. That was a strange episode. I don't remember the details of it, but it was bizarre. The Vietnamese are really a Chinese people. The very word for Vietnam, "Yuen-nan," Vietnam is just their pronunciation of "Yuen-nan."

But Vietnamese has the pronunciation is very different and Mandarin has four tones and Vietnamese has nine tones. It's a much more difficult language for foreigners than Mandarin is. Lots of strange sounds which don't exist in English. That's something I find quite puzzling is because there is a whole generation of Americans coming out of the Vietnam War and quite anti-Vietnam War. But when Deng Xiaoping

or invaded Vietnam, there was very little resistance from the American side. Carter didn't seem to care, and Mike Oxenberg didn't seem to care so much. And the China scholars who were completely anti-Vietnam War didn't seem to put up a protest against Deng Xiaoping or anything. Yes, I remember that. In some ways, that's an interesting question. So when Russia invades Ukraine, we do care. That would be the closest parallel I can think of.

And I presume now if China invades Taiwan, you would care. Oh, yes, that's something different. Somehow, poor little Vietnam. Poor little Vietnam. I think Americans were so tired of the Vietnam War, they just couldn't express outrage anymore about Vietnam. And the communist government of Vietnam won that war. So cynically, I would say that some people were happy to see them

getting whacked a little bit. But that's a good question. There wasn't much of a debate about it in the United States. So I don't know. There were some people who wanted to protest, but American public opinion just didn't seem to care. I think we had a case of, I would call it, Vietnam exhaustion. We don't want to hear anything more about Vietnam. We don't want to worry about Vietnam anymore.

But I'm very happy to see now that Americans are now interested in Vietnam again in a positive way. But it's taking a long time because next year is the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam. And I think that it's interesting in the sense that I remember you writing somewhere that

Some Americans suspend their critical lens when it comes to China. Yes. It's very usual to be suspicious of what the Soviet Union is doing, quite critical of their political institution, domestic affairs, international ambitions. But when it comes to China, then American observers tend to have a certain wishful thinking, optimism, faith in the goodwill. I think you're absolutely right. If we broaden the lens a little bit here,

So I think with China until after 1949, we thought, Americans thought, I should say, that the communists were terrible, Mao was evil, all these things were bad. And we went to war with China soon after that in 1951 in Korea.

So people were very anti-China because of those things. And then when we began reestablishing normal relations with China and Americans could go to China and American businesses could go to China, then we changed again. But we totally flipped it upside down. And everything about China is good. Some of those same things happen with Vietnam in a different way. But we didn't see the messy part or the complications. What's your take on that? Why does this happen? Why can't the public...

sentiment swing in the complete extremes. Well, it's like cheering for a football team. You get all excited about your team and then something happens and you may end up cheering for the other team at some point. For the case of China, is it just because businesses couldn't make money? No, it's not just, it's not as simple as that. That's a factor.

Americans always had probably a very oversimplified view of China. The American missionaries went and came back and told their stories. We didn't have a very sophisticated view of China. I'm not sure what the Chinese thought about the United States, but... Probably not very sophisticated either. They thought NYT was part of CIA. That's the understanding of America. During World War II, we were... the Chinese nationalists were on our side. We thought Chiang Kai-shek was good, but it turned out no, that was not right.

And then the Chinese nationalists went to Taiwan and were nasty to the Taiwanese, but now Taiwan has gone pretty well. So things are more complex than most of us think. There's a saying that Soviet scholars hate Russia, and China scholars love China. That's true. Although I think Soviet scholars in some ways, they probably like Russia more than they admit. China's a big, complex country.

So one of the most influential books for me was the Edgar Snow book, Red Star Over China. So that, in its way, has its own romantic view of China. We were on the Long March and the poor communists are doing well. Against all odds. Against all odds. Against the corrupt, capitalist, nationalist government. There's a wonderful book, which was very influential for me, called Two Kinds of Time. Have you ever seen that or read that?

that was written during World War II by a man named Graham Peck, P-E-C-K. I highly recommend it. It's going to seem very dated now, but when I read it, when I first started studying about China, I was stunned. It's a much more sophisticated take on China than Red Star of China, written basically at the same time. He was in China for a long time. And he does talk about, he says two kinds of time. He looks at two very different ways of looking at China. It's a big, fat book.

It's really interesting. Those are very nice little details that tell us how the relation is normalized and how it became okay for Americans to wander around China. And one of those big steps would be opening the NYT Beijing Bureau and becoming the first NYT correspondent in China. Could you tell us that story? How did it all happen? Here again, it's almost 50 years ago.

My memory is a little blank on that. What the exact agreement was between the two governments, I've forgotten. They would admit a certain number of American news organizations in the United States would permit a certain number of Chinese journalists to come. I just don't remember the details. And then when I got to Beijing, so initially it was the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press.

and maybe the Los Angeles Times, I forgot. And then pretty quickly then a couple of the television networks, NBC and CBS, I don't remember, but they were slightly different category. But it was pretty limited. It was like four or five. And later on it expanded, but initially the group. And the United States, they accredited the New China News Agency and Raymond Ribal. And I've forgotten who else.

But I had to go to the foreign ministry, the information department, and get my credentials. And at first, I couldn't file stories, but fairly quickly, we were able to send stories. There was a lot of bureaucracy, but honestly, I don't remember. If I tried to tell you in detail, I would be wrong. Were you excited to go to China finally? Oh, of course. Yes. In some ways, I've been trying to do that for...

many years. Certainly from sometime in the late 60s, I was hoping to do that. From the time I became a journalist in 1969. But honestly, it's too long ago to remember the exact steps. Do you remember the feelings then when you finally arrived in Beijing, opening a new office? I mean, where was your office? China had a real shortage of office space for foreigners of any kind. There was a shortage of housing space for Chinese, most of all.

and there were a shortage of offices, they weren't prepared to have an influx of foreigners coming in, businessmen. For me, for the first year I was there, I lived in a hotel room in Beijing, Fandian. That's what they gave me, and the Washington Post had the same thing. The Washington Post correspondent was married to the Los Angeles Times correspondent, so they had two hotel rooms. - Oh, this is the Matthews. - The Matthews. And they had some small children. At some point, the Christian Science Monitor was allowed to send something. I don't think that was it at first.

I had the one hotel room, I think it was on the third floor of the Beijing Findaian. That was my office, my living space and everything else. But I couldn't feel sorry for myself because most Chinese didn't have room nearly that nice. But Peking Hotel was the best hotel in... It was, but there weren't very many hotels at that point. How was Peking Hotel like actually back then? It was comfortable, it was crowded.

People in it were all, people were not there for just one or two or three nights. Most people were actually living there. It's almost like an apartment. It was almost like an apartment, but downstairs there was a restaurant or a couple of restaurants, and it very quickly became evident that the people who operated the elevators, because they were still elevator operators then, they were probably sent by the Ministry of Public Security. They were keeping track of whoever came in and came out, and there were

probably people from the Ministry of Public Security at the front door, ask any Chinese who tried to come in had to show their credentials. I would occasionally try to bring in a Chinese guest, but they would be stopped downstairs. And it was awkward. If the Chinese visitor was not afraid of being found out, they would come in. But if they were worried about being discovered, they wouldn't come in. So I really couldn't meet people at my office. At the hotel, no. I had to go somewhere else. Often it was going out to parks.

or sometimes to restaurants, because Chinese going out to restaurants, so that was okay. So there was a constant, how do you say this, a battle of wits, trying to, I can't say fool the Ministry of Public Security, but to at least try to meet ordinary people or important people without being reported back. And I felt almost all the time that I was being watched in some way, shape or form. And I think there's at least one anecdote in the book

where I had a Chinese assistant and I'm sure that he was supplied by the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, but I'm sure he was reporting to somebody in public security. I came to think that he was probably reporting once a week. My Chinese friend said he would have to make a report on me regularly. And one time he was out for lunch and there was a phone call and I answered in Chinese and they asked for him and I said, "He's not here."

And they said, "Tell him when he comes back, he doesn't have to make his report on the foreigner today." And that actually happened several times. So I said, "Okay, I'll tell him." I was being watched, as were other correspondents. I think since the New York Times was sort of part of the American government, that I was a more interesting target to watch.

And how was the newsroom like? Your office was essentially your apartment, right? My office was my hotel room, was my office and my apartment. It was in one room. How did you write stories? I had a typewriter. Do you remember typewriters? I've never used one. I've seen them in museums. At that time, I had to go to the telegraph office to send my stories. The telegraph office in the hotel? No, the telegraph office on Main Avenue. I'd have to drive there.

And they give my copy to the... I was typing it out and then I would take it to the Telegraph office. Telegraph office would send it but gave them a chance to read it before I sent it. Yeah, they have an advanced copy of everything you write. So it was like living in a fishbowl. I was being examined all the time. And how did you work with editors in New York? They're so far away. It's a 12-hour time difference.

And it's easy to remember because it's the exact opposite. If it's 6 p.m. in Beijing and I'm finished for the day and sending my story, then it's 6 a.m. in New York. My editors are not yet at work. And in those days, you paid for telegrams by the word. So they were always asking us, don't write too much in some ways. Save money. But we were able to communicate. And at some point there, I was able to make phone calls, Trans-Pacific phone calls. But you had to...

At that time you had to book a call in advance. You had to reserve the call before you made it. So you couldn't just pick up the phone and dial New York. And what kind of stories were you looking for, looking to report? And did the editors have an idea of what they wanted you to write about? In my own mind, there was a division between news stories, if there was something political that China was going on or something between the United States and China. I had to write about

those sort of more traditional news stories and developments, or if they were releasing an economic report about production or some kind of commercial agreement that these Pan American airlines had been given permission to now make flights to China, things like that. But the stories that I was really more interested personally were the stories about daily life, what life was like for Chinese and how the Chinese society really worked at that time, which is reflected in the book. Those kinds of things is what I was looking for.

Just before I got allowed into China, I had signed a contract to write a book about China. And I knew it was competitive because the Washington Post correspondent and the LA Times correspondent had also signed a contract to write a book. So the kinds of stories that I thought would go into a book were, I was particularly interested. Almost always there were things that I had written about for the daily paper well before. I was able to write in more detail in the book because the news story you're writing six or seven hundred words.

Actually, how did you write a book while also writing all those? Oh, I didn't write the book. I wrote the book after I left Beijing. I couldn't write the book there. It was impossible. There was no time. Yeah, because you were writing like two pieces each week and chasing the beat all the time. When I left China, I actually came back to the United States. I came back to Boston and I bought a house in a suburb and I had an office in the basement and I sat there from early in the morning till late at night

I could not do that while I was in China. I was coming up with ideas and material, but nothing that's written in the book was written until I got back to the US. It was a very busy job in Beijing to do the daily reporting. What's your drill? What's a typical day like for you? Every day is a little bit different. Sometimes I would just go out on the street and walk. Sometimes I would go to restaurants. I'd go into stores.

Some of the best things for me, it was unexpected, whether on a train. And train travel was the really best way to get around China at that time. There were not that many airplane flights. So if you got on a train, people would often would sit down next to you and I would start talking to them. And I knew for them it was taking a risk.

And some of the people I was able to talk to had actually gone to the United States as students and learned good English and were comfortable with Americans but hadn't talked to an American in 25 or 30 years. And they were, in some ways, they were very happy to talk. But they knew they were taking a risk. They had things they wanted to say. They wanted to talk about what had happened since the communists took over. There was a story in your book where there was a woman who wanted to talk to you not too far from Peking Hotel.

I think it was late night at night and then got pulled away by the police and they just said they're not allowed to talk to foreigners at night. Yeah, those things happened, you know. And I was very happy that when people would talk to me, I would always worry about what was going to happen to them. And I did hear back later that some people were picked up by the police and got demotions. I don't remember the details now. One senior person that I met was Sun Yat-sen's widow.

and she had a very, almost a palace for a house. And she was very hospitable to me, and I was able to meet other people in her family. And I met a number of men or women whose fathers were generals in the People's Liberation Army, and they were willing to talk to me, but I didn't meet their parents. To what extent members of the party or the People's Liberation Army learned about the United States from their children who had contact with foreigners?

because it would have been too dangerous to them or too damaging to them to have those contacts themselves. Probably some of them did. Then later on the children would get jobs, not at my time, but later on they got jobs with American companies and they could make some money out of it. They could come to the United States and be trained in whatever it was. That hadn't yet happened. Those kinds of deals were a few years away. A question that I have that I don't know the answer to is, after I left,

1981 what the changes that China has gone through since then. I went back eight years later in the late 80s, 89 after the killings in Tiananmen Square. Business, American business, foreign business was already there. But how that's shaped the lives of party leaders, I have no idea. Maybe they've forgotten about me. No, I just, it really was based on the difficulties I had even then and being told I was very fanhua. And in the book,

It was like, the book was, to use the book metaphor, it was like closing a chapter. China was a chapter and I said, "Go on and do something else." And then after I met Elizabeth and was moved to New York to pursue her and then we got married, the New York Times found other things for me to do. So some editors at the New York Times had this bright idea for me to go and interview a young black man who was in prison for murdering a series of people.

So I went and wrote a story which ended up on the front page of the New York Times again. And he invited me to come and see him again. So I ended up writing a book about him. And that book may also be made into a movie. Or at least it's going to be a podcast or series of podcasts. The iHeartMedia is making it into a podcast. This will be All God's Children?

So I got interested in crime, which was a very big issue in the United States at that time. And how did you feel about that transition out of China and back into the US and reporting on crime, reporting on Boston? It's not the conventional path. No. What would be the conventional? I would have written about crime first and then gone to China, but I wouldn't have had my Chinese studies background. The more traditional career track for a foreign correspondent in the United States is

You've done a great job in Washington. You've learned about foreign policy, and then you go overseas somewhere. Or some of the old China hands had been in China for years, decades. They probably started out in the older ones that I knew. It started out in the mainland somewhere and ended up in Hong Kong. So I don't know today what the tradition is. I don't know if there is a tradition anymore. So the current executive editor of the New York Times, Joe Kahn,

He had been the Beijing correspondent and he came back from that and became executive editor. So that was a, that's a more conventional path. Was that a path open to you back then ever? They did, at one point I was offered a job as an editor, but I just didn't think I wasn't an editor. I didn't see myself as an editor. I liked reporting and I liked writing.

I just thought those were my skills. And John Fairbank is on the cover. Yes. Despite his effort to try to pull you into academia, he still ruled the vote. Yes, he gave up then. So he had known some of the earlier Chinese journalists like Teddy White, Theodore White. He was the great American journalist during World War II and right after World War II. Theodore White went on to really eminent career as a writer.

He wrote the series of book called "The Making of the President." I think it started with Kennedy. But he became one of the top American journalists, but he started his career in China. So he was a correspondent for Time Magazine, when Time Magazine was a very dominant magazine. That was before television. Did you ever go back to China? Only in 1989 I went back. Not ever since? Not since. Why not? Even just as a tourist? It's something possible. But I've been more interested in Vietnam as an ongoing issue. In fact,

A lot of the correspondents who are the American correspondents from Vietnam, they created this online Google group. They call it the Vietnam Old Hacks. Yeah, I think you mentioned it. There used to be about 150 of us. Now it's probably down to 50, but it's because of age and death.

But there must have been half a dozen messages this morning from them. But I think that's an interesting transition as well, because for the past 30 years, China has been rising, developing, opening. It became interesting to people, but actually became less interesting to you.

It was like, I can't explain it other than to say I felt that it was going to be very awkward for me to go back and try to be a journalist there. It would be very difficult and I had seen it at a certain time and I went back once and I was just moving on to something different. It wasn't that I didn't like China anymore, I was very interested in China.

If I see somebody on the street who's speaking Chinese, I start talking to them in Portland. Or if I get on an airplane flying across the country and I happen to be seated next to somebody who I can tell is Chinese, I speak Chinese to them. So that's fun. But no, I just was moving on to other things that were challenging to my mind. And the crime story is still around. The United States has a terrible problem with crime. And it's mixed up with class issues and racial issues and regional issues.

So when you were asked to go back to China in 1989, do you remember the time then? Did you stay on top of news about democracy in China, Tiananmen? Where were you on June 4th? Oh, I don't think I was there when that happened. I got there right after that, and the New York Times asked me to go because of Tiananmen. And it wasn't clear at first if I would be able to get in, but I did get in. I felt

just on my own thinking was that I may have gotten in because they were busy doing other things. The government had other bigger problems to worry about. So I guess that trip didn't convince you to go back to China for the most extended period?

No, but at that time I was in New York with Elizabeth. I don't remember precisely when we got married. Honestly, I don't remember the date, but we were about to get married or just got married. So it didn't make much sense personally. And she had no interest in going to China at that point. It would have been crazy. And I had...

two children in school. It personally didn't make much sense. Yeah, it's a very different situation from when you were much younger and going to Vietnam and Taiwan and Hong Kong. My children were going into probably one in high school, one in junior high school. How did your interest evolve over the years on China? That's a tough one. That's so long ago. First started with the Fairbanks introductory course and then I took the more advanced graduate course in modern Chinese history.

And that's when he told me that I had to start studying Chinese. And I went to Yale for summer school. I came back in the fall of my junior year and asked for the Chinese language tapes. And the woman said, Chinese is a dead language, which reflected a very widespread view at the time. Not a very visionary view. It was just a very limited view of it.

The Chinese is this old classical language. Nobody speaks that language. Imagine if you listened to her. What would have happened to your life, you think? I wouldn't have done what I did. What would you have done? I don't know. I wouldn't have learned Chinese as well. It's laughable now to hear that. At the time, I was angry and I thought it was ridiculous. Most Americans just didn't know anything about China. It's hard to exaggerate that.

I mean, most Americans, if they thought of anything, they thought Chinese was a food. And did you ever talk to the presidents of the U.S.? About? About China or just meet them? I think I basically just met them. You probably have met everyone. Kennedy. Kennedy, I saw once because of the Harvard connection. He came and visited Harvard just before, just after he was elected president. But I don't know him. I met Harry Truman, I think I mentioned to you. Yeah. Through my grandfather. Yeah.

Let's see. Eisenhower, certainly not. Nixon, I never met. Carter. Carter, I met, but I think something in the White House because of China. I think I shook hands with him, but more than that. And I think another reason that the Chinese wanted to go to Atlanta was because of Jimmy Carter. It's his home state. It's his home state. I'd forgotten about that part. The first president I really got to know was Barack Obama. Did I mention that yesterday? No.

After I came back from China, I asked the New York Times to let me live at home in Boston for a while because I'd been in Asia for so long and I wanted to settle down and start raising a family there. The two kids came back from China. My wife at that time was also from Boston, so they gave me the Boston Bureau and I was there for quite a while. And one day I was in Harvard Square in Cambridge. I don't remember why I was there, but I was walking past...

one of the newsstands in Harvard Square on Massachusetts Avenue, and I saw the Harvard Crimson, and there was a story on the front page. It had a picture of a black man, and it said, "First African American elected president of the Harvard Law Review," which is the very prestigious publication put out by the students at the Harvard Law School. And its name was Barack Hussein Obama.

I called my editor in New York and I said, "I think there's a story here for us." And I explained what it was and they said, "Go see him." I called and he invited me to come over and see him in his apartment in Cambridge. And I wrote a story and it was on the front page of the New York Times the next day. On the front page of the New York Times with his photo. And that was the first time he'd been in a national publication. He was very charming. Very smart and very charming. You could tell he was going to be a winner. He was just that good.

I didn't know he'd become president, but he had the potential. I think I said to my wife, "I've seen a guy who's going to be the first black president." He was just that good. It didn't take long for anybody to see that. He was really smart, really nice. Did you stay in touch with him? Somewhat. Not close, touching. I wouldn't pretend that. But over the course of time, he sent me a couple of letters, "Thank you." He's very nice. Let's see. Clinton. Clinton, I've met him, but that's about it. I wouldn't pretend anything more. Bush.

The original George Bush I did meet. Did I tell you that I saw Ronald Reagan in Saigon? Ronald Reagan, while he was governor of California, Republican governor, somebody sent him on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam, which is what American presidents did in those days if they didn't want to do anything about the war. They just would send out fact-finding missions, which was a way of looking like they did something, but usually didn't do anything. So he came back.

He said he was going to spend a day in Saigon, so he flew in on a presidential plane. He landed at Tan Son Nhat Airport in Saigon. His motorcade drove him into the American embassy. He spent an hour with the U.S. ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, and then he probably spent 10 or 15 minutes with President Thieu in the South Vietnamese presidential palace. And then he held a news conference. So he'd been in Saigon less than two hours.

And he held the news conference in the garden outside the hotel where I first stayed when I was in Saigon, which was a block away from the New York Times office. So I went to the news conference, and I'll never forget his opening line. He said, as I choppered over Saigon today, I never saw it looking so good. I never saw it looking so good. That was the first time ever that he'd been in Saigon. And then that was it.

No questions. But talk about, he was clearly Alzheimer's, senile, whatever it was. As bad as Joe Biden was, Reagan was much, much farther gone. So I reported that to the New York Times and they wrote a story about it. Governor Reagan on his fact-finding mission today said, I never saw a guy looking so good.

I can't remember what year, you could look it up, but it was before he was president. Yes, he was still governor of California, but he was mentally gone. Probably '84 was when he became president. So 10 years before. The correspondents, we all looked at each other and went, that was just strange. I didn't claim to know Reagan, I just saw him in that time. It was really telling. So let's see, who do we got after that? So George, so yes, we were talking about George Bush.

Bush Sr. was the liaison officer in Beijing. He was. So I met him at some point during that period. He gave me an interview and we talked about China because he'd read my stuff in the New York Times and talked about China. And then he brings us to Joe and Donald. Yes, yeah. Joe, I mean, I met him that odd time on a trip into China. I thought he was already having mental issues. In his case, he's just...

He just was not the smartest person in the room. How do I say this? Back then? Yeah. I think I told you about the incident where he would keep reaching over and grabbing Chinese by the hand. And he always grabbed him by the hand. Give him a big grin and grab him by the hand. And I told him a number of times, please don't do that. And he was, I would try to explain something about China to him and he couldn't remember. I was surprised at the time. Did you ever meet Trump? I spent a lot of time with Trump. Oh, really?

A lot of time. When I first met Elizabeth and I was living in Boston and she at that time she was based in New York, she covered the book publishing business. That was her beat at the LA Times. And she wasn't going to move to Boston and if I was trying to pursue her I realized that I had to move to New York or try to get to New York as often as I could. So I asked the New York Times could they please find something for me to do in New York. They said okay you can come and we'll give you some assignments.

And one of the first assignments they gave me was to go out and spend some time with this guy Donald Trump, who had been a Democrat as his father had been a Democrat. But he decided he would become a Republican so he could try to become president. This would be in the 80s, wouldn't it? This was 1986, 87. He wanted to enter the New Hampshire presidential primary.

He didn't know anything about American politics. He'd been a pretty successful businessman. I mean, he inherited his fortune from his father. Apartments in Queens and Bronx in New York, not in Manhattan. But he had just built Trump Tower in Manhattan. He decided the next step for him would be to go become president. He had no political background at all. So he suggested to the New York Times that he'd be willing to give them an interview about how he was gonna become president.

So the New York Times assigned me to go meet Donald Trump. God bless you. I went and I wrote a story about him and the New York Times said that Donald Trump decided to become a Republican and he wanted to enter the New Hampshire presidential primary and here's what he would bring to that. And it was really straight down the middle. It didn't predict he was going to become president and it quoted some things he said which were not totally off the charts, off the wall, but he was claiming things that nobody could prove.

But he loved the story and he called me up and he said, "Fox, that's a great story." He said, "I want to invite you to a party. We're having the grand opening of Trump Tower. And can you come?" And I said, "Could I bring my girlfriend?" He said, "Sure, bring your girlfriend." And Elizabeth was very blonde, very pretty. So he liked her and we went to the grand opening of Trump Tower and I had to rent a tuxedo to do that. And then he said, "I'm going to fly up to New Hampshire."

So he said, "Can you get the New York Times to let you fly to New Hampshire with me?" So I asked the New York Times, they said yes. So we flew up in his private jet to New Hampshire and we spent a week traveling around New Hampshire. We as in? Trump and me. Just the two of you? The one place I remember is we went, first got there, we went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. New Hampshire is basically a rural state, but Portsmouth is one of the small cities. And we went into a diner

And Trump went up to introduce himself to the people in the diner. And he said, what I remember is he said to me afterwards, he said, Fox, isn't this amazing? All these people came out just to see me, Donald Trump. I said, oh, yeah. Oh, he stayed consistent over the years. That was 1987. So then he said he was going to fly down to his winter home in Mar-a-Lago. Could I come with him?

So I flew down to Mar-a-Lago and spent four or five days with him in Mar-a-Lago, which he had just acquired and was in the process of fixing up. I spent, I don't know, several weeks with him altogether. I wrote two stories, and he liked them both. After those first few weeks, and I wrote the two stories, the New York Times said, okay, they had something else for me to do. But he would call and say, Fox, you've got to come around and see me. We've got more stories to do. I said, my editors don't want me to do that.

And sometimes he would call and I wouldn't be there, so he talked to Elizabeth. And she said, "Fox, this guy Trump keeps calling you." It was just, it was a funny connection, our relationship. Did you stay in touch with him? No, but he periodically, every few months, would call for several years. We had, in Chinese terms, we had some guanxi of some kind. I liked him, but he was very ambitious and rather egotistic, would that be a fair term? Did you know his family at all? I met some of the family.

He introduced me to the sons. I don't remember in detail. I did go around to several more of his parties at Trump Tower until Elizabeth told me, you've just got to stop talking to this guy. Tell him, stop calling. This was before we saw what we're now seeing. It never occurred to me that he really would become president. You made the guess on Obama, right? Yes, that was a guess.

Did you get into touch? Were you guys in touch when he was in office? Trump? Yeah. Oh, no. Elizabeth said I cannot have any more contact with him. And for Obama? No. Don't pretend that. But yes, Trump, strangely, I did have his contact with. So another senior person that I did have some contact with was John Kerry. Because when we lived in Boston, my kids went to the same school.

kindergarten and elementary school as John Kerry's kids. So we carpool sometimes, but that's just as far as it goes. The one American diplomat that I knew was the American ambassador to Saigon, Ellsworth Bunker, who for a long time was the ambassador to Saigon. His top aide was my best friend in Saigon, who was in the State Department, Charles or Charlie Hill, who also came out of Chinese studies.

He's long since dead. He spent a year at Harvard at the East Asian Research Center, and then he was in the American consulate in Hong Kong before the United States and China normalized relations. Then after that, he was sent to Saigon, and he became Bunker's top aide. And Bunker introduced him to Henry Kissinger, and he ended up becoming Kissinger's top aide. And he did a lot of the negotiating. But then a few years ago, he had cancer, and he died in a

few months. Did you know Kissinger? I met Kissinger at Harvard. I took his class and I met Kissinger again through Charlie Hill, but I wouldn't claim any personal connection. Just people who know. That's another Harvard-China connection. Yeah. A significant one. Yeah. Charlie Hill later Kissinger's career wrote most of his talks, wrote his position papers.

Charlie was a very good writer, draftsman. Charlie was somebody when I was in Saigon we would talk almost every day or meet every day because we shared a lot of the same vocabulary, a lot of the same thoughts. And he'd also been in Chinese studies before I was in the State Department. He went to Brown.

This is the end of our podcast today. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. And if you like what you just heard, do subscribe to our podcast and sub stack. I've put the links in the show notes. And we also have an Instagram account, so feel free to check it out. And with that, talk to you next time.