Читать книгу CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir - Nicholas MD Platt - Страница 26

We sang for our supper to touring media moguls like Katharine Graham and Osborn Elliott, and megapundits like Joseph Alsop, who passed regularly through Hong Kong on the way to Vietnam, where the war was heating up. Joe had strong, often wrong, views on everything, including what was happening in China. I discovered that the only way to change his thinking was to reverse the normal procedure and interview him. I would ask him questions and add my own data to his answers, which often showed up in the stuff of his articles. The relationships we formed with such figures turned out to be important during later assignments in Washington.

Visiting congressmen, also on their way to and from Vietnam, were a plague. They came to shop, hundreds of them each year, and had little real interest in China per se, though we briefed them all. One exception was the tyrannical Armed Services Committee chairman, Mendel Rivers, who was deathly afraid he would be kidnapped in Hong Kong and spirited across the border into Red China. We assured him and his staff that this was totally unlikely, but to no avail. He demanded special security measures.

As his “control officer,” the official assigned to meet, greet, and manage each congressional delegation, I was also responsible for Rivers’s peace of mind. The British authorities would have laughed me away if I had approached them for a special police detail. The manager of the Hilton Hotel, an inventive Australian, solved the problem by stationing all the uniformed Pinkerton guards in the hotel, twenty in all, on Rivers’s floor for the first two hours of his stay. When the elevator door opened upon his arrival, a long line of tall Chinese from Shantung province (where the British traditionally recruited their police) in full uniform with side arms holstered, snapped to attention. Rivers’s shoulders sagged in relief.