Nixon aide's diary reveals details of China diplomacy

Newly declassified segments from the diary of former US president Richard Nixon's chief-of-staff provide a detailed, subtle portrait of the disgraced president.

H.R. Haldeman recounts moments of high-stakes diplomacy and unscripted daily life that would never make it into a White House memo or official document.

More than 40 years after Haldeman made his last audio diary recording, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum released 285 segments on Thursday from entries spanning a period from 1970 to 1973. At the time, Nixon was engaged in delicate diplomacy that would lead to treaties limiting nuclear arms and establishing diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China.

The segments include a reference to top-secret intelligence briefings the Nixon administration provided to China, and reveal Nixon's private musings as he wrangled with the then-Soviet Union over limiting nuclear weapons.

Mixed in among the accounts of top-level diplomacy, however, are revealing nuggets of daily life: Haldeman surprising Nixon as he smoked a Russian cigarette after long negotiations with Soviet leaders, for example, and Nixon's team struggling to stay sober at a Chinese banquet as they felt obliged to drink toast after toast with top officials.

Much of Haldeman's account of Nixon's February 1972 trip to China was made public earlier. But the declassified segments show the tension that was building between then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger and the secretary of state, Williams Rogers, as they tried to draft a communique about Taiwan.

Kissinger set the stage for Nixon's groundbreaking China trip with secret diplomatic meetings, while Rogers was essentially cut out.

As talks on Taiwan drew to a close, Rogers insisted on changes to the communique that almost derailed the entire process, the declassified entries show.

Later, Haldeman alludes to a top-secret intelligence briefing to a top Chinese military official concerning the threat to China from Soviet forces along the Sino-Soviet border.

In his diary, Haldeman mentions them almost in passing before moving on to a description of his visit to the Forbidden City.

The Chinese defense official "at dinner last night expressed enormous gratitude for the briefing we gave him on intelligence and so on, and that he had reported that to Chairman Mao, who was also very impressed", Haldeman said in the Feb 25, 1972, entry. "He said no one had ever dealt with them in such a straightforward fashion before and that they deeply appreciated it."