210: Tea, Drugs, and Jesus - Only Nixon Can Go to China
When Chinese "volunteers" intervened in the Korean War in 1950, American relations with the People's Republic of China fell into an icy abyss from which they did not emerge until President Richard Nixon made his momentous decision to transform world politics by visiting Beijing in 1972. In the United States, the "loss" of China to what Americans thought of as monolithic "world communism" led during the intervening two decades to the "Red Scare," the "Lavender Scare," blacklisting, and growing U.S. involvement in conflict in Southeast Asia — all while American policymakers ignored, fired, and even ruined the reputations and careers of experts who tried to give them advice on the realities of China, Vietnam, communism, and international relations during the Cold War.