17 and traveling to Hawaii, Guam, then Shanghai, Air Force One landed in Beijing (then still pronounced Peking), and was greeted by China’s premier Zhou Enlai.
Fluent in several languages, he was tapped to be the principal American interpreter for Nixon. At the time he was a foreign service officer working for the U.S. As veteran journalist Dan Rather later put it, it was a bit "like leaving earth and going deep into the cosmos to some distant planet." Most Americans - including the press - hadn’t a clue of what China was actually like beyond the politically-driven, exaggerated Hollywood caricatures of the Chinese people. The reason was clear: the country had been fighting a war against communism in Indochina for the last seven years and this would be the first time in more than two decades that the United States would be engaging the Chinese Communist Party publicly, and in China. The tension and curiosity was palpable here in America when President Richard Nixon touched down in China with an entourage of government officials and press on February 21, 1972.
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