FEBRUARY 1972 President Richard Nixon Visits China Even before he was elected president in 1968, Richard Nixon considered re-establishing American relations with mainland China, suspended since the communist revolution of 1949. Conservative by nature, Nixon envisioned the People’s Republic of China as a useful counter-weight to the Soviet Union in the Cold War and a means of increasing pressure on Hanoi to make peace in Vietnam. As president, after a series of secret contacts and to the surprise of both the American public and communist leaders in the Soviet Union, he accepted an invitation to visit Beijing in February 1972. At the conclusion of his stay the two governments issued the Shanghai Communiqué, pledging to work toward full normalization and committing the United States to remove its forces from the island of Taiwan at the end of the war in Southeast Asia. In succeeding years, Nixon’s “triangular diplomacy” (involving Moscow, Beijing, and Washington) did not serve American purposes in Vietnam as much as he had hoped, but it worked to the advantage of the United States in relations with the Soviet Union. SEE FIGURE 58 JUNE 1972 California State College, Fullerton Becomes a University Following World War II, partly as the result of the G.I. Bill, which provided federal funds for training and education, young people began flooding into American colleges and universities. These growing numbers, fortified by the general increase in population, ultimately led California to formulate its highly influential Master Plan for Higher Education, approved in 1960. Orange County benefited from this Master Plan by becoming the home of both a State University and a University of California campus. A few
years earlier, in 1957, the campus in Fullerton had been founded as California’s twelfth State College and had opened in September 1959 as Orange County State College. In 1972, when the State College system was designated as The California State University and Colleges, it was renamed California State University, Fullerton. By its 50th anniversary in 2007, Fullerton had the highest enrollment of any California State University campus. SEE FIGURE 59 1972–1973 Détente Achieved with Soviet Union One of the ironic side-effects of the Vietnam War was a decline in popular support in the United States for an actively anti-communist foreign policy. Other factors were involved in alleviating the East-West struggle, including growing parity in missiles, the break-up of alliances, and increasing economic difficulties in America and the Soviet Union. Yet it was primarily the unacceptable costs of the Vietnam conflict that afforded the superpowers a chance to reduce the scope of the Cold War. President Nixon took advantage of this opportunity and achieved specific tension-reducing understandings with Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership. Meeting in Moscow in May 1972, the two statesmen agreed to an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty, Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT), commercial arrangements, and a Declaration of Principles to guide their relationship. The next two years saw the high tide of “détente” (relaxation), as Nixon and Brezhnev held two more summit conferences and tried to meet each other’s immediate needs without conceding victory in a competition each thought his side would win. SEE FIGURE 60
Figure 58. (Top) President Nixon shakes hands with Premier Chou En-lai after seventeen years of Sino-American tension. Image courtesy of White House photo from Nixon Presidential Materials Staff. Figure 60. President Richard M. Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev sail the Potomac aboard the Presidential yacht Sequoia. Image courtesy of Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library.
Figure 59. California State University, Fullerton leads the State University system in total enrollment. Image courtesy of California State University, Fullerton.
45
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator