Asian persuasion: Bush would never have gone to China, but Nixon would surely be talking to Iran.

• Author: Frank, T.A.
• Position: Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World - The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression - Book review

Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World By Margaret MacMillan Random House, 432 pp.

The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression By James Mann Viking, 144 PP.

These days, reading a book about a former president--any former president--can be painful. One is reminded that the Oval Office, historically, has been restricted to occupants with the capacity for something resembling thought. Now that our current chief executive has broken this barrier, it's a time of reassessments, and even Richard Nixon has begun to look very, very good. An entertaining new book, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, by the Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, only heightens the effect. MacMillan is best known as the author of Paris 1919, a lively account of the six months spent hammering out what would become the Treaty of Versailles, and in Nixon and Mao she takes a similarly spirited approach to a shorter interval: Nixon's trip to the People's Republic of China in 1972, when ties between China and the United States were reopened. It's a well-timed commemoration of what diplomacy, done right, can achieve.

Nixon may have spent most of his presidency at the helm of an unpopular war, but his main interest was in peace (if rarely of a sentimental sort). This meant operating quietly and eschewing brinksmanship. Typical was the opening of a Time magazine article from April 1969: "It was a week of intensive diplomatic activity on a variety of fronts for the Nixon Administration. And in encounter after encounter, the motif was conciliation." (The article went on to note that Nixon had defused a crisis with Peru over a seizure of U.S. oil companies, discussed with NATO allies the idea of a detente with the Warsaw Pact bloc, and received an endorsement from the king of Jordan for pursuing a policy in the Middle East that was "even-handed.") Indeed, one Nixonian contradiction among myriads was that a man so famously inept in everyday social interactions could nevertheless oversee such polished diplomacy.

The results were more than just talk. In 1969, Nixon initiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that would result in the SALT treaties. In 1972, he became the first sitting U.S. president to pay an official visit to Moscow, where, from behind an ornate rococo table at the Kremlin, he delivered a nationally televised speech to Soviet viewers about turning "our countries away from a wasteful and dangerous arms race and towards more production for...