George I: American internationalist

LOS ANGELES — We in the West are always extremely grateful and utterly relieved when our neighbors in East Asia manage to take significant steps away from the risk of serious conflict in their region.

The relative prudence of East Asia — when its nation-states are at their diplomatic best — allows us to concentrate on the pursuit of our own current follies without having to subsidize or defend anyone else's.

And so we proffer our immense gratitude and congratulations to the savvy folks in Beijing and Taipei who are mending cross-strait ways with some old-fashioned straight-talk about their relationship. This week alone, after just the first official meeting between Beijing and Taipei in years — and following on the heels of the recent landslide election of a sensibly less anti-mainland government in Taiwan — the two sides put into motion measures to rev up air flights between them and to increase tourism and trade.

We like this a lot. We especially like the air deal that looks to eat away at decades-old restrictions on direct cross-strait flights. Pedestrian as it may seem, flying directly across the Taiwan Strait between the two capitals is the more sensible way to go. Pedestrian and sensible seem like the best words to describe emerging China-Taiwan relations. They also are the best words to describe a new book about China that probably won't get the attention it deserves.

The book is "The China Diary of George H.W. Bush," and the diarist is in fact someone who also hasn't gotten quite the attention he deserves: George H.W. Bush, the one-term U.S. president preceding the noisy two terms of Bill Clinton, now known as "Bill the Bully," as well as the non-illustrious two terms of his son, George W. Bush, increasingly known as "Bush the Lesser."

Just published by Princeton University Press, "China Diary" is balanced, prescient and helpful. During the one year (October 1974 to December 1975) that George H. W. Bush served as the chief U.S. representative in Beijing, the future president thoughtfully scribbled down little jottings of his experiences and worries about the all-important U.S.-China relationship. The jottings have now been strung together into a coherent diary and with deft commentaries by Jeffrey A. Engel, an up-and-coming assistant professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Policy in Texas.

The result is a quite readable, most likable and oft-illuminating set of yearlong musings about China and the U.S., about international diplomacy and personal diplomacy and about the hated Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state.

Kissinger's egomaniacal, paranoid style of foreign-policy management is not so much roasted as ironically toasted, damned with faint praise more often than raked over the coals. Frankly, it's often fun to read.

Bush the Smarter, between his stint in Beijing and in New York as United Nations ambassador, emerges as the true American internationalist. He supports the need for international institutions, careful multinational consensus-building and endless reaching-out personal diplomacy. Rather than relying on Kissinger's secretive and Machiavellian approach, his preferred philosophy is more that of his mother's, which he describes this way:

"Be kind. Don't be a big shot. Listen, don't talk. Reach out to people. [It] doesn't have to do anything with diplomacy; it has to do with life. Treat people with respect and recognize in diplomatic terms that the sovereignty [of the tinniest state] is as important to them as sovereignty is [to us]. Slightly different scale, I might add. But nevertheless this is just a value thing. This isn't any great diplomatic study from the Fletcher School or something. This is just the way you react to things."

At the end of the successful Gulf War, Bush the Brighter got relentless pressure from high echelons of the British ruling class to invade Baghdad and behead Saddam Hussein. But one of America's best foreign-policy presidents ever refused the bait. "China Diary" offers a sense of why this man was not for blundering. It turns out he learned a whole lot from the Chinese and from fellow diplomats at the U.N. But it may be that he learned the best lessons from his mother. May she rest in peace.

UCLA professor and career journalist Tom Plate personally interviewed George H.W. Bush privately only once, when he was vice president, but he liked him a whole lot.