Just Like Old Times, Except. . . : Richard Nixon: He can go to China as envoy <i> extraordinaire, </i> but the world today is less amenable to his grand diplomacy.

“You’re crazy. No one goes to China.”

It was the spring of 1934, and young Dick Nixon was earnestly warning a fellow graduate at Whittier College against accepting a fellowship at a Chinese university. It was much too risky, he told Osmyn Stout. “Don’t get in trouble with all those militarists.”

Last week, more than a half century later, there was Richard Nixon himself back in China, taking the political and public-relations risk of talking to a Communist leadership that so recently and so brutally crushed popular demonstrations for democracy.

For Nixon at least, the visit was a small replica of his diplomatic master stroke 17 years ago, when in a sense he gambled his own presidency on a trip to China and began the opening that would change the face of world politics. It was also an escape, a redemption of sorts. The week that began with an actor re-creating on ABC television the hunched shoulders and rambling dialogue of that tragic twilight of the Nixon White House, the death throes of Watergate, ended with news photos of a real-life, smiling Nixon working a crowd in downtown Beijing.

He informed the Chinese leaders “in unminced fashion,” said an aide, that they had better ease the crackdown. In 20 hours of talk, we are told, the 76-year-old former President ranged over the turbulent horizon of international affairs--the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Indochina, the world economy. Nixon the grand strategist, the blunt but skillful diplomat, just like old times.

China has always been a strange, twisting thread in Richard Nixon’s remarkable life. He grew up in a California where anti-Orientalism was virulent, where local politicians pandered to prejudice no less than in the Deep South, where conditions were so awful at one point that Chinese families traveled to Los Angeles to disinter their dead from the basin’s ground.

He would find no Chinese history, no real view of Asian or the non-European world, in the narrow, parochial curriculum of 1930s’ Whittier High or College. But on occasion when speakers would visit the campus to talk about the momentous current events of the era--China’s civil strife and Japanese aggression, the crucible from which Communist China would eventually emerge--Nixon paid attention. “We’d let it pass off,” one of his college friends said of those talks. “Nixon listened.”

Later, China would exert a fateful, often hidden force in Nixon’s political rise. Alfred Kohlberg, a millionaire thanks to Chinese textile sweatshops, was an early backer and crucial nexus in the Alger Hiss case. The China lobby of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was instrumental in Nixon’s election to the Senate in 1950. Even through his years in the political wilderness, after his defeat for the California governorship in 1962, there were recurring stories of his fascination with China and of an involvement with a beautiful Eurasian woman from Hong Kong.

He would begin planning his diplomatic China Card in the mid-1960s, long before he announced his return to politics. And, with rich irony, it would be Anna Chennault, an element of the old China lobby, who played a crucial role behind the scenes in his presidential election of 1968. For those who knew the history and his secret ambition, the startling visit to the Chinese Communists and seeming betrayal of his old Nationalist patrons came as no real surprise. “The Chinese are a great and vital people who should not remain isolated from the international community,” he wrote to the staff of the National Security Council in 1970, more than two years before he went to Beijing.

Yet there was always something more here than China itself. Instinctively, temperamentally, Nixon vastly preferred the symmetry, the neatness and conclusiveness, of secret diplomacy. Especially with tyrants, with men who could make things stick, it was all far preferable to the heated, chaotic byplay of American domestic politics. No messy congeries of interests to accommodate, no leaks to the press to spoil the drama, no anarchy of popular pressure. Like his office and home, the starched white shirts his mother ironed and the presidential cuff links he always wore, this was an orderly universe.

There was a sense about the Nixon who came to the White House in 1969 that he was somehow in the wrong office, that he had so studied and relished foreign policy that he was preparing all those years not to be President, but rather a great secretary of state, a foreign minister absorbed in his beloved initiatives with none of the fears and flailings of a political existence he half despised.

Alas, it was--and is--not to be. In February, 1972, he first went to China in the shadow of sagging popularity polls and uncertainty at home. Three months later he was in Moscow for another bold stroke, but the “plumbers” had already made their first try at the Watergate.

Now, as Nixon makes his reappearance as envoy extraordinary, the world is less than ever amenable to his quiet, controlling talks. The young men of the intifada, the peasants of the Brazilian rain forest, the striking workers of Poland and the Soviet Union, and, yes, the brave students of Tian An Men Square--they and so many others are taking decisions out of the chancellories. While Beijing and a few other capitals are the last holdouts against democracy, their days are clearly numbered.

Richard Nixon’s grand diplomacy of 1972 may account for his enduring stature as politician and President, but it is not a feat anyone, not even the master himself, is going to repeat.