The Empire Strikes Back
on February 1, 1990
“President Bush still regards you as his friend, a friend forever,” Brent Scowcroft told Deng Xiaoping in Beijing on December 10, six months and seven days after Deng ordered the People’s Liberation Army into Tiananmen Square. In Washington, the White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater was giving a lesson in Realpolitik: “We hope that we have reached the point where time heals all wounds, and that once the public gets used to more normalized contacts it won’t be focused on the past.”