After Lin Biao's death, Mao's health took a turn for the worse. He had never fully recovered from pneumonia in November 1970, when I was called back from Heilongjiang to treat him. But his physical decline after the Lin Biao affair was dramatic. When the immediate crisis was over, the arrests had been made, and Mao knew he was safe, he became depressed. He took to his bed and lay there all day, saying and doing little. When he did get up, he seemed to have aged. His shoulders stooped, and he moved slowly. He walked with a shuffle. He could not sleep.

His blood pressure, normally 130 over 80, shot up to 180 over 100. His lower legs and feet swelled, especially at the ankles. He developed a chronic cold and cough and began spitting up heavy amounts of phlegm. His lungs were badly congested. None of the tests I ran indicated pathogenic bacteria, including the infection in his lungs. This was a sign of declining resistance. His heart was slightly enlarged and his heartbeat was irregular.

I urged him to have a thorough physical, with a chest X ray and an electrocardiogram. But Mao resisted. I suggested he take ginseng, the traditional Chinese tonic that he had often taken in the past. But Mao said he did not believe in traditional Chinese medicine. I warned him that if we did not control his recurrent lung infections, he risked heart failure. I wanted to give him a series of antibiotic injections. But he did not want shots. He would take pills. But when he felt better after taking the pills for a few days, he would stop, and no encouragement or explanation of mine could convince him to resume. The pattern kept repeating.

On November 20, 1971, little more than two months after Lin Biao's death, when the affair was still officially secret, people were shocked to see the television broadcast of Mao's meeting with the North Vietnamese premier, Pham Van Dong, in Mao's haven in the Great Hall of the People. As Mao escorted the North Vietnamese premier to the door, the cameras revealed Mao's shuffling walk. His legs, people said, looked like wobbly wooden sticks.

As always when adversity sent him to bed, Mao was thinking through a new political strategy. The party had been decimated since he launched the Cultural Revolution in the spring of 1966, more than five years before, and many high-ranking officials were dead. Others were in exile. Many who had been purged had been accused of disloyalty to Mao. But no one had been as disloyal as Mao's closest comrade in arms, and many of the leaders Mao had purged had warned him against Lin Biao, arguing that he was unfit for leadership. They had opposed the hyberbole of Lin's cult of personality, his simplistic insistence on men over machines, his opposition to modernization, his inane mouthing of slogans.

After lying in bed for nearly two months, Mao was ready for a reconciliation. He wanted the men he had purged to return.