Video: 'President Nixon Announces Trip to China'

(Thursday, July 15, 1971, 7:30 p.m. PDT) — U.S. President Richard Nixon shocked the world by announcing on live television tonight from Burbank, California, that he had accepted an invitation to become the first U.S. president to visit the People’s Republic of China, after being invited by China’s Prime Minister Zhou Enlai.

Nixon said that the visit to “seek the normalization of relations between the two countries and also to exchange views on questions of concern to the two sides.”