February 20-26, 1972 – Nixon in Mao’s China. US President Richard Nixon makes an official visit to China, welcomed by President Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. The trip represents a historic stage in the evolution of relations between Washington and Beijing: in search of a way out of the Vietnam War, while the American defeat is now looming, Nixon turns the cards in the communist camp by starting the diplomatic recognition of China , also as a counterpart to the Soviet Union. The first sign of the detente between the two capitals was the “ping-pong diplomacy” of April 1971, when the US table tennis team, which arrived in Beijing to face the Chinese team, was received by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. Three months later Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor, secretly visits Zhou Enlai in Beijing. Kissinger’s diplomatic mission will be announced when things have already turned out for the best.
March 14 – The publisher Feltrinelli dies in Segrate. The Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a militant in the extra-parliamentary left, dies torn by a charge of dynamite that he himself (carrying false identity documents) was placing on a high voltage pylon in Segrate, near Milan. His body is found the next morning.
May 17 – The assassination of Commissioner Calabresi. From the “strategy of tension” to the “years of lead”: the chief commissioner of public safety Luigi Calabresi dies caught in the back by three gunshots fired at close range, on the morning of May 17, 1972, while he is getting into his “Fiat 500 “. Calabresi had conducted the investigations into the Piazza Fontana massacre in Miano on 12 December 1969 and had been involved in the investigations into the death of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli at the police station. Only in 1997 will the final sentence of the Supreme Court be reached: the material perpetrators of the crime Ovidio Bompressi and Leonardo Marino (the repentant on whom the accusation was based), principals Giorgio Pietrostefani and Adriano Sofri condemned. The four at the time of the murder belonged to the left extra-parliamentary group Lotta Continua.
May 22-29 – The US-USSR “great detente”: Nixon in the Kremlin. For the first time in history, an American president sets foot in the Soviet capital: Friday May 26, 1972 Nixon and Brezhnev sign the “Salt-1” agreements to limit strategic weapons. The agreement is divided into two parts, followed by a series of collateral protocols. The United States and the Soviet Union freeze their arsenals of ICBMs, those supplied to submarines and strategic bombers. The second part of the agreements concerns the construction of anti-missile systems (ABM), providing for two for both the US and the USSR: one to protect the respective capitals, the other to be located to protect the base considered to be the most important.
June 17 – The spark of the «Watergate». Five men, who have illegally entered the Watergate complex in Washington – where the Democratic headquarters was for the presidential election in November – are noticed by a guard, who calls the police and has them arrested. It looks like a burglary by some house rats, but at the Watergate another story begins: the Nixon administration was spying on the headquarters of the Democrats. The president will be re-elected in November against Democratic challenger George McGovern by nearly two-thirds of the vote, but the Watergate scandal continues and in August 1974 he will be forced to resign.