There is a famous photograph from February 1972 — Chairman Mao and President Nixon, shaking hands in a book-lined study in Beijing — and there is a man missing from it. He was in the room. He was cropped out on purpose. And his mother grew up beneath the carved oak of the Pillsbury Mansion at 100 East 22nd Street.

One generation from the oak

Mary Stinson Pillsbury — eldest daughter of Charles and Nelle Pillsbury — came of age in this house among its centuries-old English rooms, then went out and made history of her own at the United Nations. We’ve told her story before. But the family’s reach into world affairs didn’t end with her. In 1937 she had a son, Winston Lord — raised in New York, a grandson of this mansion — who would grow up to stand at the very hinge of the twentieth century.

The secret flight of July 1971

By 1971, Winston Lord was a young special assistant to Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council. That July, he was one of the tiny handful of Americans smuggled — there is no better word — onto a Pakistani aircraft in Islamabad for Kissinger’s secret mission to Beijing, the trip that broke a 22-year silence between the United States and China.

Lord loved to tell what happened as the plane approached Chinese airspace: he walked to the front of the cabin so that he — not his boss — would technically be the first American official to enter China since 1949. Kissinger, sitting in the back, never quite forgave the maneuver.

Cropped out of history

Seven months later Lord was back in Beijing, one of only a few Americans in the room when Nixon met Mao. But the presence of so junior an aide risked embarrassing Secretary of State William Rogers, who had been left out of the meeting entirely — so, at the American side’s request, the Chinese cropped Lord out of the official photographs. A year later, Premier Zhou Enlai quietly handed him an uncropped print, so he could prove to his grandchildren he had been there. Lord went on to work on the Shanghai Communiqué, the document that still frames U.S.–China relations, and the episode became one of diplomacy’s favorite stories — retold in PBS’s American Experience film on Nixon’s China trip.

The ambassador

The story has a satisfying final act. After presiding over the Council on Foreign Relations, Winston Lord returned to Beijing in 1985 — this time as United States Ambassador to China, serving until 1989, and later as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He shared that life with his wife, the Shanghai-born novelist Bette Bao Lord. The young man once scissored out of the picture ended up with his name on the door of the American embassy.

Two generations at the table of nations

Step back and the pattern is remarkable. Nelle Pillsbury was the granddaughter of Colonel John H. Stevens, the “Father of Minneapolis”. Her daughter Mary sat on the UN Human Rights Commission alongside Eleanor Roosevelt and founded the U.S. Committee for UNICEF. And Mary’s son helped reopen the door to a quarter of humanity. One family line runs from the first wood-frame house in Minneapolis to Mao’s study in Beijing — and its middle chapters were written in the oak-paneled rooms of this mansion.

Those rooms are still here, and they still tell stories. Join us for an evening at the Pillsbury Club — or see the whole sweep of the city’s history from the seat of a Minneapolis Trolley Tour, which departs from our front door.

Keep reading: Who was Thomas Lowry, the streetcar king whose rails carried the Pillsburys’ Minneapolis — and whose own mansion vanished?