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Waving Tulips. The next stop was Bonn, where Nixon arrived on a raw morning in a mushy mixture of rain and snow. With their Florida tans, he and Kissinger looked like two coffee beans beside the pallid Germans. A British newsman wondered aloud: "Do you suppose he uses some kind of special makeup?" The President warmed up his audience by recalling his first visit to a "leveled and broken" Germany 22 years ago, and spoke of the remarkable changes—"the miracle of German recovery among them"—since that time. Nixon and Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger conferred intensively during the day. Kiesinger, whose relations with Lyndon Johnson were never warm, emerged convinced that his coalition regime will work well with the Nixon Administration. Twice Nixon told the Germans that his mother-in-law was born in their country. (Some enthusiastic Germans recalled that Nixon's own mother, Hannah Milhous, was of German descent.) In Bonn, a matronly woman placed what she called a "dove of peace" in Nixon's hand. The pigeon rested there for a long moment, then soared aloft.
Nixon's biggest success in Germany was the highly visible gesture of solidarity with beleaguered West Berlin. Nixon flew there with Kiesinger to meet a heartfelt greeting from the Berliners. At one point, by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a group of radical students threw eggs, carpet tacks, snowballs and paint-filled bags at Nixon's limousine while they chanted anti-American slogans. But only a few blocks later the crowd was so wildly enthusiastic that Nixon pulled both Mayor Klaus Schiitz and the more sedate Chancellor up onto the trunk of his Cadillac, waving a limp bouquet of tulips at the cheering Berliners. In an echo of John Kennedy, the last U.S. President to visit Berlin, Nixon declared: "All the people of the world who want freedom are truly Berliners." As he left Berlin, he collapsed into his seat on Air Force One with an exhausted "Whew!"
He entered the Italian capital in President Giuseppe Saragat's elegant black Lancia, driving past grazing sheep and the ruins of an aqueduct along the Appian Way, the Roman road of triumphant emperors and vanquished prisoners two millenniums ago. Escorted by a bevy of police motorcycles, the car looked like a whale surrounded by a school of tropical fish, and its passage snarled traffic as Romans returned to work after their afternoon pisolino (nap). The crowds were friendly as Nixon passed. Later, in half a dozen squares, left-wing students, angry at the closing of Rome University two weeks ago, took the occasion to get into a full-scale dustup. They fought with helmeted police, smashed windows and set fire to overturned autos. There were 199 arrests, and 85 policemen and 34 demonstrators were injured in the melees; one student fell to his death from a fourth-floor window. Nixon, closeted with Saragat at the Quirinale, never saw the protest demonstrations. As he emplaned for Paris, Premier Mariano Rumor—whose newly formed government is still shaky—grabbed both his hands in his own and held on as though he had just found a fast friend.