(7 of 10)
While Party Leader Ulbricht huddled last week with Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin spent an hour with President Nixon at the White House and assured him that the U.S.S.R. would not in terfere with Nixon's Berlin visit. (He made no such promises, however, about the West German election.) Nixon's stop in Berlin will be brief, less than three hours. It was deliberately designed to avoid comparison with the wildly cheered 1963 visit of John Kennedy, which reached a climax with his bravura "Ich bin ein Berliner!" speech of solidarity from the city hall steps. Nonetheless, if only because of renewed Communist pressure on the city, it is likely to be the only showy segment of Nixon's European swing.
Air Force One has already made dry-run landings at Tempelhof Airport, which normally handles nothing larger than tri-jet 727s. After the President de planes there, his schedule calls for reviewing troops on the tarmac and laying a wreath at the marker outside Tempelhof that commemorates the 1948 Berlin airlift. His motorcade will then move on to the border crossing point at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse, a checkpoint used by West Germans traveling to East Berlin. There Nixon will mount a wood en platform for the ritual look at the Wall, a stop that will last barely ten minutes.
Later, at Charlottenburg Castle, the President was to sign the city's Golden Book for VIP visitors and hold brief talks with Mayor Klaus Schiitz and other West Berlin officials. Members of the leftist Socialist German Students Association announced an anti-U.S.
demonstration; West Berlin police then banned all street rallies, which increased the chances of a student-police clash.
Next comes Nixon's only major public speech of the eight-day trip, an address to 6,000 workers and executives at the Siemens electrical factory. Early in the afternoon, he was to leave for Rome —this time from the big Tegel Airport in the French occupation sector.
Rome and the Vatican
After the residual cold-war stresses of Berlin, Rome will be a respite. Nix on will stay in the residence of Pres ident Giuseppe Saragat, the 16th cen tury Palazzo del Quirinale, one of the handsomest buildings in all Europe. The state visitors' apartments were redec orated four years ago for Charles de Gaulle. The eleven-room Imperial Suite, where Nixon will be housed, is reached from the 200-yard Corridor of the Long Sleeve. The view of Rome from the palace is unsurpassed.