(6 of 6)
The last night in town the statue of old Mao is bathed in warm light up on the Great Hall of the People. Above is a half-moon in a clear sky. Richard Nixon is giving a banquet in honor of the Chinese, and the guests come quietly along. So do the Americans. Everybody heads for the same cavernous banquet hall where they had been on the first night of the visit. Tired Americans, tired Chinese. But still smiling, still wondering. The Great Hall would pass in Chicago if it didn't have the double row of lights all the way around its roof, giving a Chinese outline in the dark, or if the Mao pictures and his sayings were not plastered to the building.
Nixon has hinted he might have some thing to say about the talks he has had with Chou that evening. So there is a little extra eagerness as the troops trudge up the long red carpet.
The guests sit down and begin an other orgy of eating. The band tootles She'll Be Comin' Around the Mountain and Billy Boy. It still is not easy to take it all in. The only change in the room is the backdrop. The position of the flags, designating which country is host and which is guest, has been reversed. There is the vague feeling in the banquet hall that everybody has been part of some gigantic hoax, or maybe not quite that, but some kind of staging. After the popping of champagne corks (Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs, a scarce California label), Nixon gives a commercial for television but no revelation.
The banquet doesn't have the feeling it had on Monday. Time to say good bye to Peking, and the thrill is diminishing fast. It is almost as if the American presidency has been stolen from the nation for a few days, taken off in the mists of China and held there. There is the thread of television that beams back the story of ceremony, what there is of it, and sight seeing, but fails to give a sense of the inner working between Mao, Chou and Nixon. There is less here than meets the eye, of course, but even a little is a lot after 20 years.
Sixth Day
Joint communiqué concluded.
Flight to Hangchow. Boat ride in park with Chou.
The President's mood has changed for the better after concluding the long, final negotiations for the joint communiqué at 5 this morning. He then flies to Hangchow. Remarkably, the President abandons his own jet to accompany Chou aboard a Russian-built Chinese Ilyushin aircraft. In Hangchow, he wanders through the parks and islands of historic West Lake.
He is joined by Premier Chou aboard a yellow and blue pleasure boat that proceeds in leisurely fashion past bridges and willows that were first described for the Western world by Marco Polo.
Chou catches sight of Author-Correspondent Theodore White. "He has not been here since liberation," says Chou. White smiles and replies: "That's not my fault." Laughing, the Premier adds: "We, too, are to blame."
After the boat ride, Nixon invites the press to his guesthouse. In the chill wind, he explains that he could not brief on substance during the week because "I had to do everything I could to assure that we did not jeopardize possible agreement in some areas. Here was a long road and it had to be traveled with discretion." Already, he seems to be gearing back to his world, to California, Florida, Washington — to going home. The odyssey is nearly at an end.