Eating Cereal in the House of the Czars

TIME Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey kept a close eye on President Nixon's movements in Moscow. His impressions:

RICHARD NIXON'S valet brought him his dry cereal, fruit juice and coffee every morning in the dining room of the Kremlin apartment, a vaulted chamber where the czars once walked. He consumed his modest breakfast quickly and moved on into a paneled study for his early briefings and last-minute musing. The study always had the clean, swept look of Nixon. His pipe was cradled in a clean ashtray. The papers he needed were lined up. His two briefcases were set in exact positions beside the desk. There were two cans of Garfinckel's pipe mixture on the desk, a black telephone to the side, the inevitable Nixon Dictaphone on a corner, his reading glasses atop the papers.

But around Nixon all was different.

There were massive pictures of landscapes in heavy gilt frames. Giant, glittering chandeliers hung from the high ceilings. There were golden urns in the corridors and flowered rugs along the halls and in all the rooms. The floors were intricate patterns of inlaid wood. The views through the windows were of the gilded domes of long-famous churches.

Nixon moved through this landscape seemingly a lonely man, clinging to his American habits--dry cereal, cottage cheese, no vodka, only modest sips of champagne--and his singleness of purpose. There was something very admirable about the man in these circumstances, determined to bring something home, to make a supreme effort to get a little more order into the world.

Nixon made a curious physical contrast with his hosts. He was taller; yet he seemed dwarfed by them. It was their girth, their impassive faces, the fact that they moved and talked and acted as one man. They seemed to stand so close that their shoulders touched. Their gestures and walk seemed intimidating, abrupt, heavy. Nixon seemed almost languid. He was always alone or a few paces ahead of his party. A slender man, his shoulders seemed to stoop even a little more than before.

Nixon walked the Kremlin grounds in the first mists of morning, laid a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, talked hunting with Brezhnev and fishing with Kosygin. He rode a hydrofoil on the Moscow River, saw the Bolshoi dance Swan Lake and told those around him that when he gets back to Washington, "I will close my eyes and see it all again."

At the ballet, the event of the evening was the shout "Freedom to Viet Nam!" from a woman in the sixth balcony. She was the wife of a Moscow correspondent for the pro-Communist Italian newspaper Paese Sera; she was questioned by police but not arrested. It was the Russian equivalent of the girl who pulled an antiwar sign out of her cleavage in the East Room of the White House. But it was just a fleeting incident, dwarfed by the beauty of the ballet and the approach of the final hours of a summit, the full meaning of which was still locked away in the minds and hearts of the men in the Kremlin--and within the solitary figure in the light gray or blue suit who ate dry cereal every morning where the czars once lived.

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