Читать книгу CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir - Nicholas MD Platt - Страница 37

We prepared to leave the Crown Colony after almost five years, assigned to an additional year of language training in Taiwan to prepare me to be the U.S. interpreter at the Warsaw talks, our sole formal point of contact with the Beijing regime. On the eve of our departure these long-standing orders were changed in favor of a job on the Mainland China desk at the State Department in Washington. I was relieved. The Cultural Revolution had dried up the talks. Sheila and I were delighted at the prospect of returning to the United States.

The changes in our own country were in many ways as deep and disruptive as those we had observed in China. Since we had been away, President Kennedy had been killed, President Johnson had turned the Civil Rights Movement into law, feelings against the Vietnam War had exploded, forcing Johnson’s decision to leave the presidency, Martin Luther King had been shot and Washington burned, the feminists were transforming women’s rights, Robert Kennedy was dead, and the campaign to choose the next president was in full and turbulent swing. The country was going through a revolution of its own, less violent but in many ways as profound as the one that we had covered in China. It was time to go home and relearn the country we represented.