Nixon's grandson retraces historic week(2)

In the following days, the group will retrace Nixon's walking route along the Great Wall and see giant pandas at Beijing Zoo. During the 1972 visit, Pat Nixon was so taken with the pandas that Zhou promised to lend Ling-Ling and Xing-Xing to the National Zoo in Washington. The pair arrived two months later.

Next stop for the delegation will be Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, and a visit to the Six Harmonies Pagoda. That will be followed by a banquet at the Hangzhou State Guesthouse, where Nixon wrote the first draft of what would become the Shanghai Communique.

From there it's a ride on the bullet train to ultra-modern Shanghai, with visits to the old parts of the city that Nixon visited as well as a tour of the World Financial Center, the world's fourth-tallest building. This will be capped by a sunset cruise down the Yangtze River.

Other notable figures in Cox's group include KT McFarland, a Fox News national security analyst and former aide to Henry Kissinger; Colonel Jack Brennan, a former Marine Corps aide who accompanied Nixon to China in 1972; Robert "Bud" McFarlane, who was Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, and Marjorie Acker, who worked as a secretary for Nixon when he was a senator, vice-president and president.

The tour is co-sponsored by the Richard Nixon Foundation and the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. The association's president, Li Xiaolin, is the daughter of Li Xiannian, who, before serving as China's president during the 1980s, was among the high-level officials who greeted Nixon in 1972.

In a statement, the Nixon Foundation called the current tour "a rare and special arrangement made exclusively for the VIP delegation".

　Upon his departure, Cox said he was "eagerly looking forward" to retracing his grandfather's footsteps.