[...] I was also invited into the villas of the upper class; in fact the most luxurious and aristocratic house that I have been in in this country was certainly here (built a few years ago but all in plantation style and all its accessories authentic), visiting a woman for whom I had a letter of introduction; not having a clue who I was, she invited five or six corporation presidents, who made me listen to the most reactionary discourses that I have heard in the whole journey: enough to make you despair, because the American ruling class understands nothing but power-politics, is a thousand miles away from starting to think that the rest of the world has problems to solve, that Russia offers the way to some solutions and they don’t. The usual pronouncements for and against Nixon were made in these terms; and a man from Investments and Securities supported Nixon because at this point in time you need ‘a tough, ruthless guy’. In any case, the Southerners talk too much, just the way we imagine they do; when I left, with me in the limousine to the airport there were some men coming back, I think, from a local Democratic Party convention; and what do you think they were talking about? They were against the Yankees and the Easterns [sic] who are stirring up the blacks, because where they live there are very few blacks, but we’d like to see them here where the blacks outnumber us forty to one etc. etc., all the things that you usually hear white Southerners say. [...]