Mao's Next Target

The pomp and ceremony of these kinds of occasions were determined by whether Mao went or not. Mao was extending an olive branch to all those old comrades who he had pretty much forsaken. But with Lin Biao going out in the kind of style he did, he turned himself into the ultimate scapegoat. That sure was a harbinger of things to come for just about anything that needed to be spun in the right direction.