WHEN Richard Nixon announced that he would release Lieut. William Calley Jr. from the Fort Benning stockade to house arrest and then added that he intended to review the Calley case before final sentence is carried out, he left several interesting things unsaid. One was that two days before he reportedly awoke at 2 a.m. to wrestle with his conscience over the Calley affair, the President discussed congressional distress at the guilty verdict by telephone with his party's leader in the House, Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan—although the White House insists it was not the President who brought up the subject. Another was that he bypassed Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird when he ordered Calley removed from the stockade. Laird, who now hints that he opposed Nixon's intervention, heard about it only after the fact.
The third Nixon omission was even more significant. The President did not explain that Army machinery was already under way to spring Calley to house arrest, initiated at the request of the defense by Major General Orwin C. Talbott, commanding general of Fort Benning and the convening authority for Calley's court-martial. Many officers greeted Nixon's intervention with bitter dismay. One said of the President: "He knew all along that Calley was coming out. He just beat us to the punch."
Within the military, Calley friend and Calley foe alike agreed that the President's motives were political. In Viet Nam, SP/5 Willy Rowand of Sunshine Harbor, N.J., observed: "Nixon is playing politics, of course." Said Captain Leroy Saage of San Antonio: "It is a political decision, coinciding in part with the mail he's been getting. Nixon has also implied that he feels the verdict is unjust. It gives the public an impression that Nixon has no faith in military jurisprudence."
Morale and Outrage. No one made that point better than Calley's prosecutor, Captain Aubrey Daniel III, who wrote President Nixon an indignantly eloquent letter that belongs among the classic defenses of the precept that the U.S. must be a Government of laws, not of men (see box). Calley's lawyer, George Latimer, naturally found Daniel's views "entirely wrong," and added: "I believe the President was exactly right in what he did." The President dealt only indirectly with the Calley case in his TV address. He said he felt he should "speak up for the 2,500,000 fine young Americans who have served in Viet Nam." Nixon added: "The atrocity charges in individual cases should not and cannot be allowed to reflect on their courage and their self-sacrifice."