(10 of 10)
To practitioners of Realpolitik in the Nixon Administration, the peace movement is just as infuriating, if for different reasons. They bear the enormous responsibility of liquidating an increasingly obvious mistake not of their making; they must be concerned about the consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam elsewhere in Asia and throughout the world; they must remember the fact that the U.S. has global responsibilities that cannot be torn up like a draft card. To Richard Nixon, the M-day protest must seem especially unfair. He has tried hard to settle the war, and he worked out a plan of de-escalation that earlier—say, in the last phase of the Johnson Administration—would have satisfied many war critics. He has at least succeeded in scaling down the war. Some troops have been withdrawn, the draft has been reduced and casualties have been drastically cut. Last week's report was of 64 U.S. dead, the lowest number in nearly three years. He has tried to stir Hanoi and the "provisional revolution ary government" into active negotiations at Paris, only to find no break in the stone wall of Communist intransigence. Yet the disenchantment that M-day incarnates is a political reality, and it is partly of his own making. He campaigned on the promise that he had a plan to end the war, a promise that contributed to his narrow victory. Once it became clear that under the inevitable ground rules the U.S. was incapable of winning a military victory in Viet Nam —a fact that Nixon has admitted—the North in effect lost all incentive to go for a compromise. Thus, Nixon now seems to have raised false hopes, and this week's Moratorium may be only the beginning of the price he must pay for doing so. The specific impact of the Moratorium will not be known for some time, but plainly Nixon cannot escape the effects of the antiwar movement. Unless he can assert new leadership and rally much of the nation in some unforeseen way, Nixon's timetable for a withdrawal from Viet Nam will surely have to be speeded up.
* Cambridge legend has it that the last time the Harvard faculty officially passed a collective political judgment was in 1773, when they agreed to stop drinking tea in protest against George Ill's tax. While no one at last week's faculty meeting spoke in favor of the war, record numbers of faculty turned out to debate the propriety of taking a formal stand against it. The vote to condemn the war was affirmative, 255 to 81, with 150 abstentions. *Only three days before, a bomb shattered windows and dislodged masonry in New York City's major armed-forces induction center at 39 Whitehall Street. There were no injuries.