(5 of 10)
Nixon was getting flak closer to home as well, from 17 Senators and 47 Representatives who announced support for M-day. A raft of critical resolutions surfaced on Capitol Hill, showing defiance of Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott's plea for a moratorium of his own—a 60-day pause in attacks on Nixon's war policies. Two freshman Democratic Senators, Iowa's Harold Hughes and Missouri's Thomas Eagleton, demanded extensive reform of the Saigon government —within 60 days. Idaho's Frank Church and Oregon's Mark Hatfield asked for "a more rapid withdrawal of American troops"; George McGovern wanted an immediate pullout. On the House side, a vague resolution in support of eventual disengagement drew 109 cosponsors. But liberal Republicans Donald Riegle Jr. of Michigan and Paul McCloskey Jr. of California produced something stronger: a proposal to repeal, effective at the end of 1970, the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution under which President Johnson proceeded to bomb North Viet Nam and build the U.S. troop level in South Viet Nam past the half-million mark. None of the flat antiwar resolutions have a chance of passing, but their sponsors obviously feel that the measures are what their constituents want.
Nixon's first reaction to the M-day plans was disdainful. At a press conference Sept. 26, he said of the Moratorium: "Under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it." That was a serious mistake: he outraged many who might otherwise have sat on their hands. "It is now a challenge to show this Administration the outpouring of voter protest," declared Eugene Weisberg, a Denver industrialist and lifelong Republican. Reports Harold Willens, Western-states chairman of the Business Executives Move for Viet Nam Peace: "In the last two weeks, businessmen are suddenly ready to give money, and to do whatever they can. Somehow, deep down, Americans are beginning to realize that Richard Nixon is Lyndon Johnson." Nixon is not, of course, but some of his critics feel that Nixon's apparent disregard for public feeling on Viet Nam may come to parallel Johnson's own.
In spite of Nixon's disdainful public view of M-day, there were clear signs of dismay and confusion around the White House and among those who believe that any President deserves support in pursuing his foreign policy. Dean Acheson, no stranger to criticism of his own foreign policy when he was Harry Truman's Secretary of State, weighed in with the observation that open season on Presidents should be limited to "the quadrennial donnybrook," an Achesonism for presidential elections. Henry Kissinger, the President's chief foreign affairs strategist, told a group of visiting Quakers that the Moratorium is "counterproductive" because it comes at a time when the North Vietnamese are shaping their post-Ho policies. Vice President Spiro Agnew discreetly withdrew from an Oct. 15 New Jersey political dinner to avoid becoming a target for protesters. The Vice President denounced M-day as "absurd." Almost simultaneously, Republican National Chairman Rogers C.B. Morton was calling the Moratorium "a good thing," provided that it remained nonviolent.