The Nation: Nixon and Kissinger: Triumph and Trial

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misjudged the American psyche. In part, he was defeated by a mood of reaction against the '60s, against the counterculture, against permissiveness, against social programs for blacks, against excessive welfare spending. Yet the nation was not engaged in a precipitate swing to the right. Rather it was apprehensive about too rapid change and about George McGovern as a leader.

When Arthur Bremer gunned down George Wallace in a Maryland shopping center last May, Richard Nixon's re-election was all but assured. He picked up the vast majority of Wallace votes in November.

Given the McGovern nomination, Nixon waged a comfortable noncampaign from the incumbent's traditional stance of statesmanship-above-the-battle. The economy, one issue that might have sunk the Republicans, was humming along toward recovery. Scandals, or near scandals, erupted, infecting the political air with a sour smell. First there was ITT, with the suggestion that the Justice Department dropped antitrust suits against the corporation in return for at least a $200,000 subsidy of the G.O.P. convention. Agents with ties to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President and to the White House were arrested after breaking into the Democratic National Committee's Watergate headquarters to remove electronic bugs planted there earlier. Nixon's campaign was heavily financed by anonymous donors. Yet none of those issues took hold in a serious way, none of them seemed to make much difference. Says Paul Asciolla, a liberal priest and editor in Chicago: "Nixon was smart. He talked about the football blackout when McGovern was going on and on about the bombing. He talked about safety in the streets when McGovern concentrated on Watergate."

Americans were not all that callous or indifferent. Yet they seemed, in a sense, disengaged from the large political and social and military issues that had demanded so much of them in the decade past. There was some sense of endorsing the status quo, or of improving it gradually; a nation bombarded by rhetoric through the '60s did not take to McGovern's apocalyptic language. This disengagement undoubtedly worked to Nixon's political advantage in the election, just as it gave him, paradoxically, the freedom with which to pursue his boldest international ventures.

But generalized portraits of a national mind have a tendency toward caricature. America is — has always been — a mosaic of inconsistencies, of deeply contradictory and often unexpected of impulses. The language of "liberal" and "conservative," "Middle American" and "radical," usually lags behind the real changes. Thus, for example, William F. Buckley now favors decriminalization of marijuana, Black Panther Bobby Scale is running for mayor of Oakland, Calif., and between those conservative and radical poles, the mass of Americans exhibit a complexity that defies tidy compartmentalization.

Nixon has taken more and more to articulating his own vision of America. At its core is his profound conviction that the real Founders' virtues, America, has the somehow heartland been America, betrayed the by land the of liberal the Eastern media and by Government and academic intellectuals who grew up in the legacy of the New Deal. Without those enemies, the President seems to believe, the nation would belong to