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The Daniel letter stood in stark contrast to the hesitant response of most political figures to the Calley verdict and to Nixon's interference. To be sure, anyone of political prominence could legitimately duck the question by pleading that he did not wish to repeat the President's error of influencing the appellate process. Among the 1972 Democratic presidential possibilities in the Senate, only Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts spoke up for the verdict before the Daniel letter was made public, though his mail has been running solidly pro-Calley. Later, Maine's Edmund Muskie said that Nixon appeared to be prejudging the appeal; George McGovern of South Dakota chided Nixon for seeming to give in to public pressure. Birch Bayh of Indiana said that the President should "keep his mouth shut until the final review and then decide whether justice was served."
Republican Senator John Tower of Texas confided to a dinner companion: "The Calley case could become the best thing that's happened to us politically in years." A colleague, Ohio's Robert Taft Jr., defended what Nixon did as a proper exercise of his powers as Commander in Chief; Taft argued that it was necessary to restore morale in the armed forces and to calm outrage among the civilian populace.
Accepting Atrocities. Nixon may well have damped the popular outcry. Few of the pro-Calley demonstrations planned last week drew much of a turnout; in San Diego, for example, only 250 supporters—a mixed bag of John Birchers and antiwar protesters—turned out to rally and march for Calley. "The President sort of took the steam out of people," said Terry Repsher, a Houston high school junior. Dallas, however, bloomed with bumper stickers demanding: WHY CALLEY? A giant pro-Calley billboard blossomed in Bridgeport, Conn. But from the Timber Ridge School in Skokie, Ill., a Chicago suburb, 41 students wrote Nixon: "We are ten and eleven years old and afraid to grow up in America if a murderer is considered a hero."
Around the world, the admiration that the U.S. had won for trying and convicting Calley was quickly qualified when Nixon intervened in the case. Pro-Americans and anti-Americans were dismayed, for a kaleidoscope of reasons. East Germany's Neues Deutschland ran in adjoining columns pictures of Angela Davis in chains and Lieut. Calley leaving the stockade. Private Eye, London's black-humor satirical review, ran a cover photograph of Charles Manson with the caption: "I should have joined the Army." In Saigon, the respected, generally critical newspaper Duóc Nhà Nam objected: "The Nixon decision tacitly acknowledged that the savage and mass killings of Vietnamese civilians was right. A white American who killed hundreds of yellow-skinned Vietnamese was personally freed by the U.S. President."