(2 of 3)
It takes no extraordinary fund of political cynicism to know that the President's trip is also geared to the American congressional campaigns. An axiom of U.S. politics dictates that Presidents enhance their party's chances in such an election by asserting their leadership with a maximum of panoply and publicity. For no compelling diplomatic reasons, Nixon will stop in Rome to see Italian President Giuseppe Saragat and Pope Paul, and will later visit Ireland. He and Pat, after all, are of Irish blood. That makes two out of the three traditional ethnic I's—Italy, Ireland and Israel—that many traveling American politicians like to cultivate as election days approach. If it were not so diplomatically complicated, he might have liked to drop in on Israel as well.
In a political sense, Nixon's trip will be a foreign duplication of his excursions last week into the American countryside. The President flew first to Kansas State University in the gentle hill country of northeast Kansas, where longitude and attitude seem to intersect in quintessential definition of Middle America. There, if anywhere, the man of both coasts would find a spiritual home.
Plea for Civility. The occasion for the speech was as appropriate as the setting. It was the first of K-State's Alfred M. Landon Lectures this year, a gracious presidential gesture to the 83-year-old Kansan who survived his humiliation in 1936 at the hands of Franklin Roosevelt to become a minor elder statesman of the Republican Party. K-State, as political instinct and the Secret Service informed Nixon, was a comparatively safe campus on which he could propound his ideas on radical violence; Nixon won the 1968 mock election there.
As it happened, Nixon enjoyed an advantage that he could not have foreseen. More than 15,000 people, mostly students, crammed into the university's cavernous field house—and in the back rows of the balcony were two dozen leftist hecklers. Wearing the school colors in a purple and white striped tie, the President launched into a variation on his inaugural theme of civility and lowered voices. "The time has come," he said, "for us to recognize that violence and terror have no place in a free society." His speech was an appeal to "the rules of the game," a lucid and occasionally eloquent invocation of decency, self-restraint and mutual tolerance.
"Those who bomb," said Nixon, "who ambush policemen, who hijack airplanes, who hold their passengers hostage, all share in common not only a contempt for human life but also a contempt for those elemental decencies on which a free society rests." He carried the argument further, demanding an end to "passive acquiescence, or even fawning approval" of explosive radicalism. "What corrodes a society even more deeply than violence," he said, "is the acceptance of violence, the condoning of terror, excusing of inhuman acts in a misguided effort to accommodate the community's standards to those of the violent few."