Familiar stranger

AMERICA-1

MURRAY KEMPTON

New York—`And what were they going to do with the Grail when they found it, Mr Rossetti?'

Mr Nixon has been inconspicuous since his election. His most noticeable public appearance was in Vice-President Humphrey's company. At one moment he threw his arm around his opponent's shoulder; the head directed a gesture of consolation, but the arm seemed to be clutching, for rescue.

He is, quite frankly, at once the most familiar face in our politics and the least known quantity in our government. It is impossible to say what sort of President he will make. He begins with unfair burdens. Too many persons who were resigned to his ascension last summer resent it now that it has come under circumstances sug- gesting how easily it might have been avoided. If he succeeds as a President, it will be against a self-imposed failure as a candidate.

We are two nations of almost equal size. Sixty-one million Americans voted; and, when they had finished, there were 350,000 more votes for Mr Nixon than for Vice-President Humphrey.

Mr Nixon's nation is white, Protestant, breathes clean air and advances towards middle-age. Hubert .Humphrey's nation—held in trusteeship for Edward Kennedy—is every- thing else, whatever is black, most of what breathes polluted air, pretty much of what is young. No one could have imagined that, after the horrors visited upon it since January, Mr Humphrey's nation had left in it any fight at all; yet, dismembered as it was, it blooded Mr Nixon's all through one night. There seems to have been no city larger than Peoria from which he was not beaten back. He is the President of every place in America which does not have a bookstore.

If that lamentable division seems more acute now than when the campaign began, the fault belongs, to a depressing measure, to Mr Nixon's distrust of venturing into places where he might feel uncomfortable. He owed his survival and recovery to having taken sanctuary with that orthodox Republican religion which most other professional politicians neglected as out of fashion between 1962 and 1966; he wandered from this base cautiously last spring and sum- mer, but then fled back to it at the first sign of rain in late October.

Mr Nixon has always seemed a man who withdraws rather than reaches out, a trait which contributes to the rather affecting dignity he conveys in private even while it explains the persistence of his habit of failing in public. He has the wound of a history of humiliations; at the end of his campaign the guards at his meetings were ejecting any persons who looked as though they might boo. Mr Nixon would rather dare a bullet than endure an insult.

Both candidates ended up falling back on garrisons-of constituencies and ideas with which they felt safe—Mr Nixon to the fears and bigotries of the suburban middle class, Vice- President Humphrey to the fears and bigotries of the urban poor. They had a common allegiance to the out-of-date. The returns sug- gest that Mr Nixon, from calculation, and Mr Humphrey, from desperation, both misjudged the national temper; since Mr Nixon began with

a substantial lead, he had larger options to exer- cise misjudgments, and it is disturbing to see bow close he came to exhausting these options.

Certainly no flames danced around his journeyings; his crowds seemed to grow less responsive the louder he shouted; whatever key might arouse us, the strident pieties of the 'fifties do not strike it. And yet, by default, we endured an election of the 'fifties, as if some angry god had decided just to wipe out the last eight years, to begin all over again with the 1960 election and to give Mr Nixon those tiny fractions of the big states which were so whimsically and cruelly withheld from him when he ran against John F. Kennedy.

Now we must start over with what we had in 1960, only with all the scars of the years be- tween. Even Mr Nixon shows those scars; he spoke of Vice-President Humphrey with the particular sympathy which the man who has finally broken the habit of being passed over for promotion can feel for the man who seems permanently enmeshed in it. If broad majesty was absent from his words, we cannot blame him too much; we live in the 'sixties, when the agony is about national purpose; Mr Nixon comes from the Inities, when the fret was over private careers. The problem he will present as a President is whether a man who has had to spend so much time worrying about himself can now rise to worrying about all of us.

For he remains so entirely a man of his time, which is just not ours. It is hard to believe that he can make the leap. The night before he was elected, he found himself warning, with no more visible evidence than Mr Johnson used to have, that North Vietnam was using the bomb- ing halt for massive deployment of its vast war machine. He ended crying out that we had be- trayed our allies in South Vietnam.

The evidence is that this posture cost him votes. Mr Nixon himself has often said that the peace party always beats the war party; and his last-minute championing of the war party certainly did him no good. And yet he took that risk. He suffers still under the imputation of being devious; what is much more alarming is the suspicion that he is only too sincere.

He comes to us with too much experience with ceremony and too little with real engage- ment. Most of what he knows about the world comes from State Department tours, an inces- sant shaking of the hands of tyrants as various as Trujillo, Batista and Nkrumah. He is cursed by the notion that all one needs to know about a country is to be acquired from conversation with the head of its state. He even has faith in generals; could any illusion seem more foolish to President Johnson after what he has learned, or more unsettling to his countrymen; who have lived through eight years with a history of nations made no more often by heads of state than by their enemies?

So he seems to have been resurrected for us from a time when Americans believed that the struggle was between forces of light and forces of darkness, into a time when his countrymen feel more and more that the world is grey. The lessons he brings us look very like those we have already had to unlearn. His salvation and ours may be in that caution, that absorption with what people might think, those very in- hibitions against adventure which made him seem inadequate to an unexpected number of voters. For the time being, the less exciting that process of education, indeed - of character formation, which begins for him now,-the bet- ter the immediate future would seem to be for us all.