AMERICA
Mr Nixon chooses sides
MURRAY KEMPTON
New York—Mr Nixon has commenced rather to leak in the past three weeks, al- though it would be hasty to say that the spillage has been generally noticed; from here, of course, we look at him as upon another nation; if the old dislike for him on the east coast seems to be returning, it ought to be said, in fairness, that it may never have gone away. Still, there was always the sense that Mr Nixon probably disliked his critics as much as and with more tangible reason than they did him and that he had rather nobly repressed these resentments. Now they seem to be breaking out; and the process began on an occasion of very small offence.
No one seems quite able to explain why the article of Mr Clark Clifford, President Johnson's last Secretary of Defence, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, set Mr Nixon off the way it did. The answer may simply be that Mr Clifford set down a very cool and polite account of his own educa- tion and that his conclusions were somehow insulting to a President whose survival and recovery are owed to his manful resistance to every similar opportunity for education.
For Mr Clifford's account of how he lost hope for the Vietnam war is, at bottom, an explanation of how he lost hope for Mr Nixon's whole world of General Carlos Romulo, Mr Billy Graham and General Westmoreland. Mr Clifford remembers first becoming uneasy in 1967 when President Johnson sent him to Southeast Asia to talk to 'some of our Pacific allies'. 'The Presi- dent of the Philippines advised President Johnson that he preferred we not stop there because of possible adverse public reaction.' The Philippines, who, Mr Clifford felt, ought to feel more vulnerable than anyone else 'if they accepted the domino theory', made it clear to Mr Johnson that they would send no combat troops to Saigon. Australia's Prime Minister Holt explained that his country's present 7,000-man ex- peditionary force was 'its maximum effort'. Singapore's Prime Minister said that he could send no troops at all 'because of the adverse political effect'.
Now those happen to be those very allies of ours among whom Mr Nixon was float- ing at the time, selling his Pepsi-Cola and comforting himself with the strength of South-East Asian resistance. He invariably came back from these voyages intoning 'an Asian Prime Minister said to me, Mr Nixon, America must not let the Pacific become a Red Sea'. Mr Clifford, then, while think- ing about quite something else, had offended by explaining that Mr Nixon had been fooled.
Then there is the matter of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who remain, like Asian Prime Ministers, sacred objects to Mr Nixon long past the time when they retain the unmixed respect of their citizens. Here is Mr Clifford reporting on his exhaustive examination of the best minds of the military:
'After days of this type of analysis, my concern was greatly deepened. I could not find out when the war was going to end; I could not find out the manner in which it was going to end; I could not find out whether the requests for men and equipment were going to be enough or whether it would take more, and, if more, when and how much; I could not find out how soon the South Vietnamese forces would be ready to take over. All I had was the statement, given with too little self-assurance to be comforting, that, if we persisted for an in- determinate length of time, the enemy would choose not to go on.'
Even the Joint Chiefs, then, had lost confi- dence in themselves. They seem to have re- covered it soon enough under the flattery of the President's reverence; and Mr Nixon reacted to Mr Clifford as dreamers will to men who talk about reality. To instruct the President is to upset and to offend him.
It is curious that this uneasy and gloomy man chosen to preside over an uneasy and gloomy nation should evince so enormous a need for spectacles that are comforting and news that is complacent. More than almost any living politician, he is untouched by a contagion of national self-hatred other- wise so sweeping that it seems to have penetrated even the antiseptic quarter of his own campaign staff last November. Joseph McGuinness, a young Philadelphia journa- list, has just completed a history of Mr Nixon's 1968 advertising campaign. One of his more extraordinary memories is of a conversation with Gene Jones, who devised the candidate's television commercials: 'What are you going to do when this is all over', McGuinness asked Jones. `Move out ... I mean move out of the country. I'm not going to live here any more.' And then [Jones] talked about how America was no place to bring up kids anymore. And all this against the background of the commer- cials he had made: with the laughing, playing children and the green grass and the sunsets and Richard Nixon saying over and over again what wonderful people we all were and what a wonderful place we lived in. ... I really don't see any choice,' Gene Jones said: 'I mean I don't want my kids growing up in a atmosphere like this.' The he excused himself and went upstairs.
Yet Mr Nixon remains entirely certain that America is a success. It is being said again, by persons who do not notice how easy it is for him to be sorry even for him- self, that he lacks compassion. His real problem is in his need to feel safe, to avoid reminders of any occasional failure about America, to seek the society of those who are comfortable rather than who find fault.
The last two weeks have been a succession of defeats for his liberal advisers; but it ought to be noticed that the conservative successes have involved more how things look than how they really are; his turn to the right is primarily aesthetic. He bowed to the wishes of the American Medical Association in deciding not to nominate Dr John Knowles as his administration's chief medical adviser; but he quickly substituted Dr Roger Egeberg, who does not seem much less reform-minded. Now he seems to have announced a postponement in the desegregation of the southern schools, a de- cision which stirred the liberals to a protest louder than, in conscience, they would seem entitled to make (school desegregation has been required by law for fifteen years, during eight of which liberal Presidents possessed all power to act) and brought to Senator Thurmond of South Carolina more gratification than in reality he ought to feel.
Mr Nixon, in truth. needs to give the con- servatives very little to make them wildly grateful. One reason why he so enjoys their company may be that they are so easy to please and the rest of the country so difficult. He has chosen the comfortable side, and it may have been a judgment as useful to his future—if not to ours—ai- it is satisfactory to his nature, if not to ours. The two nations remain at least as equal in size as they were last November, and Mr Nixon's may even be growing. In time the ruler, however out-of-style he seems when he begins, has the best chance to establish the fashion.
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