AMERICA-2
Nlicawbers all
MURRAY KEMPTON
lington—Mr Nixon remains a mystery. who used to wonder about the secret his sorrow now must puzzle over the t of his joy. His pleasure in his office the ease with which he regards its ns are manifest; the problem is why. Is first appearance before the United ns General Assembly gave nothing of game away, assuming he has one; but, irness to him, it ought to be said that language had no larger quotient of the nal platitudes than has become stan- for the utterances of heads of state on large but increasingly empty stage. in e it was a speech very like those Mr nun used to give three or four years and U Thant, a witness subject to alarms about Americans understand- in anyone based in New York City, rted to have described the President's to words to him as harder on the war even Mr Johnson's used to be. But the Secretary-General long ago got f thought of by the garrison mentality r State Department as more Hanoi's d than ours and thus not to be told, great courtesy, anything that does not est the determination one ought to ress upon one's enemy, however it may inish in oneself.
r Nixon's public words, in this case as H others these days, were directed to his constituency rather than to his friends enemies abroad. This emphasis on estic opinion ought not to be traced to low thoughts of re-election, but is rather explained by—and possibly blamed on highest aspirations for the national onsibility. Mr Nixon has always had a ich mind. He really believes that a which only disguises defeat would n worse defeats later; his every prejudice
that the effort must be continued.
same time he is aware that more and Americans want to get out of the war less and less concern for the price. He It expect his citizens ever to like the but he does have hopes of getting them ,,ept it if he can appease those segments h can make themselves heard. One way reduce the burden on the middle class; s for example, suspended the draft gh November which might diminish liege protests for the autumn semester. would then be able to free himself, ast, from objections based on self- eq. and would need to contend only objections based on morality, an mon, which, while it increases, is not yond containment. The country seems ere more intimately divided than on s of morality; the closer Mr Nixon can to rendering the issue abstract and way, the better chance he has of keep- a few more people for than against on the war.
r Richard Strout has defined this dent as a man who, when given the
between the numbers one and ten, ys chooses five. That may or may not way to engage national problems, t does happen to be the way Americans always preferred to choose.
conference with his advisers on m had no immediate announced either, and cast no light on the ent's euphoria. It would seem, on the
surface, that he must face a crisis soon. He is pledged to a successful peace in Vietnam, and the return of 100,000 of our troops by Christmas. These aims appear incompatible with his circumstances; yet there is no honourable withdrawal from either. He has his promise to President Thieu and his promise to the American voter. No way appears for him to keep both; yet his visage radiates confidence that he can.
He has, it is true, brought home far fewer troops to date than he had promised. Still, the process of scaling down, once begun, can hardly be reversed; his com- manders must make do with what they have and with no promise of reinforcement. They appear, in these straitened circum- stances, to have brought back to him cheerful reports of their progress of the sort that used to bemuse Mr Johnson. Ambassador Bunker came to Washington early, to tell of prodigies of pacification; and General Abrams sent advance word of weakening enemy kidney and diminishing enemy morale.
The basis for this confidence is, if any- thing, less easy to see than it used to be. State Department veterans seem, for the most part, to feel that any time they were prepared to accept the casualties, the Viet- cong and the North Vietnamese could do dreadful damage to those illusions of pacification again being painfully cultivated. They remember the traumas of the 1968 Tet offensive, and have little faith that they could not be visited upon us again whenever the enemy wishes. The options, as he has drawn them, are plainly not Mr Nixon's; he is at the mercy of his opponents.
His model of Victorian statesmanship begins to resemble not so much Mr Disraeli after all, but Wilkins Micawber. Yet it would be unsafe to argue that some- thing will not turn up for him. He has been remarkably lucky so far in not having his bills come due; it is his good fortune that, in the public mind, those bills are still addressed to Mr Johnson.
Not being Mr Johnson is, after all, Mr Nixon's major claim to the public trust, and his conduct shows a continual apprecia- tion of that advantage. He treats us to Mr Johnson's policies and spares us his postures. Occasionally Washington even forgets he is there—a surcease unthinkable under Mr Johnson—and his August in California seemed an almost designed encouragement to this oblivion.
He presides over a country weary of public quarrel: even Miss Bernadette Devlin did not really excite us. The American rebellion wore itself out on Mr Johnson. If Mr Nixon seems unalarmed by our domestic sores, so do the Democrats; there is no interest in the subject visible here. The senior Democrats, of course, are as inclined to let things slide as Mr Nixon is; they are in the main men of the 'fifties; they acted at his side only last week to repress opposition to the military budget by unexpectedly large majorities. The Democrats in general give Mr Nixon less trouble than they did Mr Johnson. They appear, in fact, to be at least as dependent as Mr Nixon on something turning up, and no more aware than he of what that some- thing might be.
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