Nixon's The One--But What?

Two years ago this month, Americans were in the final stages of choosing a new President; and a lot of Democrats, liberals, moderates, independents and doves of all stripes thought there were excellent reasons for electing the conservative Republican candidate, Richard Milhous Nixon. So they helped put him in office and most of them are holding their heads today.

It is not just that the Nixon Administration has generally been more conservative and less Republican than expected, nor that Mr. Nixon, in the White House at last, sometimes suggests a glorified Captain Queeg (one could all but hear the little steel balls clicking in his hand as he piously confided that he would rather be a one-term President than countenance America's "first defeat"). It is more nearly that, in sober reflection on the 1968 campaign, there still seem to have been excellent reasons to elect a Republican conservative who talked as Nixon did then. There were concrete achievements to be expected of such a President; so that, as much as any other sentiment, a sense of opportunity gone glimmering pervades an assessment of the Nixon Administration today.

It had been easy, in Washington's political jargon, to "write a script" in 1968 in which a hard-liner could best settle the war in Vietnam. Witness General Eisenhower and Korea, General De Gaulle and Algeria. If a bona fide hawk with the anti-Communist credentials possessed by Richard Nixon reached the considered judgment that the war in Vietnam had been altogether too costly in lives, dollars and domestic disharmony, he could, with impunity, make the necessary compromises to bring peace. He could placate the right wing, not least by rightfully heaping the blame on L.B.J. and the Democrats for plunging America into the Asian morass. And if a President with that kind of base among the Cold Warriors happened also to have sensitive political antennae, as nobody then doubted Nixon's were, he could hardly fail to see that ending a divisive and debilitating war would enable him to redirect the nation's energies toward more rewarding programs here at home. Surely, he would not even require antennae to know that any other course would sooner or later convert Johnson's war to Nixon's war.

Or so the liberals' hopeful script went, as Nixon set his stately pace around the country, while the kids that fall unmercifully heckled Hubert Humphrey. In part because George Wallace of Alabama also was prominent in the race, another rather similar line of moderate-to-liberal thought held that Nixon was not only by far the more acceptable of the two candidates on the right but perhaps also the only candidate who could significantly ease race tensions. Again, it was a function of credibility--Nixon, it was reasoned, was not identified as a liberal on the black question, quite the opposite; hence, his election would reassure the white backlashers, the ethnic groups, the union men, the low-income property owners, the old folks in the pepper-salt neighborhoods, even many white Southerners. On the other hand, just as Hubert Humphrey would be saddled with Lyndon Johnson's war and the automatic suspicion of the anti-Communists, the election of another liberal Democrat (and Humphrey, of all people) would scare the backlashers into even greater animosity toward the blacks.

As for the economy, through which inflation was already galloping in 1968, it seemed only natural to suppose that a hardheaded Republican business Administration could and would restore faith in the dollar and take the tough retrenching steps needed to cool off the boom. (This reinforced the end-the-war script, because if Nixon aimed to curb inflation, he would have to cut back in Vietnam, wouldn't he?) That Nixon remained obviously reluctant to make a nuclear-arms accommodation with the Soviet Union could also be partially rationalized. He did, after all, keep saying it was time to move to an era of negotiation after the era of confrontation; and, here again, maybe the Cold Warrior who had stuck his finger in Khrushchev's chest just conceivably was the one to bring to an arms deal the acquiescence of Goldwater voters and other big-bomb advocates.

Moreover, in his long campaign back from oblivion, Nixon had said somethings that suggested greater insight and compassion than had ever been credited to Eisenhower's gut fighter. When he talked of decentralizing Government, for instance, he did not sound as if he were merely maintaining the old Republican feud with F.D.R. In one radio speech, he had talked of a "new alignment" of modern Republicans, "new liberals" anxious for more local participation and less Federal dominance, progressive Southerners restive in the one-party system and black militants seeking "dignity and self-respect," rather than "giant welfare programs." Such statements interested many moderates and liberals after eight years of the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations and 28 years of New Deal liberalism, with war raging in Asia, American cities both strangling and blowing up, young people rampaging in the streets and colleges, the races poised in hostility, taxes going up, the Government seemingly muscle-bound and the entire political system in disrepute.

What did Hubert Humphrey offer but more of the same? And if Nixon achieved only part of what seemed possible to him, wouldn't that go a long way toward restoring the diminished credibility of the Presidency as an instrument of political leadership? So Election Day came and went, the transition passed and there was President Nixon at his Inauguration, promising to bring us together. As so often before, he had peaked too soon.

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"I have been through it all," Uncle Joe Cannon, the legendary House Speaker, once observed. "Rain don't always follow the thunder." Today the Nixon antennae appear to be made of tin; the Nixon conservative base seems to keep him nervously leaping to protect it. The hardheaded business Administration quickly developed a case of political butterflies. And the Administration's greatest effort has been directed at putting a splendid face on its five-o'clock shadow.

The crude disappointments have flowed from the Administration's policies toward the war in Vietnam (30,991 Americans killed by the time Nixon was inaugurated--actually, January 18, 1969, the nearest date for which an official Pentagon total is available--43,212 by August 1, 1970), which at one point actually had the bombers flying again against North Vietnam. Indeed, one of the men Nixon had been most praised for bringing to Washington, Commissioner of Education James E. Allen, denounced the President's Vietnam policies and was forced to resign.

At the outset of Nixon's term, setting the tone for much of what was to follow, the new President refused to have his peace negotiators in Paris enter private talks, for which the outgoing negotiator, W. Averell Harriman, claimed to have laid the groundwork. Nixon also shied away from considering a North Vietnamese military pullback at that time as an overture toward negotiation, rather than as rest-and-refit for a new offensive; as a result, American military pressure was increased. The President may have been militarily correct--it still is not clear at press time--but (continued on page 221) Nixon (continued from page 105) this early episode was the tip-oft that instead of using his anti-Communist domestic base and his freedom from responsibility for the Johnson policies to underpin a bold attempt at negotiated peace, Nixon would move with caution and suspicion, guard his political face and risk little. It was also the tip-off that no more than L.B.J. would the new President try to push a reluctant Saigon further toward negotiations than it wanted to go.

So Vietnamization, not negotiation, became the slogan of his Administration. The President began and has continued a program of widely spaced combat-troop withdrawals, with the explanation that he intends to build up the Saigon government and its army to do what they had never been able to do before--fight their own war. This, Nixon explained, would cause the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong to agree to a settlement before they had to deal only with the newly trained and equipped South Vietnamese, who would not be inclined to negotiate with Communists. He did not explain, however, how many American support troops would be required to remain in South Vietnam, for how long; and he never made it clear whether he really believed that the South Vietnamese could eventually win their own war, or whether he only wanted to reduce American casualties to the point that the political situation in this country might permit him to fight on by proxy for as many years as required. Even so, whatever marginal gains toward disengagement Vietnamization might have represented may well have been blasted by the widening of the war to Cambodia. And with the single exception of the troop withdrawals, which left vague how many years there might be a costly American military presence in Vietnam, there was nothing new.

Nixon's memorable campaign tactic of referring without explanation to a "plan to end the war" had been especially deceptive--the new President seemed only to put forward Lyndon Johnson disguised as Dr. Kissinger. All of the familiar, specious arguments were revived: self-determination (although historically, South Vietnam has no claim even on nationhood), free elections (for a country with no national democratic tradition), the necessity to honor American commitments (apparently ad infinitum) and support-the-only-President-we-have (no matter what he does). As he announced the American invasion of Cambodia, Nixon even managed to go Johnson one better. The "world's most powerful nation," he proclaimed, "when the chips are down," must not act like "a pitiful, helpless giant."

Some who had watched at close range the painful unfolding of the American role in the war, with all its attendant disillusionments and failures, looked on in something near disbelief as most of it was gone through again--the same old belligerent "free world us. Communist aggressors" rationale for the war policy, the same sort of deceptions and subterfuges L.B.J. had used in carrying it out. Nixon, for instance, gave solemn assurances that the Cambodian invasion was designed solely to "clean out the sanctuaries" and protect withdrawing American troops; but at subsequently disclosed by high Administration sources, the reasons were, instead, to prop up the shaky Lon Nol regime in Phnom Penh and to warn both Hanoi and Moscow not to trifle with a tough guy like Dick Nixon. There was also the same fatal determination Johnson had so often shown to force the North Vietnamese by military pressure into the kind of settlement Nixon wanted, as well as the "Presidential" insistence on fighting the war on his own terms, no matter what Congress or draft-age citizens or anyone else thought or said about it. There was also the same sense of overwhelming miscalculation that has haunted so much of the intervention in Indochina.

The strike along Cambodia's southeastern frontier flushed the Communists from their sanctuaries, but it led directly to their taking a commanding role in Cambodia's northern countryside. Instead of diminishing the threat to the Lon Nol regime, the incursion may well have increased it by inciting local Communists and the North Vietnamese to take a more active and overt role.

A further agony of the Cambodian mission was that, once again, the Communists were prepared for the move and successfully evacuated their troops and intelligence. The invasion that was going to destroy the central headquarters ended in a display of captured sacks of rice. The New Yorker's distinguished Southeast Asia reporter, Robert Shaplen, estimated that it would take the Communists about six months to resupply what was destroyed. That did not seem to be a smashing blow in a war that they have been waging for 25 years.

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The President's record on crucial domestic issues has been as unsettling as his foreign policy to those who had hoped for a new Nixon. No one, to be sure, ever expected the new Administration to give a strong forward push to the black cause, to do more than keep in motion what already was going forward, while easing the fear and antagonism of whites who felt themselves threatened by black economic and social gains. But it came as a numbing shock to many liberals--to many others, too--to find a national Administration 16 years after Brown us. Board of Education compiling a record that could be publicly labeled "anti-Negro" by Bishop Stephen G. Spottswood, chairman of the board of the NAACP, not a militant organization. A Government sworn to enforce the law and the Constitution instead appeared to align itself, in case after case, with the white resistance rather than with the aggrieved black minority.

At the end of 1964, for instance, there were 2,164,000 blacks registered to vote in the Confederate states. In 1965, after the march from Selma to Montgomery, the monumental Voting Rights Act was pushed through Congress by the Johnson Administration. By the fall of 1969, the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council could report 3,248,000 registered blacks, an increase of more than 1,000,000, of which 897,000 had been gained in the seven states affected by the law. Yet, by then, the Nixon Administration, under the spell of the President's Iago, Attorney General John Mitchell, had asked Congress not to renew the key provisions of the act. When Congress passed it anyway, Leonard Garment, a Nixon aide involved in civil rights matters, telegraphed Bishop Spottswood a brazen claim to credit for a measure "stronger in its present version, since it incorporates the existing Voting Rights Act and suspends literacy tests nationwide."

The Administration in the summer of 1969 publicly abandoned the Johnson Administration's effective "guidelines" for desegregation, then retreated from using the most effective means ever devised for integrating schools--cutting off Federal funds to districts that maintain segregation. It fell back on the policy of Federal court action that previously had achieved desegregation of only about one percent of Southern black students in nearly a decade. Since then, Mitchell's attorneys, many of them reluctant dragons, actually have gone into Federal courts several times, not for the relief of blacks suffering from school segregation but for the relief of white school boards refusing or delaying desegregation. HEW's civil rights enforcement chief, Leon Panetta, was forced to resign for trying to push integration. One of the things that kept his boss, Robert Finch, in hot water at HEW was his attempts, however ineffective, to move ahead on school desegregation. Not until after George Wallace had survived the Alabama primary, and only a month or two before school opened for 1970, did the Administration file suits to achieve substantial desegregation.

Against this program of retreat, Administration propagandists assiduously ballyhoo the so-called Philadelphia Plan, which requires construction unions working on Federally funded projects to give opportunities to minorities--a tough program on paper, but one of almost no impact so far--and the provision of a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar fund to aid desegregating schools and to improve some all-black schools. The fund and the Philadelphia Plan, it is claimed, are of immediate and practical--not theoretical--impact; watch what we do, not what we say, the Administration insists. But "immediate and practical impact" also will come from the "no-knock" arrests and the "preventive detention" permitted by the Administration's stringent crime bill for the District of Columbia, which just happens to have the largest black majority of any American city. And the impact the appointment of G. Harrold Carswell might have had on the Supreme Court does not seem at all theoretical to anyone familiar with this kind of Southerner. Moreover, after Carswell's defeat, it was to white Southerners, not to the blacks against whom they have consistently discriminated, that the President of the United States addressed his bitter sympathies. That had immediate and practical impact, too, as did Pat Moynihan's surprisingly insensitive use of the words "benign neglect" to describe his proposed stance for the Nixon Administration toward blacks.

The years of Federal insistence on the rights of black citizens had created in the minds of many whites--particularly the disadvantaged--fear, animosity and legitimate concern for their own rights and needs. But in seeking, as every available political test suggests it has done, to win the favor of those whites by substantially retreating from the cause of the blacks, the Nixon Administration not only overlooked many of the moral and legal imperatives of the matter but, in fact, heightened the fears and tensions all around. It was not possible for mere retreat to satisfy the outright segregationists among the backlashers--only surrender could do that. And the retreat merely confirmed the blacks' long-standing suspicion that when push came to shove, the white folks would not go much further than token gestures.

The single most inglorious retreat by the Administration on civil rights has been the slowdown in desegregation of Southern schools. Yet that dismal record is being hidden by one of the slickest PR efforts the Nixon men have tried. Before he took office, for example, civil rights officials measured how many pupils from all-black schools in the South actually had been "desegregated" by counting only the blacks assigned to individual schools that continued to be at least 50 percent white. This reflected the idea that genuine desegregation is achieved only when students from formerly all-black, usually disadvantaged schools are assigned to classrooms with enough white students so that they are not transformed into either all-black or predominantly black schools. For the fall of 1970, Leonard Garment proclaimed what appeared to be a staggering increase from 164,000 to 1,000,000 black students expected to be in "desegregated school systems" in the South; at the same time, Assistant Attorney General Jerris Leonard said that 97 percent of Southern black pupils would be in integrated school districts when the schools opened for the 1970--1971 year.

But in fact, the sweeping "gains" claimed by Garment and Leonard will be achieved to a large extent by counting this year the number of children attending school in districts with some degree of desegregation--a far different thing from the earlier school-by-school criterion. Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, the chairman of the Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, has pointed out that in "this kind of hocus-pocus," Garment and Leonard include, for instance, many black pupils in Columbia, South Carolina, who still will be in all-black schools but will be counted under the Nixon method as having been desegregated, because administratively they are in a desegregated district.

This kind of thing ought to be borne in mind as the Nixon Administration and the courts follow up on the numerous desegregation suits the Justice Department filed in the summer of 1970. At almost the same time, the Administration was helping devise a "desegregation plan" for Richmond, Virginia, that would leave the city with numerous all-black schools, and it asked a Federal court of appeals to modify a district court plan that would have completely eliminated segregated schools in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Close scrutiny of the Administration's handling of the issue of tax exemption for private all-white "academies" in the South will further confuse those who try to pin down Nixon's commitment or lack of same to school desegregation. The Southern Regional Council counts almost 400,000 pupils already enrolled in these dubious institutions, most of which are of recent vintage and low quality, and obviously set up to avoid public school integration. Former HEW Secretary Robert Finch announced earlier this year that he and other good guys were battling within the Administration to reverse the Treasury's policy of granting these academies tax exemptions--under which the contributions that are their only means of support are tax-exempt. Finch said this was an unconstitutional form of Federal subsidy to maintain racial segregation, which it patently was; but he did not say who was on the other side of the battle, nor why Nixon needed to have it fought before him at such length.

Last spring, however, the Supreme Court held that local governments could grant local tax exemptions for church properties; seizing that as a "precedent," the Justice Department argued in Federal court that the white-academy tax exemptions were an act of "benevolent neutrality" to benefit education, rather than a subsidy to sustain segregation. This, as Reese Cleghorh of the Southern Regional Council later wrote, meant benevolent neutrality toward, and tax exemption for, such institutions as "the one-teacher Holy Bible Church School in Lamar County, Georgia, which has no accreditation, no drinking fountains, no waste disposal, no rest rooms and very obviously little education, and where interested public school officials have been turned away by men with guns."

This position was not only untenable but ludicrous, and in July, with suits pending in court, the Internal Revenue Service "rescued" the Justice Department from it by ruling that it would revoke the tax-exempt status of private schools that continued to practice racial discrimination. Attorney General Mitchell was said by Administration sources to have approved this policy change, despite the earlier position of the Justice Department, and the IRS ruling was depicted as the outcome of a mighty policy battle within the Administration.

If there was such a battle on such a transparent question, it only makes one wonder the more whether this Administration has any real commitment--aside from legal obligations--to school desegregation. Its bumbling and stumbling on the tax-exemption issue alienated everybody, including Southerners, and evoked wrathful threats from J. Strom Thurmond to lead the Confederacy back to George Wallace.

• • •

The Nixon record on the economy, if by no means brilliant, was at least more straightforward than on Vietnam and race--although here, too, the President showed fondness for talking tough and doing little, as when he proposed a tax on leaded gasoline with much fanfare, then abandoned it to its predictable fate among members of Congress facing an election year. In fact, Nixon proved a master of this ploy--for instance, in a 1970 State of the Union message that was almost entirely devoted to proposals for saving the natural environment. It was followed by a succession of inadequate programs, notably a ten-billion-dollar plan for myriad sewage-disposal plants that turned out to be four billion dollars Federal and six billion dollars state, or a Federal rate of expenditure less than that already authorized by Congress.

The Nixon Administration does have to be credited with a minor cutback in defense spending and with what appears to have been a zealous but vain effort to hold down Federal spending enough to produce a budget surplus and curb inflation. But this resulted primarily in funding social programs on a level even lower than previously, without major impact on inflation. Right at the outset, Nixon could not find the political courage to retain the Johnson-imposed surtax on incomes, in order to reduce consumer buying power and increase Federal revenues; and in his first year in office, he was stampeded by the Democratic Congress into acquiescence in an ill-advised tax reduction that not only damaged his own anti-inflation efforts but, for years to come, will haunt any President trying to find funds to meet national priorities.

The Democrats, sensing the one political opening they really know how to exploit--the opportunity to run against Herbert Hoover and the Depression--are trying to make it appear that the Nixon economic sin is his failure to impose "guidelines" for wages and prices, or even wage-price controls. His real failure, however, was in permitting tax reduction at a time of inflation so rampant that the Federal Reserve had pushed interest rates out of sight in an effort to squeeze the money supply.

So, by mid-1970, in three vital areas where even his opponents might most reasonably have expected Nixon to have made demonstrable progress, he had little to exhibit, although the economy showed signs of coming around at last; and on the race question, at least, the situation had retrogressed. For these reasons alone, Nixon had failed by most measures to restore Presidential credibility in its most important sense--that of broad public confidence in the office and in the man who occupies it. That kind of credibility has to be based fundamentally, almost mystically, on a general belief that the President is doing his best to hear and heed all interests and points of view, then trying to act for the general good.

But even these failures, taken in sum, were not more damaging to Presidential credibility than the most ironic and menacing development of all. In just 18 months, the President who had promised, above all, to "bring us together" had fostered one of the most divisive Administrations in history--one that had pitted groups, sections, even generations, against one another, either in ignorance and ineptitude or for short-run political gain, and one that in its harsh commitment to law and order had openly threatened dissent and unorthodoxy by means ranging from conspiracy trials to blustering oratory.

Vice-President Agnew's attacks on "effete snobs," bad apples, university officials, black militants, the press, former Democratic officials and members of Congress were the loudest and best publicized of these acts; but they were not so ominous as Mitchell's insistence on prosecuting the Chicago Seven under a statute of dubious constitutionality or his department's relentless pursuit of the Black Panthers. Even worse than these vendettas was the legislation Mitchell approved or sponsored that would invade the Bill of Rights and the American legal tradition. In a special category of menace was Mitchell's extension of "national security" wire tapping and bugging, without court orders or any other sanction or safeguard, to domestic individuals and organizations that he or the President considered a threat to national security. That certainly included the SDS, but no one could know who else.

The President himself made his own unique contributions, the more shocking for their source, to the climate of divisiveness and vengefulness. His slashing attack on the Senate for rejecting Cars-well was a blatant appeal to white Southern chauvinism and paranoia. This was followed, if not exceeded, by his denunciation of "bums" on the campus; his implied approval of the brutal lawlessness of pro-war demonstrators by his reception of the hard-hat leaders within days after construction men in New York had set upon and beaten nonviolent peace demonstrators; his callously worded statement following the senseless Kent State deaths that they "should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy." Even, ludicrously, Nixon's request that Johnny Cash come to the White House and sing Welfare Cadilac suggested what the leader of all the American people really thinks of some of them; for this song, which Cash flatly refused to sing, labels the poor in America as shiftless con men sponging on the silent majority.

It was no wonder in such an atmosphere that, as never before, the faceless permanent bureaucracies of Washington were hard at work compiling, through new computer techniques, the raw material of thought and behavior control in America. The FBI, the Secret Service, the Army, several Cabinet agencies--all were building their "data banks" of millions of dossiers on "persons of interest"--from potential Presidential assassins to student dissenters. The FBI was reported to have made lists of the people who had paid for transportation to Washington during the last peace march there. There was no visible Administration restraint on this activity; and what might ultimately be done with all that information about private American citizens was only too easy to imagine in the Washington of Agnew, Mitchell and Richard Millions Nixon.

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No President of modern times has so tempted the amateur headshrinkers of the Washington press. It is a temptation, perhaps, that should be resisted strenuously--yet every good reporter knows that ours is a Government of men as well as a Government of laws, and that in the case of Presidents, the men quite often prevail over the laws. So it is to Nixon himself that one must finally turn, if he would study the difference between the logical expectations of 1968 and the results of 1970.

The expectations were logical but not therefore justified. The logic is borne out by Nixon's most important score. In his proposed Family Assistance Plan, he laid out the broadest welfare reforms since the original Social Security Act, thus validating in at least one area the basic liberals-for-Nixon script of 1968: Only a conservative Republican critic of doles and handouts could have got away with a guaranteed-income program, however limited, that would cost more and put more people on the welfare rolls, without being labeled a bleeding-heart do-gooder. Just imagine what the House would have done to such a proposal by, say, John F. Kennedy; but Nixon actually got the support of chairman Wilbur D. Mills of the Ways and Means Committee, that stern guardian of the morals of the poor. The program has run into trouble in the Senate but may yet be rescued by hard Administration lobbying.

Despite an agonizingly slow start and the one-vote Senate victory by which he won the Safeguard ABM system upon which he had insisted, Nixon also entered what appears to be real bargaining with the Soviets on nuclear-arms control; in July, the United States put a substantial package of proposals on the table at Vienna; there was virtually no outcry from the right wing, again suggesting the rationale of sending a conservative to do a liberal's work.

It is only fair to point out that no political administration, and Nixon's less than most, functions in a vacuum, nor does what it might wish to do. Even had he not let the Democrats run over him on tax reduction, for instance, Nixon would have found himself strapped for cash to invest in social programs until he could bring the war to a close and head off the inflation. He was confronted with a Democratic Congress and an implacable liberal opposition not prepared to grant even good intentions, let alone lend political support, to the nemesis of Alger Hiss and the low-road campaigner of the Fifties. The difficulties the Family Assistance Plan encountered in the Senate and among entrenched professional welfare workers provided the most shocking example. And when, on good evidence, Nixon's education specialists pointed out that the Johnson Administration's much-touted compensatory education program for ghetto schools had accomplished little or nothing, the education establishment responded to this threat to its pocketbook with outraged cries of racism.

Still, these expectable difficulties have not been the whole story. In the first place, Nixon has not operated confidently from a conservative base he considered secure; instead, he has been constantly looking over his shoulder, as if in fear that the dreaded right wing might be gaining on him. George Wallace's survival in the Alabama primaries kept the South divided, and Ronald Reagan's anticipated re-election in California kept a potential insurgent in threatening position in one of the key Nixon states. In practice, therefore, the hopeful liberal-moderate rationale for electing a Republican conservative took a reverse bounce; the President talked disengagement and negotiation, but he fought and widened the war. He put up one and a half billion dollars to aid the integration of schools and took on the segregated construction unions with the Philadelphia Plan, but the symbols he provided to hold the backlashers in line--the Cars-well nomination, for instance, or the desegregation slowdown--were so divisive that they far outweighed his gestures in the other direction.

Another good reason why the theories of 1968 proved unreal in I969 and 1970 is that the theorists simply overlooked the extent to which Nixon is himself exemplary of the attitudes and experience of those to whom he had appealed in the campaign. His is by no means an old-line Republican Administration, grounded in Wall Street, the loftier reaches of the Ivy League and the industrial establishment; men of noblesse oblige such as William Scranton and Henry Cabot Lodge seem to serve it at arm's length. It is, instead, an Administration of the newly affluent middle class--wealthy construction men, Western entrepreneurs, arrived ethnics, the new managerial class, Southern Republican state chairmen and the like, whose collective wisdom (with honorable exceptions) seems to run to a notion of most Americans as television-watching football fans, desperately worried that blacks will burn up the cities and drive down property values, that students will overthrow the Government and that taxes will go up, so that the poor can work less. Thus, the affairs of the country, at a time of change and turmoil and severe intellectual challenge, have fallen into the hands of a group of well-intentioned, even able men of relatively narrow experience and conventional-to-conservative social attitudes. Nixon himself is not only typical; this Administration is his creation.

In their management of racial matters, for example, the likelihood is that the President, Mitchell, former HEW Secretary Finch and Assistant Attorney General Leonard--like the white middle class in general--have little conception of the depth of black despair or of the vast gulf between the conditions in which black men exist and those in which white men live in America, and less recognition of the casual, almost instinctive racism of so much of white America. This is not only a more charitable, it is a more logical explanation of their policies than that they are simply under the thumb of Strom Thurmond and other Confederate generals. The Nixon Administration is not so much anti-Negro, as Bishop Spottswood charged, as it is typically white and middle class--a subtly different thing, if not much less damaging.

Again, the plain meaning of the report turned in by Chancellor Alexander Heard of Vanderbilt University was that the Nixon White House had little or no understanding of the student political movement in America--which was what, in his famous letter. Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel had already tried to tell the President. Dr. Heard suggested, for instance, that the President's famous Lincoln Memorial chat with students about football and surfing had been, in the days following the Kent State deaths, like "telling a joke at a funeral."

The theorists of 1968 also forgot the extent to which personality dominates American politics. It is Nixon's personality, perhaps even more than his political outlook, that shapes his Administration. For instance, in his days as what Lyndon Johnson once called a "chronic campaigner," Nixon was known as a technician of politics, who would study his problems and prospects and, like a systems engineer, put together a solution or program to which he was likely to remain faithful to the end, even when circumstances changed or demanded ad hoc response. This game-plan approach appears to have carried over into the White House--in Vietnamization and the Southern strategy, for instance--so that the Nixon Administration often gives the impression of being more calculated than dynamic, as does its leader.

There was a revealing moment this past summer in Nixon's television appearance with three network newsmen. Asked by NBC's John Chancellor why he had chosen the conversation "technique," Nixon picked up the word right away and repeated it twice. He was using that technique, he explained, because others had used it, the time seemed ripe and the reporters could "follow up" on their questions. His absorbing interest in the technique--the Presidential gadget and how it would work--was manifest, just as it had been in the 1968 campaign, when he would proudly discuss how cheap and effective was his rediscovered technique of nationwide radio addresses.

Early in his Administration, Nixon had spoken several times of weighty decisions as if they were tangible objects. He would meet with his advisors on Saturday and make the decision whether to build an ABM system; in a few days, he would sit down with the National Security Council and make "the decision" on Middle East policy. This left something of an impression of documents being signed and filed, once and for all, rather than a sense of shifting situations being watched, weighed, managed by fallible but dedicated, responsive and intelligent men.

This emphasis on technique and the President's fondness for policy-making machinery and all sorts of "councils" suggest a sort of compensation for what seems to be his tin ear for the subtleties and rhythm of politics. He may know how to devise and follow a game plan (perhaps right out the window), but no instinctive politician would have shut himself off from the student peace marchers to watch a football game, nor made the "bums" remark the morning after the Cambodia speech, nor let John Mitchell speak to the segregated Delta Council the week after the Jackson State killings. Add to this the Administration's taste for obvious political cosmetics. When District of Columbia crime took a seasonal downturn, the Justice Department claimed its hard-nosed policies were responsible; and when the troops invaded Cambodia, they barely managed to get there before Herb Klein, leading his tame "inspection committee" of friendly governers and members of Congress. The picture that emerges is one of technique without vision, of a mechanistic Administration dedicated as much to political mileage as to substantive achievement.

No one has contributed more to that impression than Richard Millions Nixon, who has himself given a major reason why in his book Six Crises. Discussing his preparations for the "second debate" in 1960, after John Kennedy had "won" the first one, Nixon wrote: "In the final analysis, I knew that what was most important was that I must be myself.... I went into the second debate determined to do my best to convey three basic impressions to the television audience--knowledge in depth of the subjects discussed, sincerity and confidence."

He seems still determined to convey those qualities, and that is a large part of the trouble. Anyone who is determined to convey sincerity and confidence can rarely be sincere or confident, and Nixon seldom seems either. It is patently only surface sincerity, for one famous example, to say that one would rather be a one-term President than to preside over a "second-rate power"; precisely because the statement is so obviously designed to convey patriotism, self-sacrifice and dedication, it does not really do so.

As for confidence, through the contrived sincerity of Nixon's television appearances, one catches more disturbing glimpses. The quick unexpected attacks, for instance, on Clark Clifford and George Ball not only ought to have been beneath a President (although the only such personal moment in which Lyndon Johnson indulged himself publicly was directed at Nixon) but they ominously recalled Nixon's earlier incarnation as the hard-hat of the Eisenhower Administration. Under pressure, as President, he appears still reluctant to stay away from the jugular. Or perhaps such jumpy reaction is only another version of the chest-thumping talk of the April 30 speech on Cambodia. That evening, the President spoke of humiliation and defeat as if he personally would have to suffer them for the nation, of will and character as if only power and battle could prove them, of the overwhelming strength of the United States as if it had to be demonstrated to exist.

This struck many listeners as something more personal than superpatriotism, as a disturbing preoccupation with manhood and its more muscular symbols. A day or so later, in a conversation about the real reason behind the invasion of Cambodia, someone suggested to me that the answer was obvious: Nixon invaded Cambodia because he could never make the first string.

Glib as it may be, that verdict still has a certain ring of insight. Why, for instance, did Nixon presume to mention his relatively small Cambodia decision--again, he spoke of it as if it were something he had placed in an envelope and sealed with wax--in the same context with the war-and-peace decisions of Wilson. F.D.R., John Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis? Why, later, did he allow comparison of his Cambodian campaign to Stalingrad and D day? What was the wellspring of his bitter but historically inaccurate complaint that in denying him Haynsworth or Carswell on the Supreme Court, Congress was not passing judgment on them but invading prerogatives granted to every other President?

So we come back, I think, to Captain Queeg--a limited man, not quite sure of himself, therefore going by the book, yet determined at all costs to measure up to great demands and to have his due in return. This is not necessarily ignoble; in fact, one senses that Nixon, like Lyndon Johnson before him, is making mighty efforts as Commander in Chief and director of foreign policy, to live up to the great teachers and precepts of the post-War era--Truman, Acheson, Dulles, Eisenhower, collective security, resistance to aggression, American leadership of the free world against the Communist world.

With the same single-mindedness, his domestic course seems to unwind relentlessly from the narrow but embracing conviction that the country is moving right, going conservative, perhaps even faster than he can, and that his mission and his fortune is to sail with the tide and protect us all from the monsters of the right wing. But is there such an irresistible trend? Are those monsters so menacing that any compromise is justified if it seems to head them off? Might not even great teachers and landmarks of national policy have become inadequate or out of date in a time of such swift and profound change?

What is hardest to detect in Richard Nixon is a concept of America rising clear and promising in his own heart, his own mind. And what, as leader, he seems most seriously to lack is the ability to improvise, innovate, make do, recognize and adapt to changed reality, all with the same goals in mind--steady vision with flexible response. Lacking them, is the game plan deepest in Richard Nixon's soul only to prove himself--once the chronic campaigner, one of life's most famous losers--as big a man as any of his predecessors? If so, and if he characteristically sticks to that goal come hell or high water, we can continue to expect a tin ear to be turned to great opportunity.