M-DAY'S MESSAGE TO NIXON

THEIR numbers were not overwhelming. Probably not many more than 1,000,000 Americans took an active part in last week's Moratorium Day demonstrations against the Viet Nam war; that is barely half of 1 % of the U.S. population. Yet M-day 1969 was a peaceful protest without precedent in American history because of who the participants were and how they went about it. It was a calm, measured and heavily middle-class statement of weariness with the war that brought the generations together in a kind of sedate Woodstock Festival of peace. If the young were the M-day vanguard, many in the ranks wore the housewife's apron and the businessman's necktie, and many who clambered to enlist were political leaders.

In most of the nation, TIME correspondents found that the size and vitality of the M-day turnout exceeded dispassionate expectations. Even in the Midwestern heartland, reported Chicago Bureau Chief Champ Clark, "so many of these folks--far from being professional liberals or agitators or youths simply trying to avoid the draft--were pure, straight middle-class adults who had simply decided, in their own pure, straight middle-class way, that it was time for the U.S. to get the hell out of the war in Viet Nam."

Even Tenor. The impact of M-day was more than the sum of its disparate parts. Hundreds of thousands of Americans found, face to face, that they had a common cause. Those who participated actively may be only the visibly restive; many sympathizers and many others merely interested watched the day's events unfold on television. "Probably the majority of the country were touched in some way by the outpouring," TIME Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey concluded. "It was the collection of smaller events in the churches, the schools, the town halls and on the sidewalks that gave M-day its meaning."

New York provided an extraordinary juxtaposition of moods as the Mets won the World Series the day after M-day. For a few hours, the paper pouring down into Manhattan streets suggested a return to normality and a celebration of all the usual pleasures--and excep-> tional miracles--of everyday life. But this could not erase the deep weariness and despair over the war.

The President had expressed his doubts that the demonstrations would tell him anything new. What, in fact, was M-day's message to Richard Nixon? Many participants demanded immediate and total withdrawal from Viet Nam of all U.S. forces. Yet the Moratorium by no means constituted a call to the President for that solution--although it evidently gained new respectability and popularity (see story on page 20). What M-day did raise was an unmistakable sign to Richard Nixon that he must do more to end the war and do it faster. Unless the pace of progress quickens, he will have great difficulty maintaining domestic support for the two or three years that he believes he needs to work the U.S. out of Viet Nam with honor and in a way that would safeguard U.S. interests and influence in the world.

Letter from Hanoi. His response to the Moratorium has been ambivalent. On Sept. 25, he announced sternly that "under no circumstances will I be affected by it whatever." Last week, seeking to mollify the outraged response to his disdain, Nixon picked out an admonitory letter from Randy Dicks, a 19-year-old Georgetown University student, and made public his reply. "There is a clear distinction between public opinion and public demonstrations," Nixon wrote to Dicks. A demonstration, Nixon argued, expresses only the view of an organized minority; what the great mass of Americans feel may well be something else entirely.

Next day, however, the conciliatory mood shifted. North Viet Nam's Prime Minister Pham Van Dong released a letter to the U.S. peace movement that concluded: "May your fall offensive succeed splendidly." "It was too good to pass up," says White House Communications Director Herb Klein. Nixon summoned Vice President Spiro Agnew for a half-hour meeting, after which Agnew told the press that the M-day leaders "should openly repudiate the support of the totalitarian government which has on its hands the blood of 40,000 Americans." For the protest impresarios to ignore the Hanoi letter, said Agnew, "would bring their objectives into severe question." Dong and Agnew each made a tactical error. The Communists, obviously misunderstanding American politics, damaged the M-day cause in the U.S. by embracing it. The Vice President anachronistically evoked the rigid anti-Communism of the 1950s by trying to damn M-day participants with guilt by association.

Then Nixon released an off-the-record statement made earlier in which he had predicted that the U.S. would be out of the war within three years "on a basis that will promote peace in the Pacific." That deadline happens to coincide with the presidential election. He had already scheduled an address to the nation on Viet Nam for Nov. 3, just a year and two days after Lyndon Johnson ended all U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam. In it, he is likely to propose new action. If the present battlefield lull continues, Nixon may announce a suspension of the daily B-52 raids, already reduced. He will probably go ahead with a third stage of troop withdrawals, perhaps raising the total cutback for this year to the nice round figure of 100,000. The annual truce season of Christmas, New Year's and Tet is approaching; Nixon might offer a more extensive truce than has been customary, which, in effect, would be backing into an experimental ceasefire.

Muted Tone. Many of the Moratorium speakers had proposals of their own. The ideas were not necessarily new, but they stimulated talk and thought. In Lewiston, Me., Senator Edmund Muskie called for a standstill ceasefire, followed by orderly U.S. troop withdrawal. Senator Edward Kennedy muted the tone of his earlier criticism of the war to suit the Moratorium mood; for the first time, he asked that the President announce a fixed schedule for pulling out all ground combat forces within a year and all remaining Air Force and Army personnel by the end of 1972. In Washington, former U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg came out for an immediate end to all U.S. offensive military operations, combined with a presidential statement that the U.S. will discuss at the Paris talks a timetable for "prompt and systematic withdrawal." Nixon in the past has accepted the idea of a cease-fire in Viet Nam only if it is supervised by an international body agreed to by both sides. In June, he said that without such surveillance, and "in the case of a guerrilla war, a cease-fire is a grave disadvantage to those forces that are in place." A fixed deadline for withdrawal, he believes, would end any incentive Hanoi now has to negotiate a settlement; he would agree to a specific timetable only if North Viet Nam agreed to pull its forces out on the same schedule.

Senator Barry Goldwater had a plan of his own: resumption of U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam on Nov. 1 if the Paris negotiations remain deadlocked. A fellow Arizona Republican, Representative Sam Steiger, enlisted 14 House members to sign a letter to Nixon demanding "a sudden major escalation of the war with one aim--victory!" Cavalry calls such as this had a pro forma ring; no one in Washington expects Nixon even to consider them seriously.

Says Columbia's Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Johnson Administration adviser on Communist affairs: "What Nixon really needs to do is to convince the public that he actually has a policy." The President's pledge to end the war within three years coincides with Ted Kennedy's own timetable. So if Nixon moves faster--by increasing troop withdrawals, for instance, and putting forward a firmer schedule --he may well get renewed backing from the large moderate center of M-day supporters. Most of them did not criticize his peace efforts with much vehemence until August, when he delayed the second stage of troop pullbacks.

In 1856, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested." To most Americans, those who marched on M-day and those who switched their headlights on in daylight to show their support for Nixon, the war in Viet Nam is at best a necessary evil. The President himself has suggested the idea of escape, and the American supply of endurance is growing shorter daily. Yet sentiment is far from cohesive or even coherent. Many citizens who want out now may not easily swallow the dust of defeat later.

In a moving but cautionary M-day speech on the New Haven green, Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr.--who joined Mayor Richard Lee in offering a five-point disengagement plan two weeks ago--warned of another danger to America: "Let us admit that the retreat of our power in the face of a persistent enemy might invite other aggressors to doubt--and doubting, to test --our will to help keep the peace, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia. Let us say simply and proudly that our ability to keep the peace also requires above all that America once again become a symbol of decency and hope, fully deserving the trust and respect of all mankind." He added an important caveat: "Let us not make the mistake of saying that defeat is easy to take."

Deep Shock. Strictly speaking, it may be premature to use the word defeat. Still, no matter how the war ends, it is bound to entail some degree--perhaps a high degree--of American loss. What Brewster calls "this wound" will probably provoke deep shock among those many Americans who have nothing in their experience to prepare them for national failure. Instead of making pronouncements about not being the first U.S. President to lose a war, instead of faulting the opposition at home for his difficulties in Southeast Asia, Nixon would perform a better service by preparing the country for the trauma of distasteful reversal--and for the lesson to be learned from it. If he is to heal the wound, he will need unity, not further division. He will need the help of all those who took to the streets last week to try to push him farther along the road out of Viet Nam.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.