THE CALL FOR RECONCILIATION

IT was an appropriately uptight put-on. As a few hundred hippies gathered in the Boulder, Colo., area--a flower-power resort at this time of the year --the story went out that they had recognized Boulder and Tibet as the only havens from destruction when, as they expected, the asteroid Icarus smashed into the earth. The ultimate happening was supposed to have taken place at 4:48 p.m., E.D.T., June 14. Instead, at the perigee of its 19-year cycle, Icarus missed by roughly 4,000,000 miles, and the hippies stayed around to enjoy the Sugarloaf Mountain air.

If most Americans do not fear the end of the world, they are not so easily deflected from the worry that their stable society is seriously threatened--or, to continue the Icarus imagery, that the nation's high-flying hopes might be doomed to a fiery fall. That concern weighed on many minds as the country was getting back to business after the shock of Robert Kennedy's assassination. At Harvard's class day last week, David Shelton, the senior-class chorister, chanted new lyrics to the university's old anthem. Among the lines:

The nation that greets us is tortured and sick

And mouths inarticulate cures.

We pray for the spirit to cope with a world

Where so very little assures.

Ordered Normality. That the U.S. is tortured cannot be denied. That it is gravely sick is too simplistic a view. After the first spastic reaction to the Kennedy murder (see PRESS), most commentators rejected a blanket diagnosis of disease while at the same time refusing to completely absolve U.S. society and civilization for what had happened. John Kenneth Galbraith, no Pollyanna when it comes to national flaws, observed last week that "the greater danger in our day than violence is unfocused selfcriticism. Nothing so serves as an excuse from reality."

To Lyndon Johnson, "the critical question that we face is whether we can, as one people, hold fast to our faith in each other and in this nation's purpose." There seemed to be something of a shortage of faith. Louis Harris took a survey after the assassination and reported that two out of three Americans believed there was something deeply wrong with their country; 53% agreed with the statement that "law enforcement has broken down and lawlessness has taken over."

Indications such as the Harris poll reinforced the prevailing feeling in Washington that the national mood is one of anger and frustration compounded by a sense of disorientation. Congress, which senses these things with the politician's instinct for self-preservation, sees divergent trends. It discerns a conservative swing in the country--a swing accentuated, paradoxically, by the murder of one of the nation's most articulate liberals. The rationale is that the majority of Americans, the white and the relatively affluent, now crave a return to a kind of ordered normality that may in fact never again exist in traditional terms. How deep and long-lived this trend to the right will prove to be can only be guessed at. A real test will not come until the election is decided in November. But it poses a danger for the short run because it serves as an excuse to block reform--and unreasonable resistance to change can lead to still more turmoil in the U.S.

At the same time, there is also a realization that Robert Kennedy's "constituents"--the poor and neglected--will continue to assert, despite his death, their claim to national attention. Many leaders feel that the moment demands a historic attempt to pull the straining elements of American society together. Lyndon Johnson anticipated it with his renunciation of power. Those who would succeed him are groping for new coalitions and new modes of action with which to meet unprecedented social needs.

Prophets. Thus Hubert Humphrey describes himself as a "healer." Richard Nixon discovers a new "alliance of ideas." Nelson Rockefeller and Eugene McCarthy both talk of "the new politics." No one has quite defined it, but it is a force that seems to strain beyond the New Deal-Great Society consensus. Its prophets cannot do without vast Government largesse, and yet seem to insist on individual action rather than handed-down help. Richard Scammon and others speak of it as "the politics of participation," a phrase that echoes the New Left's "participatory democracy." "This new movement in America," McCarthy said last week, "the movement for reconciliation and reconstruction, for peace and for hope, cuts across all the traditional political and religious groups. It is a common front which reaches from the conservatives, with the exception of the fanatical rightists, to radicals, with the exception of those despairing and hopeless ones who believe that American society is dead and cannot be revived."

Bobby Kennedy died preaching the same message. Now it is the task of his political survivors to make the mission of reconciliation and renewal mesh with the electoral process.

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