An Act of Usurpation

It was like a clenched fist at a garden party. Discreet ads presented their accustomed celebration of the good life. Rolls-Royces at $31,600. Bracelets at $1,200 each ("Two will give you a beautiful necklace"). The cartoons included the customary chuckle at suburbia. White space set off John Updike's latest four-line poem, "Upon Shaving Off One's Beard." But leading off last week's "Talk of the Town" section, with Eustace Tilley presiding at the top of the page as usual, was the sternest editorial The New Yorker has ever run.

"The two-hundred-year-old American system," it declared, had come under "its most serious attack in modern times, not from the poor, the blacks, or the students, but from the White House." President Nixon's ordering of U.S. troops into Cambodia, it contended, "was in disregard of the Constitution, the tempering strictures of our history, and the principles of the American democracy. It was, therefore, an act of usurpation." Other strictures: "He made war by fiat . . . Our democracy is not an elective dictatorship . . . The President has now declared himself superior to the people, to the legislature, and to the laws."

Another editorial praised the students who protested the President's action: "The week belonged to the young; they provided its victims, its rage and energy, most of its history, and all of its sense of a future re-opened . . . There were strikes, fire bombings and street fights; there were prayers and marches and assemblages. All, perhaps, were inevitable, and were necessary to awaken a sense of remaining alternatives in a people who had lapsed into apathy, exhausted by a meaningless, unending war, silenced by the smiling orthodoxy of an Administration that condoned the most vicious attacks on almost every form of dissent."

Grim Period. To many readers the editorials* suggested that The New Yorker is changing, that it is taking a new interest in serious issues. Mild-mannered Editor William Shawn almost sighs at the idea. He heard the same reaction when an issue of the magazine was given over to John Hersey's documentary on Hiroshima in 1946; when it carried Rachel Carson's warning against contamination. Silent Spring, in 1962; when it ran Richard Harris' analysis of the Justice Department last year. And he has heard it on many other occasions, including the aftermath of editorial attacks on President Johnson over Viet Nam.

But if last week's editorials did not represent an abrupt change for The New Yorker, even Shawn concedes that their tone may have revealed "deeper disquiet." In Shawn's view, this was because the events warranted it. "It was," he said, "one of the grimmest weeks that the country has ever lived through." Then he smiled slightly. "Despite that, there's also a lot of fun in the issue." Dick Nixon may not think so, unless he is in the market for a Rolls.

* The one on Nixon was written by Richard N. Goodwin, a former aide to both John and Robert Kennedy, and a contributor to the magazine since 1964; the one on youth was written by Roger Angell, 49, a New Yorker staffer since 1956.

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