Nixon: The Pursuit of Peace and Politics

MOST presidencies develop their own interior rhythms, cycles of public motion and private labor, of crisis and calm. Last week Richard Nixon began a new round of intense activity. At summer's end, congressional elections loomed in the middle distance, and for the first time Nixon saw his popularity in opinion polls dip below 50%. Campuses were reopening, bringing uneasy possibilities of violent dissent. The auto strike diluted optimism that the economy was at last beginning to right itself (see BUSINESS). And in the Middle East, earlier hopes for peace were rapidly unraveling. Nixon moved almost simultaneously on all fronts.

At the center of his concern was the Middle Eastern balance of power. As Palestinian guerrillas menaced the government of Jordan's King Hussein, Nixon met in Washington with Premier Golda Meir to discuss new United States aid to Israel. A day earlier, in an off-the-record meeting with Chicago newspaper editors, the President mentioned the possibility of American intervention in the Jordan crisis (see WORLD). His remarks amounted to a calculated leak warning Arabs to move cautiously. The Chicago Sun-Times published a story on it, which the White House made no real effort to deny.

Showing the Flag. In his broader Mideastern policy, the President advanced a strategy of somewhat less pugnacious pressures to persuade Russians, Arabs and Israelis alike of U.S. determination to find stability in the Mediterranean area. Even before the Jordanian outbreak of civil warfare, Nixon announced that he would leave at the first of next week for a nine-day European tour--his third trip overseas since he took office--that would deliberately take him around the Allied perimeter of the Mediterranean.

Nixon had been talking about the journey in general terms since the spring. Now it took on a special urgency. By his presence, the President means to show the flag in the Mediterranean, where Russian naval strength has been growing. The point will not be lost when he appears at sea on the bridge of the guided-missile cruiser Springfield, a flagship of the Sixth Fleet, or when he calls on NATO's southern headquarters in Naples. His visit with General Franco in Madrid will be a much publicized reminder of the renewed agreement on American military bases in Spain, just across the water from the Russian missiles.

Three I's. Some other stops on Nixon's tour will be politically eclectic. In London, he will meet with British Prime Minister Edward Heath for the first time since-Heath took office. In response to a longstanding invitation, Nixon will call on Yugoslavia's President Tito, underscoring the Administration's desire for good relations with Communist regimes of all stripes and at the same time its support for Yugoslavia's independence. Nixon is also hoping to repeat in Belgrade the exuberant success of his Rumanian visit of 14 months ago.

It takes no extraordinary fund of political cynicism to know that the President's trip is also geared to the American congressional campaigns. An axiom of U.S. politics dictates that Presidents enhance their party's chances in such an election by asserting their leadership with a maximum of panoply and publicity. For no compelling diplomatic reasons, Nixon will stop in Rome to see Italian President Giuseppe Saragat and Pope Paul, and will later visit Ireland. He and Pat, after all, are of Irish blood. That makes two out of the three traditional ethnic I's--Italy, Ireland and Israel--that many traveling American politicians like to cultivate as election days approach. If it were not so diplomatically complicated, he might have liked to drop in on Israel as well.

In a political sense, Nixon's trip will be a foreign duplication of his excursions last week into the American countryside. The President flew first to Kansas State University in the gentle hill country of northeast Kansas, where longitude and attitude seem to intersect in quintessential definition of Middle America. There, if anywhere, the man of both coasts would find a spiritual home.

Plea for Civility. The occasion for the speech was as appropriate as the setting. It was the first of K-State's Alfred M. Landon Lectures this year, a gracious presidential gesture to the 83-year-old Kansan who survived his humiliation in 1936 at the hands of Franklin Roosevelt to become a minor elder statesman of the Republican Party. K-State, as political instinct and the Secret Service informed Nixon, was a comparatively safe campus on which he could propound his ideas on radical violence; Nixon won the 1968 mock election there.

As it happened, Nixon enjoyed an advantage that he could not have foreseen. More than 15,000 people, mostly students, crammed into the university's cavernous field house--and in the back rows of the balcony were two dozen leftist hecklers. Wearing the school colors in a purple and white striped tie, the President launched into a variation on his inaugural theme of civility and lowered voices. "The time has come," he said, "for us to recognize that violence and terror have no place in a free society." His speech was an appeal to "the rules of the game," a lucid and occasionally eloquent invocation of decency, self-restraint and mutual tolerance.

"Those who bomb," said Nixon, "who ambush policemen, who hijack airplanes, who hold their passengers hostage, all share in common not only a contempt for human life but also a contempt for those elemental decencies on which a free society rests." He carried the argument further, demanding an end to "passive acquiescence, or even fawning approval" of explosive radicalism. "What corrodes a society even more deeply than violence," he said, "is the acceptance of violence, the condoning of terror, excusing of inhuman acts in a misguided effort to accommodate the community's standards to those of the violent few."

Several laminations below the surface, beneath the overall tone of re straint, was a distinct firmness, even an oblique suggestion that if the universities could not control radical violence, then the Government would. Somewhat confusingly, the threat was contained in a denial that Government has any interest in campus intervention. "It is time," said Nixon, "for the responsible university and college administrators, faculty and student leaders to stand up and be counted." Whereupon nearly all of the audience stood up and cheered. "Because we must remember only they can save higher education in America," he went on. "If we turn only to Government to save it, then Government will move in and run the colleges and universities."

Crowd Orchestration. Even if it had been planned, no Brechtian genius could have staged the audience participation better. Before Nixon was 60 seconds into his speech, the platoon of hecklers began to shout: "Tell us about Kent State!" "Right on!" "Make more bombs!" The vast majority of the audience began a counterpoint of loud and sustained applause. Nixon, hearing the radicals, hurried his speech, with half-stops in his monotone. But his lines about "the willingness to listen to somebody without trying to shout him down" summoned up thunderous ovations.

Afterward, some K-State students expressed resentment at the role they had felt obliged to play. Said Rowan Conrad, a graduate student: "This was a pep rally. We've been used. He came here and staged us." Donna Diehl, a junior from Salina, Kans., almost apologized: "I disapproved of the hecklers. They were dumb and weren't accomplishing anything. I found myself clapping just to show them that I didn't approve." Obviously, however, much of the cheering was an uncomplicated endorsement of the President and his message.

Conventional Politics. Nixon justly regarded the speech as a political triumph and afterward waded into the student crowd for several minutes of ebullient handshaking. He later said that he regretted not being able to visit other, more militant campuses. Turning quickly to more conventional politics, he flew to Chicago to lend his prestige to Senator Ralph Smith's campaign against Adlai Stevenson III. While there, the President took the opportunity to meet with eight leaders of Chicago's large and politically powerful Polish community and at one point to press the flesh with a group of hardhat construction workers in the Loop.

There he participated in a warm ceremony welcoming 140 men and women of 37 nationalities who were about to become American citizens. Pat Nixon gave each new citizen an American-flag pin like the one the President wears in his lapel. Then all--including Candidate Smith--adjourned to a buffet table adorned with a large spun-sugar elephant.

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