1971 Just May Be Better

As Americans rang in the New Year last week, it was an oddly kaleidoscopic moment. Bostonians had slogged through the snowiest December since 1947, and the traffic-snarling snowfalls gave the angular shapes of the town houses on Commonwealth Avenue a specially softened calm. Houston's golf courses were flecked with executives basking in record warm temperatures. Nippy winds scoured clean the usually smoggy Los Angeles basin, offering Southern Californians breathtaking panoramas that they rarely see. The vagaries of the weather matched the novelty of the national mood, as Americans took stock of 1970 and looked to the year ahead. However tentatively, the feeling was that things have been so bad that maybe, just maybe, they are about to get better.

Though there was no sudden end in sight to the litany of plagues that turned 1970 into a year to be well rid of, there came scattered signs that at least the nation's economic illness may be turning into convalescence. That will be the best of any good news; a Louis Harris survey published this week found that more Americans are concerned about the economy than about any other issue. The Commerce Department reported that its economic leading indicators rose an average of 1% in November. November also saw an increase in help-wanted classified ads for the first time in 14 months. In Paris, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicted a "fairly strong" U.S. business upturn--and a slackening of inflation--for 1971. Last week the Dow-Jones average soared into the mid-800s, the high for 1970.

Wait Till Next Year. Despite the frenetic peregrinations of the last days of the 91st Congress, Administration operatives found the turn of the year a time for self-examination. President Nixon helicoptered to Bethesda Naval Hospital for his annual physical checkup; his doctors found him to be in "excellent health," even to have "a young man's blood pressure." His political standing seemed less clear. At the end of 1970 the Nixon men, reported TIME White House Correspondent Simmons Fentress, were "still a bit defensive, like ballplayers who can only tell the fans to wait until next year." Nixon is still getting low ratings in the polls on the performance of his job, though Americans paid their President a customary tribute by voting him the man they most admired in an annual Gallup sounding--by a considerably smaller margin than the year before.

Nixon's men promise that something new is being charted in the Administration, and that midcourse corrections are being made. There will be, they say, a more positive approach to the Congress. Already there has been a rejiggering of advisers and administrators at Cabinet level and below. There is even a new spirit of self-criticism among the men who came confidently into office with Nixon only to find their earlier certainties inadequate to the nation's needs.

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan left the White House staff last month to return to teaching, he asked for a frank recognition that simplicities in government no longer suffice. A Harvard colleague, Sociologist David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd), echoes the thought. "I don't ask for the leadership to be preachery and noble." says Riesman, "but I think we would be in much better shape if it were more complex and candid. If the President said, 'We don't know how to manage a big economy, no society has really clone it very well,' my feeling is that people would be less anxious. The same with drug problems, Viet Nam and many other of our large burdens."

To Riesman, the questions now troubling Americans are basic: "What can we believe? What is our ultimate end? Who will lead us? Where are we going?" Part of the malaise, he adds, "lies in not knowing where the bottom is and how far down we're going to go." But no national mood can last forever, whether it be the ebullience of the Kennedy years or the despair that has been increasingly the style since November 1963.

New Innocence. Already there are signs that the gloom is lifting. Aptly enough, even the radical Weathermen seem to sense a change in the climate: Bernardine Dohrn gave a statement to the Liberation News Service suggesting that bombings have been a tactical mistake because they isolated the bombers from possible supporters. She called for a return to pacific protest. The recent ferment has begun to be quelled in trivial ways: Boston's staunchly traditional Locke-Ober, which lifted its men-only rule for the first-floor restaurant in August after a Women's Lib onslaught, has just reinstated the ban. After Cambodia and Kent State, the campuses are newly quiet. It is a time of consolidation: a time when people turn from the weariness of insoluble problems to a refuge in romance and the kind of new innocence incarnated by Actress Ali MacGraw in Love Story (see SHOW BUSINESS).

From the thesis of characteristic American optimism and the antithesis of wild disillusionment, there may come a synthesis that is more honest and appropriate to the modern world than either. If that happens, paradoxically, Americans could turn to antiquity for a text for their times. "Perseverance is more prevailing than violence." wrote Plutarch. ''Many things that cannot be overcome when they are together yield themselves up when taken little by little."

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