The Calley Affair (Contd.)

WHEN Richard Nixon announced that he would release Lieut. William Calley Jr. from the Fort Benning stockade to house arrest and then added that he intended to review the Calley case before final sentence is carried out, he left several interesting things unsaid. One was that two days before he reportedly awoke at 2 a.m. to wrestle with his conscience over the Calley affair, the President discussed congressional distress at the guilty verdict by telephone with his party's leader in the House, Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan--although the White House insists it was not the President who brought up the subject. Another was that he bypassed Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird when he ordered Calley removed from the stockade. Laird, who now hints that he opposed Nixon's intervention, heard about it only after the fact.

The third Nixon omission was even more significant. The President did not explain that Army machinery was already under way to spring Calley to house arrest, initiated at the request of the defense by Major General Orwin C. Talbott, commanding general of Fort Benning and the convening authority for Calley's court-martial. Many officers greeted Nixon's intervention with bitter dismay. One said of the President: "He knew all along that Calley was coming out. He just beat us to the punch."

Within the military, Calley friend and Calley foe alike agreed that the President's motives were political. In Viet Nam, SP/5 Willy Rowand of Sunshine Harbor, N.J., observed: "Nixon is playing politics, of course." Said Captain Leroy Saage of San Antonio: "It is a political decision, coinciding in part with the mail he's been getting. Nixon has also implied that he feels the verdict is unjust. It gives the public an impression that Nixon has no faith in military jurisprudence."

Morale and Outrage. No one made that point better than Calley's prosecutor, Captain Aubrey Daniel III, who wrote President Nixon an indignantly eloquent letter that belongs among the classic defenses of the precept that the U.S. must be a Government of laws, not of men (see box). Calley's lawyer, George Latimer, naturally found Daniel's views "entirely wrong," and added: "I believe the President was exactly right in what he did." The President dealt only indirectly with the Calley case in his TV address. He said he felt he should "speak up for the 2,500,000 fine young Americans who have served in Viet Nam." Nixon added: "The atrocity charges in individual cases should not and cannot be allowed to reflect on their courage and their self-sacrifice."

The Daniel letter stood in stark contrast to the hesitant response of most political figures to the Calley verdict and to Nixon's interference. To be sure, anyone of political prominence could legitimately duck the question by pleading that he did not wish to repeat the President's error of influencing the appellate process. Among the 1972 Democratic presidential possibilities in the Senate, only Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts spoke up for the verdict before the Daniel letter was made public, though his mail has been running solidly pro-Calley. Later, Maine's Edmund Muskie said that Nixon appeared to be prejudging the appeal; George McGovern of South Dakota chided Nixon for seeming to give in to public pressure. Birch Bayh of Indiana said that the President should "keep his mouth shut until the final review and then decide whether justice was served."

Republican Senator John Tower of Texas confided to a dinner companion: "The Calley case could become the best thing that's happened to us politically in years." A colleague, Ohio's Robert Taft Jr., defended what Nixon did as a proper exercise of his powers as Commander in Chief; Taft argued that it was necessary to restore morale in the armed forces and to calm outrage among the civilian populace.

Accepting Atrocities. Nixon may well have damped the popular outcry. Few of the pro-Calley demonstrations planned last week drew much of a turnout; in San Diego, for example, only 250 supporters--a mixed bag of John Birchers and antiwar protesters--turned out to rally and march for Calley. "The President sort of took the steam out of people," said Terry Repsher, a Houston high school junior. Dallas, however, bloomed with bumper stickers demanding: WHY CALLEY? A giant pro-Calley billboard blossomed in Bridgeport, Conn. But from the Timber Ridge School in Skokie, Ill., a Chicago suburb, 41 students wrote Nixon: "We are ten and eleven years old and afraid to grow up in America if a murderer is considered a hero."

Around the world, the admiration that the U.S. had won for trying and convicting Calley was quickly qualified when Nixon intervened in the case. Pro-Americans and anti-Americans were dismayed, for a kaleidoscope of reasons. East Germany's Neues Deutschland ran in adjoining columns pictures of Angela Davis in chains and Lieut. Calley leaving the stockade. Private Eye, London's black-humor satirical review, ran a cover photograph of Charles Manson with the caption: "I should have joined the Army." In Saigon, the respected, generally critical newspaper Duoc Nh`a Nam objected: "The Nixon decision tacitly acknowledged that the savage and mass killings of Vietnamese civilians was right. A white American who killed hundreds of yellow-skinned Vietnamese was personally freed by the U.S. President."

Money Problem. Throughout it all, Rusty Calley remained ensconced at 31-D Arrowhead Road; Calley, his secretary, Mrs. Shirley Sewell, and his girl friend, Anne Moore, invested in a $35 automatic letter opener to try to keep up with the mail, which peaked at 10,000 pieces in one day and is still coming in at the rate of 2,000 letters a day. They have yet to find a hostile message. Florists' vans turn up daily with bouquets of roses or carnations, and the neighbors bring gifts of food. Since Calley is still considered an officer, his MP guards call him "sir." His most urgent problem is money; the fan mail has brought in only $3,000 for his defense fund. He has only received about $15,000 of his share of a $100,000 advance from Viking Press for Lieutenant Calley, an expansion of his Esquire "confessions" to Writer John Sack that is to be published in September. But the expenses of his defense have been substantial, and at the moment he is trying to find $700 to pay the Army for quarters occupied by his lawyers during the court-martial.

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