Discontent of the Straights

In a seeming classic of circumvention, the Nixon Administration last week staged the White House Conference on Youth at a Y.M.C.A. camping center in the Colorado Rockies, 7,500 ft. above sea level and 1,800 miles from the White House. To compound their isolation, the 1,400 delegates (420 of them adults) were soon blanketed by more than two feet of snow that fell on the site near Rocky Mountain National Park. While manfully debating the great issues that a preconference poll showed are most troubling youth, the delegates had to borrow Army parkas from nearby Fort Carson and improvise boots from chartreuse plastic grocery bags.

In this hermetic atmosphere, two young rabbis were overheard discussing whether to make a side trip to the nearest hamlet, five miles away. "But Rabbi," said one, "nobody lives down there, not even Eskimos." Replied his companion: "I just want to see if the real world still exists."

Cheek to Cheek. All this grew out of a top-level decision to split youth problems away from the regular once-a-decade White House Conference on Children and Youth, which took place in Washington last December (TIME, Dec. 28). But why Colorado? Stephen Hess, 38, the conference chairman, explained that the site freed everyone from distractions, to say nothing of saving $180,000 in big-city hotel bills. With considerable logic, critics sensed that the Administration was trying to avoid a confrontation on its own doorstep.

Few delegates arrived with disruption in mind. Many sported crew cuts; one wore a T shirt from the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Many were nominated by Governors, party youth groups and organizations ranging from the Boy Scouts to the Sierra Club. One girl from San Francisco was a veteran demonstrator: she had organized a pro-Nixon rally during last spring's nationwide protests against Administration policies. When a rock band deafened the proceedings, the kids promptly began dancing in 1950s style, cheek to cheek.

The few radicals who did drift in were taken aback. Said James S. Kunen, a veteran of the 1968 Columbia bust and author of The Strawberry Statement: "I didn't think they could find this many straight kids in America."

Recycled Reforms. Even so, Hess & Co. had good reason to support their choice of delegates. They said they carefully used census reports to reflect the U.S. youth population. Example: 20% of the young delegates were college students, slightly overrepresenting the 16% of young Americans who are in fact collegians. Blacks (12% of the youth population) accounted for 16% of the delegates. Others included working youths (27%) and young housewives (9%).

The nature of the representation made the results all the more startling. Imbued with great faith in the U.S. political process, the delegates went to work with a vengeance to pick the reforms they wanted. They overloaded three high-speed Xerox machines with 1,500,000 sheets of draft resolutions, petitions and recommendations from committees, subcommittees, sub-subcommittees, task forces, subplenary task forces, caucuses and assorted alliances. An ecology task force thoughtfully arranged for the recycling of used documents at a nearby plant. A task force on race and minority groups split into caucuses for American Indians, black Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, Spanish-speaking Americans and "nonethnic Americans." Several of the caucuses then held a press conference to protest the alleged underrepresentation of Italian Americans.

When the sun finally began to melt the snow on the third day, the delegates had shown a powerful discontent with the Administration. Veterans of student politics and service organizations took the lead in marshaling the more naive and confused participants. Said the preamble of the conference's report: "We are not motivated by hatred, but by disappointment over and love for the unfulfilled potential of this nation." Republican Senator Bill Brock. 40, one of two overridden adult members of the task force that drafted the preamble, immediately called the rhetoric "masochistic, negative, nonproductive and not representative of American youth."

Calling for complete U.S. withdrawal from Indochina by Dec. 31, the delegates voted to use some of the Government's $1,104,000 in conference expense funds to send telegrams of endorsement to the nonviolent groups sponsoring last weekend's antiwar protests. Further bucking Administration policies, various task forces urged a complete end to strip mining, the immediate resignation of J. Edgar Hoover, and amnesty for all draft violators.

Message for Everybody. The ecology panel used consultants to draft a detailed bill proposing a national corps of volunteers to work on environmental projects; a panel on drugs called for the open, legalized sale of marijuana regulated by the Government (a black caucus dissented strongly). By a vote of 493 to 127, the final session also declared that "any sexual behavior between consenting, responsible individuals [not just adults] must be recognized and tolerated by society as an acceptable life-style."

When HEW Secretary Elliot Richardson told the delegates, "You may well ask 'Is anyone listening?''" a skeptical delegate brought down the house by answering: "Yeah, the FBI." Richardson promised to bring up this year's proposals at the "earliest" Cabinet meeting, but warned the delegates that not every recommendation could get action. Unwilling to leave follow-up efforts entirely to the White House staff, the delegates created their own group to issue public reports on results.

For most delegates, that seemed adequate. Alex Stevens, 17, a black student government leader from Miami Beach High School, told TIME Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand: ''We are making our report to the nation, to Congress, to everybody. We don't think that Nixon is necessarily going to be in office for a long time, and we will have somebody later who might listen."

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