*Getting Ready for M-Day

ON top of all his other problems, President Nixon was finding a remark he had made at his press conference the week before coming back to haunt him. He would not, he had insisted, "be affected whatever" by antiwar protests like the Moratorium Day activities planned for Oct. 15. More than any of the newspaper ads placed by the day's organizers, that defiant --some would say contemptuous--stand galvanized much of the nation's factional peace movement. Some 1,500 letters of support and more than $1,000 descended daily on the confused but jubilant Viet Nam Moratorium Committee staff in Washington. Workers there cheerfully conceded that they had little hope of coordinating the burgeoning affair. While focused on college campuses (see EDUCATION), the protest was gaining the support of religious and civil rights groups, radicals and wealthy liberals, politicians in Congress and in many communities. The forces were mainly those that had rallied behind the presidential candidacies of Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy a year ago.

The Moratorium Committee's coordinator is, in fact, a former McCarthy campaign aide, Sam Brown, 26. An ebullient onetime Harvard Divinity School student from Council Bluffs, Iowa, Brown has been restlessly seeking new ways to marshal a mass antiwar movement ever since he effectively organized campus youths behind McCarthy. He won a fellowship to Harvard's Institute of Politics last year, tried to create a strong anti-ABM movement in Boston, but soon lost interest in both enterprises. The idea for a Moratorium Day came to him last spring after a Massachusetts peace group proposed a drive to set a deadline for termination of the war, using the threat of a nationwide general strike as its main weapon. Brown considered a commerce-stopping strike almost an impossibility to pull off, but guessed that a national day of protest, accenting pacific rallies, door-to-door pleading and campus debates, might inspire significant support. "The discussion of the war had become stale," he says. "We needed new tactics."

Off the campuses, those tactics on Oct. 15 will vary widely. The Congress itself has been urged to participate by two dozen Democratic Senators and Representatives, who announced that they will boycott legislative business on Capitol Hill that day. They include such war critics as Senators George McGovern, Edward Kennedy, Edmund Muskie and William Fulbright. Their idea has spread so widely that there is some doubt whether the Senate will be able to collect a quorum on M-Day. The Republican Party's liberal Ripon Society is backing the moratorium. At the community level, Buffalo Mayor Frank A. Sedita has proclaimed his city an official participant, and there will be a mass rally on the city hall steps and an evening bonfire to memorialize Viet Nam war dead.

"Businessmen's Rallies" are scheduled by antiwar groups for Chicago's Civic Center Plaza and New York's Wall Street. Some scientists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., have promised to wear black armbands at work, as have some doctors and dentists. Two too leaders of American Reform Judaism, Boston's Rabbi Roland Gittlesohn and New York's Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, urged their 700 synagogues to participate. Exerting his influence beyond the cause of his migrant workers for the first time, Mexican-American Leader Cesar Chavez has asked his followers to observe the day. The moratorium leaders expect thousands of sympathizers not allied with organizations to wear armbands or simply observe moments of silence on the job. That does not mean, of course, that everyone agrees with the tactics and aims of M-Day. Neither protest politics nor a hasty U.S. withdrawal are popular everywhere in the nation--and there will be countless communities where Oct. 15 will be just another day.

Some Administration supporters are concerned that M-Day will be dominated by confrontation-seeking radicals and perhaps lead to violence. Sam Brown doubts it. He considers the antiwar feeling in the U.S. to be too pervasive to be dominated by any faction. He does not even expect the day's rhetoric to be unduly violent. "We will try to engage people in conversation rather than in polemics," he promises.

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