KALEIDOSCOPE OF DISSENT

SAIGON was quiet for a war zone.

In the presidential palace, Nguyen Van Thieu was closeted in his daily conference with aides. U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker was lunching at his residence six blocks away. A handful of American relief workers held a silent vigil. General Creighton Abrams, asked what the Viet Nam Moratorium movement meant to him, replied: "We've got our job to do here and that's what we're doing." Sure enough, an army platoon set out from Chu Lai on combat patrol and killed two guerrillas in a firefight. But half the members of the platoon wore the black armbands of M-day.

In Paris, Henry Cabot Lodge, chief of the American negotiating delegation, worked quietly in his quarters at the U.S. embassy, preparing for yet another bargaining session that would produce no bargaining, no progress. In Boston, the ambassador's son, Harvard Business School Professor George Cabot Lodge, conducted a Moratorium Day teach-in for 150 students.

Double Suicide. It was a day of wrenching contrasts. Quiet seminars mulled over the issues of the war while pickets shouted their dissent. Some mass marches developed a football rally spirit; elsewhere a funereal atmosphere dominated as church bells tolled and the names of the war dead were read. A pair of high school sweethearts from Blackwood, N.J., attended an M-day rally at Glassboro State College, then committed suicide together. Across the Hudson, New York's city hall wore the black and purple bunting of mourning. Mayor Herman Zogelmann of Wellington, Kans. (pop. 8,391) cooperated with the American Legion post to drape the town in patriotic tricolor. Across the country--in drenching San Francisco rain, in ankle-deep Denver snow, in crisp New York fall sunshine--Americans took part in a unique national Happening.

Down Commonwealth Avenue a crowd of 100,000 converged on the Boston Common. They were mostly students, but mothers from Newton and Wellesley walked among them, their children wearing black M-day armbands or clutching helium-filled black balloons. From a bar, a man hollered: "Bums! Do they think of the guys who died on Guadalcanal?" Halfway across the nation in front of the Forest Park (Ill.) Selective Service office, miniskirted girls from nearby Rosary College were reciting the names of the Illinois war dead; two elderly clerks inside went on with their work, paying little attention. San Francisco State College President S. I. Hayakawa, a hero to California conservatives for his rhadamanthine handling of student demonstrators in the past, serenely denied that M-day was being observed on his campus. But not far from his office, students planted 2,000 white crosses representing California's war dead in Viet Nam. The Moratorium caused split levels of routine and awareness. Almost everyone at the Pentagon seemed to be watching the Mets and Orioles except those in the civil-disturbance center, who were assigned to monitor the U.S. for violence. Richard Nixon spent much of the day reviewing Latin American policy, although his mind doubtless wandered occasionally to the events in his country.

The day fostered juxtapositions improbable to the Western mind and perhaps inscrutable to the Oriental--such as Lyndon Johnson's once intimate adviser, Bill Moyers, addressing a Wall Street crowd of 20,000, among them hundreds of bankers, on the evils of the Establishment's war policies. Former Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz and Radical Tom Hayden participated in Moratorium teach-ins and rallies at the University of Michigan. At Minnesota's Macalester College, an unsmiling Professor Hubert Humphrey heard his vice presidency and position on Viet Nam roundly criticized by young fellow faculty members. The Moratorium pointed up striking new rearrangements of politics and ideology.

In the Detroit suburb of Birmingham, a Republican enclave, more than 1,000 protested in Shain Park. 18 TODAY, DEAD TOMORROW, read one poster. "I fought hard in World War II," said a physician, James Pingel, "but I'm against this one. It's morally wrong. I've got two boys coming up." Malcolm Baldridge, co-chairman of the Connecticut Citizens for Nixon-Agnew in 1968, told a rally of 15,000 in New Haven: "The President should move faster to end the war."

Peace Stuff. What was perhaps most striking about M-day was not the size of the hundreds of rallies and parades but rather the delicate balance temporarily achieved in many sections of the U.S. The formerly shattering voices of protest were more numerous than ever before, but at the same time less shrill. The old militant certainties of anti-Communists have been tempered by the relentless persistence of the war.

Among the thousands distributing antiwar literature were a group of Stanford students who boarded commuter trains at Palo Alto for the run to San Francisco. Stanford Senior Bob Matson approached one commuter who recoiled: "God damn you, you hippie freak Commie! Get out of here!" "Is that peace stuff?" another asked. "Damn it!" But many passengers were sympathetic. "I hope it all does some good," said one middle-aged businessman. A younger man, who said he was just out of the Navy, admitted: "I can't ride with this war any more. Give me some more material. I'd get a kick out of sending it to some buddies in Hawaii."

Oddly, black Americans took relatively little part in the Moratorium in most areas, even though Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. led a candlelight parade of 45,000 to the White House. A larger proportion of blacks than whites may be opposed to the war, but their widespread attitude was summed up by a Washington Negro: "Why should I get knocked down in a white folks' march?" As it turned out, few were knocked down or even jostled. Demonstrators and counter-demonstrators generally kept their assaults verbal. Police acted mainly as spectators.

One student at Houston's University of St. Thomas broke down and wept while reading a list of U.S. war dead; he had come to the name of a close friend whose death he was unaware of. Four Notre Dame students burned their draft cards shortly before a "resistance Mass" celebrated for some 2,500 on the library lawn. Yet the day was not entirely grim, especially since the almost pathologically humorless Maoist factions boycotted it. Students from Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College circled the city's Federal Building blowing shofars in an effort to bring it down like Jericho; they ran out of wind before completing the Biblically prescribed seven circuits. Three long-hair types in the candlelight procession to the White House carried a sign: KEEP THE BOYS IN VIET NAM, THEY BRING US OUR GRASS.

At Ohio'sCase Western Reserve University, a placard carried by a member of the Cleveland Symphony said: BRAHMS, NOT BOMBS.

Protest Against Protest. The enormous turnouts at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Cornell were predictable reflections of their recent histories of dissent. But the Moratorium also brought the antiwar movement to smaller, conservative colleges. Students at Kentucky's Jefferson Community College donated blood to the Red Cross as a constructive--and unorthodox--gesture of protest. At Richard Nixon's alma mater in California, Whittier College, 600 students attended a ceremony to light a butane-fueled "Flame of Life" to burn until the war ends. Others at Whittier marched in support of Nixon. At Western Kentucky University, 1,000 undergraduates converged for an M-day rally; the same day, 2,000 appeared for a homecoming rally.

Students were not the only Moratorium participants in the heartland, however. In Boulder, Colo., 12 townspeople asked citizens to volunteer for community projects to show how energies and resources being used in the war could be diverted to social action. Nearly 100 people responded, committing themselves to 500 hours of helping the handicapped, the underprivileged and the sick.

The anti-Moratorium sentiment was strongest in the South and Midwest. Mrs. Donna Long, wife of a Marine sergeant serving in Viet Nam, walked more than 100 miles to the state capitol in Raleigh, N.C., to present an American flag to Governor Bob Scott as "a protest against the protest." Georgia's Governor Lester Maddox inveighed against "longhairs, hippies, socialists and Communists," led a chorus of God Bless America on the State Capitol steps. Red, white and blue arm bands appeared in such cities as Beaumont, Texas, where the city council declared a "Support Our Boys in Viet Nam Day." The Veterans Club at Black Hills State College in-Spearfish, S. Dak., hired a plane to buzz the campus, dropping leaflets saying: AMERICA, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. Carol Meyers, a topless dancer in Houston, allowed between sets at the Red Baron: "These college students are just young and immature. They haven't seen as much of the world as I have."

Many demonstrations planned to oppose the dissenters failed to ignite. In Memphis, a patriotic rally organized by a police lieutenant drew only 37 persons. In Oklahoma, a traditionally conservative state that has produced three national commanders of the American Legion, Governor Dewey Bartlett asked the people to fly the flag in support of the President. Still, more than 3,000 attended Moratorium activities at the University of Oklahoma. Senator Fred Harris, who has increasingly angered his Oklahoma constituency by his antiwar stand, addressed overflow audiences at Oklahoma State in Stillwater, "the Buckle of the Bible Belt."

Police and firemen in New York City were outraged at Mayor John Lindsay's directive that all American flags be flown at half-staff on city buildings as part of the Moratorium. One group of cops raised their stationhouse flag to full mast and ringed the flagpole in defiance. Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was persuaded to demur to Lindsay's request that the flag at city-owned Shea Stadium be flown at half-staff during the fourth World Series game. Yet surprisingly few drivers turned on their headlights to show support of the Administration's policies.

No one imagined that the demonstrations made instant mass, hawk-to-dove conversions. Even M-day's most enthusiastic backers did not hope for that. Rather they were trying to arouse the uncommitted without enraging those who still back the President. On the morning of M-day, a well-dressed commuter rushing through New York's Grand Central Station stopped when he saw some 200 divinity students conducting a prayer meeting. "Did it ever occur to you that you might be wrong in what you're doing here?" he demanded of a young, bearded student. "Yes," said the student. "When that happens, I do the best I can: I pray for guidance." But, the commuter replied, "you're lending aid and comfort to the enemy." The student shrugged, and the man began walking away. "Sir," called out the student, "did it ever occur to you that you might be wrong?" The man did not answer, but perhaps he remembered the question.

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