Nixon's Campaign for Confidence

NORMALLY, they seem aloof. Since the Cambodian intervention and the Kent State killings, Administration figures have been more visible and voluble. Last week they were still receiving student delegations, appearing on TV, granting press conferences and private briefings, conferring with Congressmen, labor leaders--and even each other.

The Administration is out to make a case. It wants exoneration from charges of widening the war, usurping congressional prerogatives, failing to understand or communicate sufficiently with the young, isolating the President from even his own Cabinet members, provoking dissenters with abrasive rhetoric. However insensitive the Administration may have been recently, by last week it had grasped one essential. Richard Nixon's credibility as a calm, competent guardian of the commonweal had come into question. Thus the Administration was trying hard to restore confidence without changing basic policies or attitudes.

Trigger Fingers. It is no easy undertaking, given the mood of the nation. Moderate dissenters must be made to see at least a puff of peace-pipe smoke, while the crazies and burners and the would-be revolutionaries must not get even a burnt match. The solid core of loyalists, still the majority, still Nixon's mainstay of the moment and hope for the future, must not be offended in the process. Finally, Hanoi must not get the impression that Nixon is politically crippled like Lyndon Johnson was.

Protean as the President's efforts have been, they have not been altogether convincing. Nixon called the state and territorial Governors to the White House to talk about "current matters before us regarding both foreign and domestic matters." There was no discussion about controlling National Guard trigger fingers; Nixon defended his Cambodian strategy at length. He and Henry Kissinger also chatted informally with Governors Robert McNair of South Carolina, John Love of Colorado, and John Dempsey of Connecticut. On short notice, Nixon dropped in on a meeting of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council, a body that has always been staunch in its support of the war. So it is still, and Nixon took the occasion to report the "enormous success" of the Cambodia venture.

The expedition was uncovering large caches of enemy supplies (see THE WORLD). But both Secretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, in talks with newsmen, conceded that it would take some time to prove just how much the foray had accomplished. "We're going to know by the end of June," Rogers told a press conference. "See where we are in July and August," said Laird. As battlefield action in Cambodia sharpened --the venture had cost 140 American lives through last week--Laird and Rogers tried to accentuate the peaceful. Laird predicted that by July 1971 South Vietnamese rather than Americans would be handling all the major combat in Viet Nam. Both men reaffirmed the Administration's pledge that U.S. forces would withdraw from Cambodia by the end of next month. In fact, some units began to move out last week.

But war critics worried that the South Vietnamese would stay in Cambodia after a U.S. pullout, as South Viet Nam's leaders asserted, and that the U.S. would remain involved in order to furnish logistical support. With both U.S. and South Vietnamese energies thus diverted, would Vietnamization and U.S. withdrawals from Viet Nam be slowed? Laird and Rogers denied it, but not so categorically as to dispel all doubts. Rogers, for instance, refused to rule out future air strikes in Cambodia. Nor did the Administration quarrel with Senator John Stennis's argument against congressional restraints on U.S. military action in Cambodia (see following story).

At home, the modulated tone predominated. Spiro Agnew was playing his own close game. He spent last week almost silently, though he promised to make no "unilateral withdrawal" from the verbal battlefield. A number of Cabinet members continued to take relatively conciliatory lines toward the opposition. Attorney General John Mitchell told a group of Philadelphia public-and parochial-school pupils that "unrest represents dissent, and dissent is a good thing because it brings change in our society. But it must be done in an attitude of respect for the rights of others." But in talking to some Duke University students, Mitchell stressed the associations between a few prominent antiwar leaders and foreign Communists.

Cool It, Wally. In private conversation, John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman, two of the White House staffers closest to Nixon, were taking the pre-Kent State line: Agnew has the right idea, the campuses are out of control; Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel is merely frustrated about his department programs. Hickel had written his now famous letter to the President the week before; last week, on CBS's Sixty Minutes, he explained that his efforts to see Nixon after writing the letter had been turned aside by a White House aide who dismissed the Kent State protests with, "Cool it, Wally--this will all blow over in 24 hours."

The announced guests in the oval office seemed to have been selected to erase that image of insensitivity and show the President is indeed listening to all sorts of people. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his domestic concerns had a hearing before the Chief, as did George Romney, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Donald Rumsfeld, Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and Alexander Heard, the President's temporary new adviser on campus affairs.

That legal maneuver was hardly calculated to quiet dissent. Most of the protest, though, was aimed at Southeast Asia. The outcry was so intense that the Administration seemed to have reduced its room for military maneuver rather than extended it. McGeorge Bundy argued convincingly last week that the Cambodian action has been so rending that Nixon would not dare undertake anything like it again without congressional approval. Former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, in a LIFE article appearing this week, took a sterner line toward the Administration and what he called Nixon's "curious obsession about Viet Nam and Southeast Asia." Clifford proposed 1) cessation of American combat activity by Dec. 31 and withdrawal of all military personnel by the end of 1971 at the latest, 2) U.S. avoidance of all offensive operations except those necessary to protect American personnel and 3) even quicker liquidation of the American presence if a cease-fire and certain other items can be agreed upon. More than 1,000 New York City lawyers were organizing an antiwar lobbying effort, and a similar move was under way among scholars in Asian affairs.

Lethal Attack. Campus unrest continued in assorted forms, much of it politically oriented but with violence all too prevalent. The University of South Carolina at Columbia was the scene of skirmishing between youngsters and both police and National Guardsmen. Disorder in Jackson, Mississippi, at least partly related to antiwar sentiment, exploded with a salvo of police bullets that killed two young blacks and wounded at least twelve. In Augusta, Ga., a ghetto protest over the jailhouse death of a black youth led to a lethal police attack on looters.

Calm men like John Gardner and Earl Warren spoke of social disintegration and grave danger. Citing violations of civil rights, the war and an "atmosphere of repression" as among the major causes, Warren said that there has been no crisis "within the memory of living Americans which compares with this one." The national mood is roiled and apprehensive. Policemen and pro-Nixon workingmen gave vent to their frustrations with the same vehemence as partisans on the other side.

The blood, the passion, the malaise of the country seemed to leave the Administration--and the President--weary. On Thursday, Nixon took off for a weekend in Florida, where welcoming crowds at Homestead Air Force Base and the Key Biscayne presidential compound cheered him and cheered him up. Later, a group of University of Miami students appeared to chant "All we are saying is give peace a chance." Nixon claims that his Cambodian strategy is doing nothing less. Whatever the military progress, however, the price being paid at home is high.

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