University of Virginia Library

Tricky Dick Feints Left

Obviously worried by the specter of all
those hippie students returning to all their
left-wing campuses this month, one of the
finest broken-field runners ever to pick his
way down Pennsylvania Avenue has grabbed
the ball and charged through the line with a
series of mind-bending moves designed to
defuse the expected wave of protests before
they begin.

Tricky Dick Nixon is turning out to be
even more slippery than his used-car salesman-image
would originally have suggested. Nobody
knows whether all the reports coming
out of Washington about troop withdrawals,
draft reforms and the sacking of General
Hershey are true or not, but you can bet your
Agnew button that nothing ever "leaks" out
of Washington's "informed sources" by
accident.

Clearly, Mr. Nixon's advisors (Julie and
David perhaps) have let him in on the big
news that students, and not only the radical
students, dislike the war almost as much as
they dislike being forced to fight in it. Not
only that, but after six years of war and one
Presidential election that demonstrated the
futility of working through the system to stop
it, students have begun to believe that they
will have to stop at very little to bring the
fighting to an end. The NSA has been working
with a broad base of student leaders to set
into effect a series of moratoriums which
would protest the war as long as there are
Americans fighting in Viet Nam.

The NSA moratorium would be a kind of
student strike, lasting one day in October, two
days in November, and so on until the war is
over. One can just imagine the President
sitting in the Oval office, contemplating the
vision of week-long strikes and perhaps
economic boycotts by spring and saying to
himself, "I've got to nip this thing, nip it right
here in the bud. Funny those kids out at
General Beadle State didn't mention this to
me."

Now there's nothing wrong with troop
withdrawals and draft reforms and getting rid
of General Hershey. Better late than never, we
always say. But we think that Mr. Nixon is
going to find that you can't please all of the
people all of the time. You can't give Agnew
and Haynsworth to the South, troop withdrawals
to the peaceniks, the ABM to the
Pentagon, and Dr. Knowles' head on a platter
to the AMA, and expect to keep everybody
happy. The pie just isn't that big, and the
President is soon going to run out of slices to
pass around in his attempt to bring us
together.

Perhaps it is a sincere attempt, not
motivated solely by a desire to keep the
symptoms of unrest from revealing the true
extent of the disease. Perhaps it is not just
rumor-mongering. And probably we should be
grateful for every tidbit tossed to us from the
Republican table.

But it seems to us that Mr. Nixon is going
to have to start hurting some people sooner or
later. He is going to have to realize (or the
realization is going to be thrust upon him)
that you can't have the Pentagon and the
segregationists playing in the same ballgame
with the students and the blacks. He
obviously thinks that his moves, if and when
they materialize, will strip the radical students
of their moderate support, and that his black
capitalism, if and when it materializes, will
further alienate the black militants from the
Negro bourgeoisie.

But he will find that moderate students
agree with their more radical counterparts
that the war is stupid and criminal and must
be stopped completely; they will not be
satisfied by token withdrawals. And he will
find that black people everywhere are coming
together and are determined not to be split
apart again; they will not be satisfied by
hollow promises and more defense appropriations.

Unless the President is a better politician
than we give him credit for being, the
demands for action from all of those
conflicting factions are going to become more
and more strident as time goes on, and there
will come the time when he is forced to
choose sides. Then the nation will see where
Tricky Dick really stands.