University of Virginia Library

'A Lot Of Meat'

"The President is, of course, very pleased
by the decision," noted White House Press
Secretary Ronald Ziegler, formerly a guide at
Disneyland. His remark followed the Senate's
narrow vote of approval Tuesday for a
two-year extension of the draft. Nixon, who
ran for President in 1968 promising to
establish an all-volunteer Army and end
conscription, was expected to apply his
official signature to the new bill without
delay and Selective Service will again swing
into action.

A chief patron of the draft bill, Senator
Stennis, who chairs the powerful Armed
Services Committee, was elated. It was
Stennis who last summer stopped the critics
with his own uncanny appraisal of the bill.
"That's a lot of meat," he snapped. If Nixon
was "pleased that the Senate moved in a
positive way," Stennis' beaming face and
shining fangs seen on the pages of yesterday's
newspapers revealed a man with an appetite
words fail to describe. Could Senator George
McGovern have been thinking of Stennis
when he said last year, "I'm tired of old men
dreaming up wars for young men to fight"?

In addition to extending the draft
authority until June, 1973, the new law
empowers Nixon to abolish all student
deferments for men entering college this fall
and afterward. Others already deferred will
continue to be free from the threat of
conscription until they have completed their
fourth year of college or their twenty fourth
birthday, which ever occurs first. The
bitterly debated bill, which has consumed
more than half of Congress' time this
year-committee hearings began on February
2 and the old law expired last June-also
provide for a military pay increase involving
the allocation of another $2.4 billion.

Anti-war Senators had attempted to
involve the larger issue of the war in the draft
negotiations. One amendment, proposed by
Senator Mansfield, would have attached a
fixed dare for withdrawal of U.S. forces from
Southeast Asia contingent upon the release of
American prisoners of war by the DRV. The
amendment was diluted in conference with
the House, and what remains of it lacks the
force to compel a fly to leave a corpse.

While Nixon was having his merry way
with the Senate, U.S. jets were carrying out
the heaviest bombing attack on North
Vietnam since March, 1968, when President
Johnson halted bombing runs over the North
and paved the way for the ill-fated Paris peace
talks. Since then Nixon has managed
masterfully to undermine the negotiations,
first with last winter's assault from the air and
his repeated threats that more bombing may
be expected at any time. Tuesday's 200-odd
sorties tended to bolster that promise while at
the same time serving on Hanoi that a
negotiated settlement will not be acceptable.

For more than a year, observers like
Daniel Ellsberg and Hans Morgenthau have
warned that an escalated air war-in possible
combination with tactical nuclear attacks in
the North or the destruction of Haiphong
harbor-is a contingency whose time may be
drawing near. Indeed, Presidential Advisor
Henry Kissinger's Metternich diplomacy
places a strong measure of reliance on the idea
of never issuing empty threats. The politics of
fear require that one demonstrate something
real (like experienced violence from airborne
gunships) to convince "the enemy" of our
seriousness. Our skepticism regarding any
promise form Nixon-tacit or
otherwise-grows weaker, our fear stronger.