qt1 t Ntau Datt Seventy-eight years of editorial freedom edited and managed by students of the University of Michigan under authority of Board in Control of Student Publications 429 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich. News Phone: 764-0552 Editoriats printed in The Michigan Daily exp ress the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. DEAR MR. EX-PRESIDENT: TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 1969 NIGHT EDITOR: ROB BEATTIE . Opposing Nixon* A sporting gesture A bitter f arewell AMERICANS admire few virtues so much as sportsmanship, and in the past couple of months they have certain- ly been getting their fill of it. The treat- ment Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon have accorded each other since the elec- tion has been, with only minor and iso- lated exceptions, almost sickeningly saccharine.- Nixon cleverly scuttled Johnson's inten- tion to nominate Arthur Goldberg Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And in the eleventh hour Wilbur Cohen committed the incoming administration to programs and policies which it dislikes, but from which it might find withdrawal embar- rassing. Otherwise all has been, if not light, at least sweetness. Certainly the chumminess of Johnson and Nixon at the inaugural proceedings yesterday did little to dispel'the image of a transition graciously executed. And Nixon's bow to that hoariest of Republi- can enemies, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a commendable gesture. Indeed, the good feelings have extend- ed beyond Nixon's relations with Johnson to the new chief executive's relations with his critics. Despite preliminary noises, Nixon's cabinet appointments will receive all but unanimous Senate approval. And those who will be among the President's unshakable opponents in .six. to twelve months now counsel "giving Nixon a chiance.''" . THE TROUBLE with this advice is in discerning what, if anything, it means. Minds will be open until Nixon begins to act. Thereafter his policies will be ap'- plauded or deplored. Open-mindedness threatens to lose its utility with each passing day. Underlying these pleas for fairness to the new President is the premise that Nixon has hitherto given no indication what paths he intends to pursue. Yet Nixon through 2 years of public life has been inclined toward a moderate con- servatism, and nothing he has said or done belies a fundamental reversal of his views. He has appointed Melvin Laird, who favors more nuclear weapons, secre- tary of defense, and he has designated John Mitchell, who wants more wiretap- ping, attorney general. A realistic read- ing of these signals allows little am- biguity. Since Nixon's intentions are not veiled In mystery, no case save sportsmanship can be made for a waiting game. And even the sportsman, while suspending judgment temporarily, must wonder what to anticipate from the Nixon years, and how to react to them. EXPECT THE enactment of plans more grandiose and radical than those Nixon haspledged to reverse would be unfair and unrealistic. Yet to cease arguing for those programs merely be- cause there is no chance Nixon will adopt them would be shirking responsibility. The danger of excessive pessimism is in setting expectations so low that Nixon can't help but fulfill them. To the pes- simist, if a single tree rernains standing by 1972, Walter Hickel will have been one of the great secretaries of the interior. None of the psychological self-adjust- MARK LvIN. Editor TPHEN WILDSTROM URBAN LENER Managing Editor Editorial Director DAVID KNOKE, Executive Editor WALLACE IMMEN ......News Editor i CAROLYN MIEGEL .,.... Associate Managing Editor DANIEL OKRENT................... Feature Editor ,PAT" O'DONOHtE ............ ......... News Editor WALTER SHAPIRO..Associate Etrial Director HOWARD HORN ........ Associate Editorial Director AVIVA KEMPNER.............Personnel Director NEAL RUSS ....................Magazine Edito AI4ON SYMROSKI ......Associate Magazine Editor ANN MUNSTER ..................Contributing Editor ments to be Nixon Presidency are ade- quate. And given the lackluster alterna- tives, apathy becomes an appealing de- fense mechanism. Yet whatever its appeal, apathy is a luxury that cannot be afforded. The crude application of Marcuse to the effect that Nixon will promote revolution by making the system intolerable is irrele- vant. For the danger is not to the system but to human lives. SHOULD NIXON and Laird aggressively pursue a military buildup-including more offensive nuclear weapons in the name of supremacy and a "thick" Anti- Ballistic Missile system - tensions be- tween the nuclear powers will be danger- ously exacerbated. A new arms race can only disturb the delicate psychological balances on which peace now depends. Nixon's predisposition toward just such policies is undeniable. His campaign speech on defense strategy, one of his few departures from the hackneyed lines he recited to crowd after crowd, called for both superiority and the ABM. Laird in his 1962 book on strategy warned that America must be willing both to use nuclear weapons-offensive and defensive-and to strike first with them. There is little reason to think that the former Wisconsin Congressman's views have mellowed. I AN ADMINISTRATION holding these views on defense policy must be vigi- lantly and vigorously opposed. And the chances of successful opposition are abetted by Nixon's finely tuned political ear. Not that Nixon's motivations are solely political. Were he operating in a political vacuum, free to act out of purely ideological motives, he would have no dif- ficulty deciding what to do. But Nixon is a vote-counter, and can be persuaded' or dissuaded by political realities. The responsibility of those who fear his views is to create those political realities. Those who have rejected the Demo- cratic Party are in the best position to raise effective opposition because their motives will not be dismissed as partisan. That includes the non-violent left, what remains of it, and liberal Republicans. Especially the latter. Significant defec- tions from his own party ranks-such as Johnson experienced-could have a very sobering effect on Nixon. Congress now has a number of young, obscure liberal Republicans who stand to become less obscure by raising principled objections to administration policies.' They are ob- vious allies of any group hoping to pre- vent Nixon from pursuing a disastrous military policy THE NON-DEMOCRATIC, non-Republi- can left is in a different position. Largely discredited in the eyes of most Americans by association with unpopular anti-war demonstrations, the left must recover its credibility before it can again raise a politically significant voice. Yet strategically, the controversy over increased nuclear armaments gives the left fewer problems. Demonstrating against the war strikes most Americans as somehow unpatriotic. Demonstrations against the ABM will not be similarly tainted, In appealing to a vote counter, the im- portant criterion is numerical strength. Only widescale opposition can make Nixon's militarist intentions politically untenable. Apathy, whatever its tempta- tions, is more intolerable now than ever before. -URBAN LEHNER Editorial Director A year ago you asked "Why all this restlessness? That you could honestly not know the answers borders on the macabre and utters from the ludicrous. But appairently you do not. This letter is my answer. If I counted all the times you meant "peace" when you said "peace." would they add up to one? If history does say that you "tried." what do you think it will say that you tried to do? If you weren't God could you face your judgment? A FRIEND OF MINE got ambushed in Vietnam. By civilians. By civilians left homeless and countryless. My friend did everything he was told to do. He even got killed. I° heard your popularity index jumped 20 percentage points after last week's State of the Union musings. I'm sure it must have gone even higher after yesterday's inauguration of Richard Nixon and his 7,000 security men. But the worth of your Presidency will not be counted by opinion polls. Political stakes cannot be cashed in but must be wagered over and over again until the roulette wheel stops spinning. More significantly your level of humaness will not be measured by columns of percentages. YOU CAME TO power in the niilieu of street violence. You found violence in the bureaucracy but it was the wordless kind of glaciers gouging the earth. Like the feeling that ground down my friend's parents when they received his back pay minus the cost of the uniform he ruined by getting shot. This silent violence had its own momentum and didn't satisfy Your need for willful manipulation. So you branded your breed of violence, capitalizing on a decade of foreign policy mistakes. You made it 10-gallon size. And you purged your accomplices with your zeal to hog the prestige a war-united nation bestows. Even now, despite your angry penance, you want your deeds adjudged those befitting a great man. BUT YOU LEAVE the Presidency something less than a man, even as you leave me with something less than human responses. I have been sucked in by the malicious, lava which poured forth from your war. I hated the hate between soldier and civilian in Vietnam, the hate between policeman and student in Chicago. I was caught in the crush of voices pushing past each other to be heard. Too often I used my bitterness as a cudgel and struck out just to strike back. But you turned each promise into a lie. Even your bribes had no honor among bribetakers. You blame the mythmakers and the media for not selling this war as other wars have been sold. You think that affluence has soured my stomach for a diet of patriotism laced with bullets. No. I am just as courageous and as cowardly as my father who; fought in World War II. I have discovered no new virtue, no new sense of compasgion or justice, no higher idealism than my father or grandfather. BUT YOUR OBSESSION with your destiny was logged in terms too brutal and savage for any except the most animal and most, passive. Snivel if you will because I blasphemed your immortality, be- cause I unarmored your weakness. I didn't find it in time to save my friend or the other thousands. So today you are Mr. Ex. YOU'VE SENT me 5rmany application forms which I've dutifully filled out over the past five years. Now I'm sending one to you in the hope you might have time to read it, It's for the Peace Corps. Many people have worked in the Peace Corps, building things like bridges and friendships. According to some reports, a lot of these things have been busted up by napalm bombs and mortar fire. I thought you might like to find out what's been happening. HOWARD KOUN I - 0102 CARTOONISTS HAVE had more fun with Richard Mil- hous Nixon than with any other major political figure. But the humor that emanated from their drawings was more complex than the simple over-exaggeration of two massive jowels. It was a mocking humor, a humor that roared with the disbelief that such a fated political figure could hope to become President. But even political cartoonists can be wrong. And somehow, none of the old Nixon jokes seem terribly funny anymore. It is difficult to depict the ironically tragic. The solid mediocrity which seems to be forthcoming from the new .administration has not managed to elicit much in the way of either subtle or brazen humor. There is something decidedly depressing about mocking the stolid sober earnestness which is the hallmark of the President. The uncharacteristic degree of consideration which T his is your Pres'ident f.r. . Watch that firststep !" i Nixon has received since his narrow electoral victory, even from this once brutally hostile quarter, is probably one of the most glaring symptoms that the Nixon inauguration is no laughing matter. Whether Nixon's election was a cruel quirk of fate or whether it is the inevitable outcome of the current political sterility of our lives, we are stuck with a President wlho seems unable to fathom our aspirations. Because of the anomaly of this situation it is exceed- ingly difficult to come to grips with the reality of the Nixon administration. Today's page represents our first confrontation, With the simple yet strangely perplexing fact that the man with the scrawling outstretched arms is now President. -THE EDITORIAL DIRECTORS 4 Nixon and his Cabinet The Inaugural Address: By WALTER SHAPIRO JUDGING FROM Nixon's Inau- gural Address, we have passed from the Age of Confrdntation into the Age of the Aphorism. Midway through the mercifully short address, one began to sus- pect that the new President was modeling his rhetoric on the in- spirational talks given at the con- clusion of Rotary meetings. READERS OF eleventh grade American history textbooks may recall that Teddy Roosevelt once called ' the Presidency, "a bully pulpit." Where the first Roosevelt seem- ingly referred to the office's built- in powers of persuasion, Nixon seemed far more captivated by the Presidency's opportunities for ex- hortation.. As the new President waxed ecstatno abnuit "thn ema11 nlgn- seems to reve'e are the supe sort which tend to obscure,i than alleviate, our underlyi cial problems. LIKE ALL but the best po oratory, the Nixon speec marked by a series of almos tradictory juxtapositions. While Nixon said at one "we can afford to apprais weaknesses with candor, nonnetheless felt comnelled tno Ushering in erficial P r e s i d e n t insisted, "I know rather America's youth," betrayed how ng so- unsure Nixon was of his own as- sessment. Nixon immediately coupled this olitical glorification of youth with a lec- h was ture, reminiscent of an earnest t con- sixth grade teacher; on the posi- tive social values of decorum and point, quiet. Scaling our national law se our and order fetish down to more he familar dimensions, Nixon pleaded stres that "Weocannot learn from nne with the explanation that "we are approaching the limits of what government alone can do." Nixon went to great lengths to quiet the fears of Democratic partisans, by affirming his devo- tion to a long list of national goals ranging from "full employment" to "enhancing the quality of life." The programatic vacuity of the Inaugural Address suggests that Nixon as President is an intelli- L-ent_ sincere. welt intentionndaalA the Age of the Aphorism is the only contribution -that America needs to make toward easing world tensions. The conflict between us and the Soviet Union has gone on, far too long for either side to be moved by their adversary's professions of peaceful intentions. Unless Nixon's rhetoric is accompanied by a will- ingness to make meaningful con- cessions in the interest of mutual accommodation, one remains con- rather pregnant fact that we are at war. While throughout his campaign for the Presidency, Nixon has val- iantly tried to make this seemingly insoluble conflict disappear by ig- noring it, one would assume that upon reaching the White House he would at least deign to acknowl- edge its existence. Yet even as President, his inten- tions in this tremendously crucial area rovaviy Qhrnnd1 A inm vterv.