The future is the past
AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON
New York—The pattern of Mr Nixon's mind is finally emerging after four months' submersion. It has now been described by Robert Semple. Jr., with the tact and dis- cretion the New York Times expects of its White House correspondents, yet with more precision than would seem possible under those restraints:
'Mr Nixon's is a style distinguished mainly by two characteristics, a passion for order and a passion for privacy. Order, to ensure that the President receives a regular flow of the best advice that government is able to give him; privacy to insure that. when he gets all these options, he can re- treat and, in the atmosphere of studied detachment, reach the correct decision.'
When a man well enough along in his fifties retires for private reconsideration of fundamental matters, habit usually brings him back from the experience thinking pretty much what he always has. Mr Nixon's meditations usually take him down paths only too familiar to him, and carry him to places he has known all along. He is at once the senior with very little of the experience of power. and the junior trained to say the things which men of power have been saving all through his conscious poli- tical existence. We owe to Mr I. F. Stone, who is exceptional among American journa- lists for the continual exercise of his mem- ory. the reminder of how closely what Mr Johnson said about Vietnam in 1965 re- members what Mr Nixon says about it now. Thus. Mr Stone notices: 'If we simply abandoned our effort in Vietnam. the cause of peace might not sur- vive the damage that would be done to other nations' confidence in our reliability ...it would enormously increase the dan- ger of a bigger war later.' (Mr Nixon, 14 May.)
`To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all ... monk in the value of an American commitment ...The result would he ... even wider war.' (Mr Johnson. 7 Anril. 1965.) 'We have also ruled out ... acceptance of terms that would amount to a disguised American defeat' (Mr Nixon. 14 May.) 'We will not withdraw ... under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.' (Mr Johnson, 7 Anril. 1965).
This year's Australian renders the same toasts to Mr Nixon for his effort 'to help South Vietnam preserve its independence'
that Mr Holt was accustomed to render Mr Johnson. It is now two months since Mr Kissinger asked us to give him a year. The new Secretary of Defence is as euphoric about the developing muscle and steadying kidney of the South Vietnamese Army as the old Secretary of Defence always was. In his speech to the Air Force Academy the other day Mr Nixon referred to how much more information came his way than his critics could possibly have, just as Mr Johnson used to; his terms had the same import Mr Johnson's once had without their arousing vulgarity. Where Mr Johnson assaulted 'nervous nellies', Mr Nixon called pained attention to the derision of our military profession 'in some of the so-called best circles of America'. Meanwhile the executive's special access to information re- mains in the condition it has always been.
The Secretary of State is surprised when the journalists at his press conference bring him the news of an Air Force foray into North Vietnam, the services being, as always, prompt in bringing him the infor- mation which is fantasy and laggard with the news of what is real.
Finally, Mr Nixon shares with Mr John- son the public impression that each is infinitely calculating when he is only bound- lessly innocent. When he tells the Air Force Academy that it would be 'easy for a presi- dent of the United States to buy some popu- larity by going along with the new isola- tionists', as he calls those alarmed by the history of the last five years, Mr Nixon is entirely sincere. He is sure that a peace presi- dent would be popular, but he believes that a war president is necessary; the image of Munich controls his night mind. He is ready to endanger his popularity for what he be- lieves, and the pieties of the last twenty-five years have been destroyed for pretty much everyone but him.
You hope very much that events will not be too hard on this innocence; however much ruin there may be in a country, it is disturbing to contemplate the results of the political ruin of two presidents in succes- sion. Mr Nixon does not, after all, have a nature as dangerous as it sounds; the risks he has taken have always been more on the side of caution than of adventure. He pretty fairly described his own character when he told the Air Force graduates that, when he came to consider the defence budget: 'If I have made a mistake, I hope it is on the side of too much rather than too little.'
His words in Denver aroused the Senate liberals. who chose to hear in this faint echo of the way he used to talk the thunder of the villain he had always been for them. Still, he has always been a man at whom it was only necessary to shout back to give him pause; he differs from Mr Johnson in not being really nasty enough to enjoy con- frontations. It was in his nature to choose those precincts where he ran no danger of affronting anyone present—a still unidenti- fied South Dakota college to attack the student rebels, and Denver to refute the Eastern critics of the military. We are more than ever two nations; and he remains care- ful to go to the very centre of his own before assaulting the other.
The President is not the sort of man to dare much. He falls back before any really aroused opposition; there are reminders of his old weakness for withdrawal in the re- ports of those retreats for studying his options, and there is some comfort in the alacrity with which he gives ground when he discovers how few options he really has. He will return to Washington, having jointly said with General Thieu pretty much what Mr Johnson always said jointly with General Ky, and in Washington he will just sit, returned to his old self, as watchful as always, with events, as always, out of his hands.
It is all so boring, this residence in a country whose recent history has been a series of revolutions occasionally interrupted by the election of an incumbent. America is very like the France Mr Richard Mayne talks of in the latest Encounter: 'If you read enough newspapers, your mind begins
to feel like a tired piano. The same old keys are hammered till the strings are slack and the tone'sUffied—STUDENTS, VIET- NAM, APPOLLO, EUROPE, DE GAULLE.'
We have the war we were starting to have in 1959, and the President we could have had in 1960; New York thinks about having again the Mayor and New Jersey the Governor they had in 1954, and all of them are frozen, just what they were, the flesh a little wrinkled, the slack spirit unchanged by the years. We enter the 'seventies acting as though the 'sixties had never never happened.
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