In Praise of Youth

For a week they had been flocking to Billy Graham's East Tennessee crusade. Each night some 55,000 gathered in the University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium for the Graham style of neo-tent meeting--compounded of smooth efficiency, earnest prayer and the preacher's intimations of apocalypse. Graham warned, as he had before, that the Second Coming was at hand: "Jesus said that there will be a generation in history whose problems are so great there is no human solution. God has to step into history."

On the seventh day of the crusade, Richard Nixon made an extraordinary appearance at the stadium, stopping off en route to a Memorial Day weekend at San Clemente. Without arguing with his old friend, Nixon suggested that all the nation's serious ills are curable without divine intervention. It was the President's first appearance before a campus audience since U.S. troops marched into Cambodia, but of course this audience was more fundamentalist than collegiate. Perhaps 500 protesters in the stands flourished signs that read THOU SHALT NOT KILL. But the vast majority of the congregation drowned out the antiwar chants with their cheers. It was Nixon country, and the guest speaker was obviously enjoying himself.

Great Generation. The President's mood was conciliatory rather than chiliastic. His earnest and scrubbed listeners may have restored his sense of the young as he would have them. But he appealed broadly to all youth in one of the most effective speeches he has yet delivered. "Perhaps," he began, "America needs to know something about America's youth, and perhaps America's youth needs to know something about America."

Mindful of the damage he had caused by calling some protesters bums, Nixon declared: "I am proud to say that the great majority of America's young people do not approve of violence. The great majority do approve, as I do, of dissent." Then he added a passage that might cause rueful smiles among veterans of antiwar confrontations: "It isn't the beat generation. It isn't the beat-up generation." Rather, he declared, it will be "the great generation."

Plea for Reason. In a sort of civic confiteor, the President acknowledged: "I recognize that a great number of our young people are concerned about the fact that in our great cities the air is dirty, that in some places the water is polluted, that there aren't enough parks, that education is inferior, that health is inadequate, that there is alienation between the races and between the generations." All these needs, he promised in almost biblical cadences, can and will be satisfied: "I want this nation to be at peace, and we shall be. I want the air to be clean, and it will be clean. I want the water to be pure, and it will be pure. I want better education for all Americans, whatever their race or religion, and equal opportunity for all, and that shall be."

Nixon concluded with a spiritual appeal. "We can have what can be described as complete cleanliness and yet have a sterile life, unless we have a spirit that cannot come from a man in government." In his peroration, the President repeated a theme from his campaign and inaugural address. "The material things are not enough. If we're going to have peace in the world, if our young people are going to have a fulfillment beyond simply those material things, they must turn to those great spiritual sources that have made America the great country that it is."

It was a speech that recognized with a new directness some of what has changed in Nixon's America in the past month. With thousands of students already in antiwar political campaigns, the President pleaded for peaceful progress within the established system. The speech was a gesture to the young, even something of a plea for reason and orderly change. The question is how many youths who attend protest rallies rather than Billy Graham crusades will heed the plea.

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