Toward an Uncertain Spring

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

It has been a long winter's journey into February. From Boston and Miami to San Diego and Spokane, with Wilmington, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Dayton, Denver and Las Vegas in between.

Good land down below. Good people when you get there. What we used to call Richard Nixon's people for the most part. Supermarket proprietors, cattlemen, computer salesmen, bankers, suburban housewives and mothers-the people who plan and manage the American way of life.

Vignettes of this broad country snatched on the run can be misleading; they are apt to go stale by morning or obscure what is real. Yet the winter's impressions are supported by the opinion polls; so maybe it is worth some recounting as we move toward an uncertain spring.

The President's legions of vociferous supporters from November 1972 are a sprinkling now. Perhaps many simply stay silent. But many, many others do not. The President has violated something too basic and precious, though sometimes hard to perceive and explain. For Nixon, a recovery of trust seems impossible, his hold on office a precarious thing. The mood is one of passive disillusionment, but here and there it flickers into the kind of flame that could consume him.

"We can't go on like this," said the owner of a supermarket chain over his grapefruit in one of those flaked, weary Florida hotels. "We can't run our business any longer. There's got to be stability. It takes two years to plan and build a new store." Gasoline, highways, housing starts, employment and the price of wheat have all got to be calculated. That future is now chaos.

A lawyer's wife echoed the main line of Nixon's defense. "I just don't believe most of what I read about Nixon. He's done a lot for this country. The press won't give him credit." A student stated some singular but thoughtful support. Many great men and women in history, he said, were at one tune or another unprincipled; Nixon was in that pragmatic tradition.

--And there are the quirks that make America so endlessly amusing and fascinating. In a San Diego dawn, that Eastern liberal warhorse Murray Kempton, a writer and sometime columnist, titillated the Nixon folks with his gentle irreverence on one of those wake-up TV shows. "I liked Nixon when he was a Commie fighter," he said. "He believed it. It was pure." Then there was the night Bill Hall, a liberal editor of the Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune, one of those splendid small papers that keep our society awake, found himself defending Nixon before students at the University of Idaho. When Nixon's foreign policy was criticized as too little too late, Hall told the audience that the "what have you done for me lately" approach had two sides. "If you are going to complain about things not being done, then it is only fair to give credit when something is finally done." Hall and most of the students want Nixon out of office. Over a Scotch, he pondered why Westerners favor impeachment more than others. "Change is not frightening out here," he said. "They use recall. City councilmen, state legislators are voted out of office all the time. They accept a man until he crosses them."

Presidential boomlets bubbled all across this vast landscape: "Can Percy make it? ... Is Connally finished, I hope, and Teddy Kennedy too? ... Does Rockefeller have any chance?" We need someone better, they often said. Who has the special intelligence and compassion and energy to rise above all the others?

A surprising number almost timidly suggested Henry Kissinger. A European-born Jew with a German accent in the White House -even if the Constitution could be amended to permit it? Well, why not, in this strange world?

It is plain that many are still reluctant to look upon the crimes known as Watergate as sufficient cause for action against the President. There is no stolen property, no body count, no looted treasury. Moral transgressions, while quickly deplored, are not so easily brought to judgment, especially in a nation whose basic life-style is still fundamentally intact. But people are feeling the weight of the developing crises, and it is NIXON & KISSINGER growing heavier. Hugh Sidey

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.