Word: moratorium
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THEIR numbers were not overwhelming. Probably not many more than 1,000,000 Americans took an active part in last week's Moratorium Day demonstrations against the Viet Nam war; that is barely half of 1 % of the U.S. population. Yet M-day 1969 was a peaceful protest without precedent in American history because of who the participants were and how they went about it. It was a calm, measured and heavily middle-class statement of weariness with the war that brought the generations together in a kind of sedate Woodstock Festival of peace. If the young were...
...President had expressed his doubts that the demonstrations would tell him anything new. What, in fact, was M-day's message to Richard Nixon? Many participants demanded immediate and total withdrawal from Viet Nam of all U.S. forces. Yet the Moratorium by no means constituted a call to the President for that solution?although it evidently gained new respectability and popularity (see story on page 20). What M-day did raise was an unmistakable sign to Richard Nixon that he must do more to end the war and do it faster. Unless the pace of progress quickens, he will have...
Letter from Hanoi. His response to the Moratorium has been ambivalent. On Sept. 25, he announced sternly that "under no circumstances will I be affected by it whatever." Last week, seeking to mollify the outraged response to his disdain, Nixon picked out an admonitory letter from Randy Dicks, a 19-year-old Georgetown University student, and made public his reply. "There is a clear distinction between public opinion and public demonstrations," Nixon wrote to Dicks. A demonstration, Nixon argued, expresses only the view of an organized minority; what the great mass of Americans feel may well be something else entirely...
Muted Tone. Many of the Moratorium speakers had proposals of their own. The ideas were not necessarily new, but they stimulated talk and thought. In Lewiston, Me., Senator Edmund Muskie called for a standstill ceasefire, followed by orderly U.S. troop withdrawal. Senator Edward Kennedy muted the tone of his earlier criticism of the war to suit the Moratorium mood; for the first time, he asked that the President announce a fixed schedule for pulling out all ground combat forces within a year and all remaining Air Force and Army personnel by the end of 1972. In Washington, former U.N. Ambassador...
...presidential palace, Nguyen Van Thieu was closeted in his daily conference with aides. U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker was lunching at his residence six blocks away. A handful of American relief workers held a silent vigil. General Creighton Abrams, asked what the Viet Nam Moratorium movement meant to him, replied: "We've got our job to do here and that's what we're doing." Sure enough, an army platoon set out from Chu Lai on combat patrol and killed two guerrillas in a firefight. But half the members of the platoon wore the black armbands...