Word: moratorium
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...cover article this week describes the organization, objectives and gathering momentum of what seems bound to become the year's biggest single act of protest: the Oct. 15 Viet Nam Moratorium. Written by Keith Johnson, edited by Laurence Barrett and researched by Anne Constable, the story involved TIME correspondents in hundreds of interviews across the nation...
...MORATORIUM" was scarcely a household word a couple of months ago. The dictionary definition is "a period of permissive or obligatory delay," and to most people it meant a pause in paying one's debts or in talking. Now, suddenly, "moratorium" has become the focus of national attention in its special 1969 sense: M-day, Oct. 15, a movement intended by its organizers and supporters to show the Nixon Administration that large and growing numbers of Americans want out of the Viet Nam war as fast as possible...
Across the nation, M-day observances are aimed at suspending business-as-usual in order to allow protest, debate and thought about the war. The Moratorium demonstrates a diversity and spread unknown in the earlier landmark protests against the war: the march on the Pentagon in October 1967, which inspired Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, and the bloody riots the following summer in Mayor Daley's Chicago. Each of those involved directly only a minority of the young and the radical intelligentsia, not anything resembling a cross-section of U.S. society...
...core of M-day activism is on the campuses, as it was in the campaign for Eugene McCarthy in 1968; hundreds of colleges and universities are closing for the day or radically altering schedules to allow for Moratorium demonstrations. The idea has spread from the campuses to the community at large?though not without arousing resistance. In the affluent suburb of Westport, Conn., the representative town meeting bitterly debated for nearly three hours last week and then only narrowly passed, 17 to 15, a resolution asking immediate action to get the U.S. out of Viet Nam. In California...
...only official Administration reaction to the Moratorium came on Tuesday in a speech by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. After a conference with Nixon, Agnew asked the Moratorium leaders to repudiate a letter from North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong. The letter expressed hope that the nationwide demonstrations would bring an end to American participation...