Nation: A CHANCE TO LEAD

AS they start on the road to November, the Republicans are united. Now what will they do with their unity? Richard Nixon is clearly in tune with his party. Will he be in tune with the country?

These are the chief questions that emerge from the Republican Convention and will dominate the political scene for the next 2½ months. The American party system allows a measure of plasticity every four years. The Republicans are making the most of this chance. The painful ruptures of the past have been treated and very nearly healed—almost in a spirit of harmony or bust. After pulling back from its heartfelt but self-indulgent right-wing position of 1964, the 1968 party once more stands in the middle of its ideo logical spectrum.

Within his party Richard Nixon represents the only centripetal force. The country is troubled, the opposition divided. The rational course is to play it safe, to bet that self-preservation—just staying together as a party—will be nine-tenths of victory. It is, after all, an election in which the incumbents are in danger simply because they are incumbents. Nixon's choice of the factionally neutral Spiro Agnew as running mate was part of that strategy.

These assumptions, of course, may prove too neat. Unity is essential for a minority party, but the G.O.P. may find the price tag troublesome. Does harmony require straddling at the expense of commitment? Does it mean combining the vocabulary of change with the policies of conservatism? The convention offered mixed portents.

Boldface Type. Symbols of unity and progress napped like so many ensigns at fleet review. Barry Goldwater sounded like a man from the N.A.A.C.P. New York's John Lindsay agreed to second Agnew's nomination rather than serve as the rallying point for opposition to it. The platform, the keynote address, Nixon's acceptance speech and the subsidiary verbiage were on the whole impeccably progressive in tone, promising jobs, justice, education and a "piece of the action" to the poor, peace in Viet Nam, honorable conciliation with the Communists.

Those who wanted to could find less obvious signals bearing a slightly different message. Only one sentence in the platform's domestic-policy section appeared in boldface type: "We will not tolerate violence!" Somehow Nixon manages to sound more forceful and specific in emphasizing the need for law and order than in pleading for social justice. The targets of his acceptance speech are the "forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators." They are "good people. They're decent people. They work and they save and they pay their taxes and they care."