Nation: Nixon's Unsilent Supporters

We don't smoke marijuana in

Muskogee.

We don't take our trips on LSD,

We don't burn our draft cards down

on Main Street,

'cause we like living right

and being free.

THOSE defiantly straight lyrics from the ballad Okie from Muskogee were rendered at the Washington Monument on Veterans Day by a close-cropped country music group from rural Virginia. They were met with roaring approval by a Freedom Rally crowd of 15,000 proudly self-proclaimed "squares." Swelled in response to the President's TV appeal for "the silent majority" to speak up, the cheering anti-Moratorium demonstrators represent a fresh force in the national controversy over the war. They praise Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, support the Government's course in Viet Nam and flaunt their patriotism. They resent, perhaps even more vehemently, all those rebellious youngsters and peace marchers who have attracted so much attention for so long.

Who are they? The Washington rally was conceived by Professor Charles Moser, faculty adviser to the Young Americans for Freedom chapter at George Washington University. Started nine years ago in Connecticut, Y.A.F. is a national organization of conservatives, mostly on campuses, devoted to "victory over rather than coexistence with" Communism. Its National Advisory Board includes such not-so-young conservatives as Senators Barry Goldwater, John Tower and Strom Thurmond.

When President Nixon invited the silent majority to express themselves, says Moser, who teaches Russian, "he got what he wanted—a visible opposition to the Moratorium crowd." But Moser hopes that Nixon may get even more than he sought. "He may have set in motion the forces that will vigorously oppose the culmination of his policies by demanding victory, not peace." Y.A.F. Director Ron Dear claims that Nixon "would not be unhappy to see his options in the war expanded by right-wing pressure—and we aim to please." -

Others expressed their anti-Moratorium sentiment in individualistic ways. In Houston, Mrs. Nancy Palm, a fiery Republican county leader known to friends as "Napalm," led a drive that quickly collected more than 8,000 signatures on a pro-Nixon petition. As peace demonstrators lay prone in Manhattan's Central Park to symbolize war dead, a lone representative of "the New York Fireman's Ad Hoc Committee for Moratoriums on Moratoriums" held high a sign: STAND UP FOR AMERICA

DON'T LIE DOWN FOR THE VIET

CONG. A Los Angeles group ran an ad bannered GIVE THE QUARTERBACK A CHANCE, claiming South Viet Nam is the gridiron, Richard Nixon the quarterback, and "only one man can call signals." In Santa Cruz, Calif., Mayor Richard Werner, a 74-year-old veteran of two World Wars, ripped a Viet Cong flag off a residence whose owner made a citizen's arrest of the mayor for malicious mischief. Werner, feeling that his act was entirely justified, pleaded not guilty.