Nation: NIXON'S NEW ALIGNMENT'

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Volunteer General. Nixon mentions Daniel Moynihan as typifying the broad-minded liberalism that presumably qualifies as "new." Admittedly, Democrat Moynihan has been critical of the ham-handed implementation of Great Society programs, and calls Nixon's thesis "thoughtful and important." But Moynihan is a big spender when it comes to federal funds, as are most liberals, and in the current Commentary voices the fear that 1968 may well produce "a conservative Republican President and conservative-to-reactionary Congress: a regime marked by indifference to events abroad, save for intermittent threats to blow up the world, and by hostility to social change at home." He is obviously nonaligned in Nixon's context.

While not quite saying so, Nixon was obviously volunteering to serve as general of the army that he has constructed on paper. His enlistment is hampered by old anti-Nixon prejudices that die hard and by a shortage of personal appeal to non-Republicans that he may not be able to make good. If history decides that Nixon is correct in his assessment of the drift in alignments, it might have to add the irony that someone else benefited from the discovery.