Nation: The Emperor's Skivvies

For all the talk of a new stifling of dissent, the unsilent minority still seems fairly aggressive. Last week a group called 1970 Senators for Peace and New Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times depicting the President, the Vice President, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, and South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond marching along in their undershorts, presumably leading the country toward the abyss.

"It's The Emperor's New Clothes all over again," said the ad, which promoted a Madison Square Garden rally to raise campaign funds for antiwar Senate candidates. Among the scheduled speakers: Ramsey Clark, I. F. Stone and Julian Bond. The cartoon was hardly a contribution to the national debate, and few other countries in the world would casually allow their Chief of State to be depicted so contemptuously. But the U.S. presidency has survived sharper lampooning. Actually, the present instance might have been worse. The artist, Robert Grossman, originally had the whole crew walking along naked. The Times rejected that version on grounds of taste, so Grossman airbrushed in the topless skivvies.