Nation: MOVING AHEAD, NIXON STYLE

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The rapid-fire week made a sharp contrast with the leisurely previous pace of Nixon's Administration, which has often brought accusations that his is a do-little presidency. Nixon himself has cautioned: "We will propose only legislation that we know we can execute once it becomes law." Generally, Nixon is reluctant to plunge ahead with ambitious and experimental social ventures; like Eisenhower, he means to consolidate and reorganize rather than innovate.

Nixon has sent to Congress a spate of law-and-order bills, which cost little compared to a massive social program. He was quick with legislative proposals on organized crime, narcotics, obscenity, and law enforcement in the District of Columbia. Yet another repeated 1968 campaign promise—to encourage black capitalism with tax incentives—has run afoul of a variety of problems (see BUSINESS). With that plan stalled on dead center, Nixon has little to point to that his Administration has done specifically for the black community. Moynihan's deputy, Stephen Hess, pleads: "We are not defining problems by constituency and bloc. These groups have grown accustomed to being catered to. Our major programs are fairly evenhanded—welfare, manpower training."

Still, it is six months since Nixon's second press conference, when he asked Negroes to judge him on his record as President. In that time, Nixon's most visible moves in the race-relations field have been a rearrangement of school-integration enforcement methods and an attempt to rewrite the 1965 voting-rights law. Both of those steps were widely taken to be gestures to the Southern whites, led by South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond, who supported Nixon in 1968. At the same time, the Administration has initiated strong desegregation proceedings in such disparate places as Chicago, Georgia, and Waterbury, Conn. As he does in other fields, Nixon on civil rights often seems to run on alternating current as the conservative and progressive forces around him feed in conflicting impulses.

As for the future, Nixon is obviously banking on having more money to spend on domestic problems once the Viet Nam war is ended and the nagging problem of inflation has been overcome. In the meantime, he has initiated a number of proposals that make a gesture in the direction of urgent national needs —for example, a plan announced last week to spend $10 billion over a dozen years on improvements to urban rapid-transit systems. Two themes are likely to recur in the Nixon Administration's social legislation; both are contained in the welfare message, and both are favorite concepts of Pat Moynihan. One is that much adolescent and adult delinquency can be avoided only by enriching the early years of a child's life. The other, exemplified by both welfare decentralization and the revenue-sharing plan, is the idea that the Federal Government is a first-rate revenue-collecting agency, but a fifth-rate dispenser of public services.