Nation: KALEIDOSCOPE OF DISSENT

SAIGON was quiet for a war zone.

In the presidential palace, Nguyen Van Thieu was closeted in his daily conference with aides. U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker was lunching at his residence six blocks away. A handful of American relief workers held a silent vigil. General Creighton Abrams, asked what the Viet Nam Moratorium movement meant to him, replied: "We've got our job to do here and that's what we're doing." Sure enough, an army platoon set out from Chu Lai on combat patrol and killed two guerrillas in a firefight. But half the members of the platoon wore the black armbands of M-day.

In Paris, Henry Cabot Lodge, chief of the American negotiating delegation, worked quietly in his quarters at the U.S. embassy, preparing for yet another bargaining session that would produce no bargaining, no progress. In Boston, the ambassador's son, Harvard Business School Professor George Cabot Lodge, conducted a Moratorium Day teach-in for 150 students.

Double Suicide. It was a day of wrenching contrasts. Quiet seminars mulled over the issues of the war while pickets shouted their dissent. Some mass marches developed a football rally spirit; elsewhere a funereal atmosphere dominated as church bells tolled and the names of the war dead were read. A pair of high school sweethearts from Blackwood, N.J., attended an M-day rally at Glassboro State College, then committed suicide together. Across the Hudson, New York's city hall wore the black and purple bunting of mourning. Mayor Herman Zogelmann of Wellington, Kans. (pop. 8,391) cooperated with the American Legion post to drape the town in patriotic tricolor. Across the country—in drenching San Francisco rain, in ankle-deep Denver snow, in crisp New York fall sunshine—Americans took part in a unique national Happening.

Down Commonwealth Avenue a crowd of 100,000 converged on the Boston Common. They were mostly students, but mothers from Newton and Wellesley walked among them, their children wearing black M-day armbands or clutching helium-filled black balloons. From a bar, a man hollered: "Bums! Do they think of the guys who died on Guadalcanal?" Halfway across the nation in front of the Forest Park (Ill.) Selective Service office, miniskirted girls from nearby Rosary College were reciting the names of the Illinois war dead; two elderly clerks inside went on with their work, paying little attention. San Francisco State College President S. I. Hayakawa, a hero to California conservatives for his rhadamanthine handling of student demonstrators in the past, serenely denied that M-day was being observed on his campus. But not far from his office, students planted 2,000 white crosses representing California's war dead in Viet Nam. The Moratorium caused split levels of routine and awareness. Almost everyone at the Pentagon seemed to be watching the Mets and Orioles except those in the civil-disturbance center, who were assigned to monitor the U.S. for violence. Richard Nixon spent much of the day reviewing Latin American policy, although his mind doubtless wandered occasionally to the events in his country.