Nation: At War with War

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There were other signs of anger against the gathering protest. At Northwestern University, a student waved an upside-down American flag, urging some 2,500 others to strike. A hefty man in work clothes tried to grab the flag, shouting: "That's my flag! I fought for it! You have no right to it!" The students began arguing with him. "To hell with your movement," the man responded. "There are millions of people like me. We're fed up with your movement. You're forcing us into it. We'll have to kill you. All I can see is a lot of kids blowing a chance I never had." It was not an isolated sentiment.

Nixon's Silent Majority may be bewildered and unenthusiastic about Cambodia, but the demonstrations are moving its members to rally behind the President. Many of them argue that "the President knows all the facts—he must know what he is doing." Even more of them express frank hostility toward the students. Says a Chicago ad salesman: "I'm getting to feel like I'd actually enjoy going out and shooting some of these people. I'm just so goddamned mad. They're trying to destroy everything I've worked for—for myself, my wife and my children." .

Nixon's Insulation

During the 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon said: "We must listen to the voices of dissent because the protester may have something to say worth listening to. If we dismiss dissent as coming from 'rebels without a cause,' we will soon find ourselves becoming leaders without an effect. By its neglect, by its insensitivity, by its arrogance, our present leadership has caused an unprecedented chasm to develop in our society."

Much of Nixon's present trouble stems from not heeding his own warning. Like Lyndon Johnson before him, he has tended to shut himself away even from many in his Administration and listen almost exclusively to John Mitchell and to White House Aides John Ehrlichman and Robert Haldeman. "They encourage his anger," says one disaffected White House staffer. "They tell him he is right and everybody else is wrong."

Before the Black Panther rally at New Haven two weeks ago, the Army's domestic intelligence network, which monitors the protest movement, concluded that no federal troops would be needed at the demonstration. Richard Kleindienst, Deputy Attorney General, ignored the decision and ordered up 4,000 of them. A recommendation from the same intelligence unit saying that federal forces would not be required in Washington last Saturday was simply dropped from the Pentagon briefing prepared for White House officials.

"Nixon gets very little firsthand," says a former White House staff member. "He doesn't read the papers raw very much." Observes TIME'S Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey: "There is about Nixon's presidency the feeling of theater. When the performance is over and the lights go out, there is an eerie nothingness—no heart, no feeling of movement or national momentum."