THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
The PROGRESSIVE The Moment of Truth As you read this, millions of American voters will have arrived at that moment of truth when they not only must make a choice between Richard Nixon and George...
...We are convinced that the endless, hopeless, feckless Indochina war is a major contributing factor...
...It is not too difficult to conceive of circumstances in which any one of these sleazy episodes, let alone the full panoply of them, would have sufficed to topple an incumbent President seeking re-election...
...How did such a climate come to prevail...
...President Nixon Press Conference October 6, 1972 The flag of the government of South Vietnam once again flies over [the provincial capital] of Quang Tri, five months and many thousands of Vietnamese lives after the city fell to the North Vietnamese army...
...Are people too cynical to react...
...But when leaders teach that war is peace, it is not surprising to find a large measure of public cynicism generally...
...But Quang Tri is no longer a city...
...He described the index at a recent meeting of the American Political Science Association, and concluded that the rapid trend toward alienation from their Government is "somewhat alarming...
...They have been led into a war by lies...
...The PROGRESSIVE The Moment of Truth As you read this, millions of American voters will have arrived at that moment of truth when they not only must make a choice between Richard Nixon and George McGovern but pass a judgment upon themselves as a people...
...Columnist Joseph Kraft found that "people have become so used to dishonesty in high places that one more set of frauds is no big deal...
...a year in which even the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission was disclosed to be hip-deep in the promotion of private profit and political manipulation...
...Senator George McGovern has gone all out to charge that the Nixon Administration has been "the most corrupt in the nation's history...
...it is rather that they believe the climate is so hospitable to corruption that there is absolutely nothing the average American can do about it...
...It will determine whether we have become a nation without a conscience, one that permits President Nixon to bomb and kill, in our name, thousands of defenseless peasants ten thousand miles away from our safe shores...
...It will demonstrate whether Americans understand what George McGovern means when he beckons them to come home to values and standards that once made their country the symbol of hope to struggling peoples everywhere...
...The past year alone—a year when the President was presumably alert to the need for commanding public respect and confidence so that he could win a second term—has set an unrivaled record in corruption...
...a year in which grain exporters reaped windfall profits on the basis of inside information about a sales agreement negotiated with the Soviet Union...
...The returns from voting places all over the nation will decide whether the American people will continue to tolerate an Administration that barters the public good for political gain...
...It is a field of rubble, and circling over it in a helicopter recently, one searched- the landscape less for any sign of life than for any sign that there had once been life...
...they have been lied to about the prospects of peace...
...Every major public opinion survey conducted in recent years has come up with similar findings, and they have been depressingly confirmed in the Presidential election campaign that is rapidly drawing to a close...
...The Wall Street Journal October 5, 1972...
...Professor Arthur Miller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, has devised a "cynicism scale" on which he measures the distrust and dissatisfaction which Americans feel toward their institutions...
...For the better part of a decade, Americans have watched their Government commit monstrous crimes in their name...
...Yet it has been one of the profound frustrations of the McGovern campaign that large numbers of Americans seem to have reacted with resignation rather than indignation...
...a year in which a former Democratic contributor received a coveted Federal bank charter shortly after writing a check for the President's re-election campaign...
...Quang Tri wasn't so much destroyed as obliterated...
...It has been a year in which a man who admitted that he was offered a political bribe he did not report was elevated to the office of Attorney General...
...Bribes, huge campaign contributions in return for favorable Federal decisions, and continued tax loopholes for giant corporations are paid for in the end by the average American in the form of higher utility bills, higher prices, and an unfair burden of taxes...
...a year in which the Justice Department dropped a major antitrust action against International Telephone and Telegraph after the corporation made a substantial commitment toward financing the Republican National Convention...
...Reactions have certainly been muted...
...Anthony Lewis wrote in The New York Times, "There is something very strange in this country: a deadened quality, an end to caring...
...Corruption picks the pockets of the poor and middle classes and lines the pockets of the rich...
...It is a time for the people to look into their hearts and vote their conscience...
...Whose Back Was Broken...
...a year in which the President's party amassed a secret campaign fund of $10 million or more just in time to beat the reporting requirements of the new political contributions law...
...Do they think that all politicians are crooks, so forget it...
...It was the issue of ending the war that brought Senator McGovern into the Presidential race and that continues to dominate his campaign...
...they have squandered their resources and their lives to visit death and devastation on the people of Southeast Asia...
...America is on a disastrous course...
...Among millions of Americans, the hope of changing official policy has been crushed...
...As Anthony Lewis has pointed out, "No people can survive eight years of such deceit without a mark on their collective psyche...
...He is right to recognize the link between the war and corruption...
...Nicholas von Hoffman wondered...
...It is not that they accept Vice President Agnew's bizarre claim that "never in history has there been a poorer climate for corruption than there is in the United States now...
...a year in which agents of the President's reelection drive were caught in the act of planting eavesdropping devices in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee—a year, in brief, to keep muckrakers busy for a generation...
...I see Mr...
...It is a rare observer who has not been struck by the apparent apathy or cynicism of the electorate...
...Vietnam may not be the only cause of the contemporary indifference...
...Nixon, in contrast, as a man of no constant principles—except opportunism and political manipulation...
...There is still time to hope, in the few days remaining to the campaign, that a majority of Americans will recognize this important contrast...
...Millions have become desensitized to the fact of death by our instruments in Indochina...
...a year in which the Agriculture Department allowed a nationwide rise in milk prices after dairymen's associations came across with handsome political contributions...
...Using data furnished by the University of Michigan's respected Survey Research Center, he calculated that the proportion of Americans who have abandoned faith in the political process almost doubled —from twenty per cent to thirty-nine per cent—in the years from 1964 to 1970...
...The back of the enemy offensive has been broken...
...The scandals that rocked Administrations in the not-too-distant past— the deep-freezes received by President Truman's cronies, the vicuna coat accepted by President Eisenhower's administrative assistant—were petty peccadilloes compared to the massive and systemic corruption that has come to light in these four Nixon years, and we can be certain that only a small portion of it has come to light at all...
...How did we sink into this slough of cynicism and indifference...
...The sole hope for saving this country from four more Nixon-Agnew years is that the conscience of the nation, so long under sedation by the Administration and an overwhelming majority of newspaper publishers, will come awake by Election Day and vote for a better, wiser, and socially just America under George McGovern's leadership...
...I have held to a steady course," he says, "on the transcendent issue of the past ten years— the war in Vietnam—and the reallocation of excessive military spending to the urgent needs of this society that is in deadly peril...
...For how the vote goes on November 7 not only will decide the country's course for years to come but will have something to tell us about what kind of people we are...
...They hold no provincial capitals now at all...
...In a word, the voters are "YOU shall know the truth and the truth shall make vou free" turned off," The Washington Post reported after a survey of attitudes in the ten largest states—a survey in which its reporters found "distrust and lack of faith in politicians and the Government itself...
...This, presumably, is progress...
...What too many citizens have overlooked—and most of the media have not told them—is that corruption is a tax...
...Yet many of the people seem numb, resigned, prepared to accept the unacceptable and tolerate the intolerable...
Vol. 36 • November 1972 • No. 11
