In our bafflement that fall, we were unable to pass on the energy that had been instilled in us during our first year at Harvard. Harvard students began taking leaves of absence in droves. Those who left didn't miss much: the renewed bombing of Cambodia on the biggest football Saturday of the fall, an invasion of Laos in February, and the final insult--Mayday in Washington. It was a time when a Harvard senior could write: "...nobody talks about the war much, because it's depressing and boring and well, the war was last year. Or the year before."

His generation, at Harvard and elsewhere, tried futilely to convey the outrage which Americans generally, and Congress in particular, felt only recently; and that is what is so terribly sad, that their efforts were so futile. In May of 1971, the U.S. government could round up 7000 Washington demonstrators in one day--10,000 in a week--and get away with it. Nixonian Washington had so undermined the credibility of students and the Left by then that most Americans visualized only a bunch of crazed hippies roaming the streets of the Capitol. A handful of people, such as those who marched in the Civil Rights movement a decade ago, understood the frustration felt by Mayday protesters. I remember writing The Crimson's stories from Washington, typing sentences that told of outdoor detention centers and indiscriminate arrests, and asking myself, "This is America?" I really wondered.

SO IT WAS that by 1972, The Quiet Campus had arrived, and newspapers were noting that students were studying more, and applying to medical schools and law schools, and drinking more beer, and wearing corduroys and skirts instead of blue jeans. Mr. Nixon mined the harbors of Haiphong and stepped up the bombing of the North, and students took a break from studying to attempt a strike that was doomed from the outset. Some of us, recalling the apocalyptic days of 1970, thought perhaps World War III was coming. Richard Nixon knew better, though, or so he told the Associated Press. Perhaps we knew better, too, because we had seen so many Nixonian aberrations go by the American people and the rest of the world, and we were still here, intact.

Yes, and we are still here and kicking. A few things have changed since the fall we arrived at Harvard. The apocalypse is not so much in our thoughts, if at all. Alternate lifestyles are not quite so fashionable. There is a new administration at Harvard, if not in Washington. The same Faculty which felt tricked two years ago can find a way not to punish 30 black students who occupied Massachusetts Hall for a week. The radicals who remain have forsaken the streets for community organizing. And many students are studying, for a lack of anything better to do, with an eye on professional school, or on a traveling fellowship which prohibits recipients from staying in one European city for more than three weeks at a time. We have changed as well; I know I will always credit Harvard not for its academics, but for the people here who pointed up to me the contradictions of this world over four years.

Politics is still not a topic of much discussion. What is there to discuss when Mr. Nixon is going to run the country any way he wants to, regardless of what people say? He admits to it offhandedly; he is convinced that he has The Mandate. So he dismantles poverty programs, jails reporters, and makes pompous statements about draft resisters: "...[they] must pay their price, and that price is not a junket in the Peace Corps, or something like that, as some have suggested. The price is a criminal penalty for disobeying the laws of the United States." My ex-roommate, the same one who woke me up to tell me about the end of the world, is a draft resister. And we wonder about Richard Nixon. What is the criminal penalty for obliterating an entire country, for shredding the spirit of the American people, or for smothering respect for the office of the Presidency?

There must be some penalty, and that is why I think it is time for my generation of students to get out of school, go out into the real world, and best Mr. Nixon at his own strategies. He says Congress cannot make him spend money by legislating expenditures. But how long will Congress tolerate that kind of arrogance? The American people are waking up. Peace with honor in Vietnam is for now an unproven proposition. But should it last, I for one want no part of a post-war generation which repeats the horrible mistakes of its forebears. Count me out of Mr. Nixon's New Majority of comfortable Americans who leave the poor, the deprived, the sick and the old to tend for themselves in his modern-day laissez-faire society. We must find a way to counteract through persuasion and unremitting pressure the perversions of logic and priority practiced by Mr. Nixon; in this way we can prevent another Nixon. And that will be our success.

My greatest fear is that the slow pace of progress will be stilled altogether in the next four years, and that the generation which best knows the errors of the past four years will lose its will to challenge what is wrong in America. It is time to disturb the silence which afflicts our generation. The ultimate tragedy would be for us to submit to the despair and cynicism attributed to us and to our predecessors, and become an ineffectual generation lost to the disappointments of the past. President, 1972-73