A Hostile Reception

IN AN administration such as Nixon's, where crass corruption has cut so deep, any modicum of integrity can seem to be admirable. Against the dismal background of Watergate, the refusal of Elliot L. Richardson '41 last October to fire former Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox '34 appeared a welcome relief. But Richardson's minimal act, clearly also an act of political necessity, did not erase his earlier record. Nor did his supposed act of conscience remedy the vicious policies of which Watergate was the dramatic consequence--policies Richardson helped implement as Secretary of Defense and earlier as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Public respect should not be bought so cheaply.

Richardson was director of the Pentagon in 1973 when the Nixon administration began six months of merciless bombing in Cambodia. His appointment as successor to Melvin Laird was announced before the carpet-bombing of Hanoi which began in December 1972. Richardson did not refuse that December to become Secretary of Defense. At no time did he make any public statement to protest the terror. He did not resign in February rather than help direct the indiscriminate bombing of Cambodian homes, farms and villages. If Richardson secretly opposed such devastation, he lacked the courage to act on his conviction. If he supported the bombing--as his direction of the American war effort at the time suggests--his act of integrity in the Watergate investigation cannot compensate for his complicity.

It is customary at Commencement week speeches to applaud even the most general and least substantive of public remarks out of a supposedly deserved personal respect for the University's guest speakers. It would be equally appropriate, considering the policies which Richardson has sanctioned and enforced, that his Class Day speech today be met with skepticism and hostility. Although Richardson should certainly be allowed to speak, it would be fitting, at those moments when an audience usually accords a speaker its respectful applause, if those listening to Richardson met him with boos and heckling. Heckling is an institution perfectly consistent with political democracy; it is an accepted political tradition in England for hecklers at political rallies to require candidates to respond to the concerns of public assemblies instead of delivering pre-packaged platitudes. An expression of hostility against Richardson would not bring peace to Southeast Asia. It would not resurrect the bodies or homes destroyed by the devastation of the Cambodian countryside. It would not compensate for a moratorium in government support for the protection of civil rights of minority groups and women, which Richardson oversaw as secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. A hostile reception could only be a sign, but it could be an important sign nonetheless.

It could remind the administration--and it could remind Harvard, whose graduates have too often served inhumane administrations--that even when the cancer of Watergate is gone, the public will not tolerate the greater miseries men such as Nixon and Richardson have perpetrated.