Newsday (Nassau Edition) from Hempstead, New York • 133

CLAYTON ROBERT MAYER How Do We Justify the Dead? If it is true, as it appears to Nixon, like President Johnson, pursuit of military victory in problem for the administration increasingly becomes the justification of another 100,000 U.S. casualties in the next year or so. This is the dilemma that is squeezing Nixon and his advisers harder than any other. It is the exposed nerve of the NixonKissinger strategy of fight-and-talkand-withdrawal, and it is a nerve that the new war critics, such as Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman, and Cyrus Vance, will pinch when the Senate hearings on Vietnam are soon revived. be, that President has abandoned the Vietnam, the chief Clayton Fritchey If the government no longer seeks or expects a U.S.

military solution, if it is going to gradually withdraw unilaterally, and if it is even prepared to accept a Communist or partly Communist government in Vietnam under certain conditions, why go on killing additional thousands of young American soldiers? This is deeply troubling not only to dovish senators but also to some of the highest officials of the Johnson administration, who once were firm supporters of the previous administration's Vietnam policy. Clifford was secretary of defense, and Harriman and Vance were Johnson's chief peace negotiators at Paris. All three have somewhat different plans for scaling down the war, but their aim is the -reduce and eliminate U.S. casualties as fast as possible. In combination, they would accelerate the withdrawal of U.S.

combat troops, work hard for a cease-fire, and meanwhile switch to the defensive on the fighting front. Obviously, this has enormous public appeal. The JAMES J. KILPATRICK Pentagon counters with the implausible argument In the that casualties will increase if we substitute a defensive strategy for the search-and-destroy operations by The boys who call themselves which "maximum pressure" is presently kept on the each night on Christopher Street, enemy. buildings.

They wear pants that This argument won't wash, for it is contradicted gaily colored blouses. Some look by the Pentagon's own casualty reports, which show like any other young men, except that the number of dead and wounded goes up or perhaps for a certain delicacy of down depending on the intensity of the ground action. movement. Others bleach their Actually, a large proportion of all U.S. casualties can hair a bright blond, and wear be traced just to troops stumbling into booby traps thick makeup.

A few wear womand hidden mines in search-and-destroy operations. en's clothing. Nixon's brief for keeping up the pressure on the They are homosexuals, the ground is like Johnson's contention that he couldn't kind who choose not to hide it. stop or reduce the bombing of North Vietnam be- Long ago they picked Christopher cause U.S. casualties would soar if he did.

The record, Street as their turf, a three-block however, shows that casualties dropped after the homosexual Main Street in Greenbombing was halted. wich Village. They rarely accost A Hot Weekend In the Village girls can be seen leaning against the are too tight, and Robert Mayer When Clifford became Secretary of Defense he began changing his mind about the war when he asked for the Pentagon's plan "for obtaining victory in Vietnam," only to discover that "there was no plan He was appalled to find U.S. strategy was nothing more than endless "attrition," a military concept that most experts thought had been abandoned 50 years ago. But under Nixon, General Abrams is still persisting in the attrition strategy that General Westmoreland pursued under Johnson, with the same sterile results.

"The first order of business," says Harriman, "is the reduction of violence. We're not going to make any progress politically until we do. It is perfectly obvious President Thieu wants to maintain the fighting as long as possible. He wants to maintain our troops there in order to maintain his position." Clifford agrees that the objectives of Saigon and the U.S. are not the same.

He has concluded that Saigon is "in no hurry for the fighting to end," and that it does "not want us to reach an early settlement of military issues with Hanoi." Peg Was a Very Good Hater saw Peg was maybe three or four Casa Cholla out on West Magee miles from Tucson. I remember little of that afternoon, except that the conversation was vintage Pegler; he sipped at his old animosities, inhaling them like brandy. The New Dealers were dead -Bubblehead, Old Weenie, Moosejaw and the Widow, La Boca Grande -and he had survived them all. We drank to that. Now Westbrook Pegler is dead at 74, and I venture an affectionate "30" for the last of the great newspaper writers.

At his best, Peg ranked with Henry Mencken The last time I years ago, at his Road a couple of James J. Kilpatrick as a stylist. He had none of Mencken's erudition, but he gloried in the same shillelagh and bung-starter brawls. Like Mencken, he made some colossal misjudgments, and he made them colossally. Nothing about Pegler was small.

Dr. Johnson once paid a fine tribute to that eminent Tory, Lord Bathurst. The first earl, he said, "was a man to my very heart's content: He hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, and he hated a whig; he was a very good hater." Pegler was all of this. Once he put that vast belly against a portable typewriter, he was an absolutely even-tempered man: He stayed mad. He turned his fury on union bosses, hypocrites in public office, and liberals of high and low degree.

It was said that in his final years, he turned to anti-Semitism, but he denied it and the charge was too selective anyhow. Peg was anti-everything--or or so it often seemed. His sense of pure integrity made odd demands upon him. He would resent the comparison, but he shared something of Ernest Hemingway in this regard. Hemingway kept having to prove something to himself.

So did Peg, in terms of his friends. At one time or another in his life, he broke with Heywood Broun, Gene Tunney, Roy Howard, Quentin Reynolds. It was as if friendship threatened his virtue. He feared seduction and distrusted intimacy. Except for 2 strangers.

They rarely break the law. They are allowed to live in peace. That is how it has been for years. That is how it was until this weekend. But this weekend, New York City experienced something new.

This weekend New York City had its first homosexual riots. The spark was a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a private club for homosexuals at 57 Christopher St. The Stonewall was opened more than two years ago to give the young men a private place to congregate. On the outside there is nothing but brick and opaque black glass, and a small sign that says: "Private Club, Members Only." There is nothing to offend the innocent passerby. Few non-members have ever been inside.

Inside, there is a long bar that serves soda and setups. The place has no liquor license. There are booths and tables, a jukebox, and in the back, a squalid dance floor surrounded by bare brick walls and bathed in psychedelic lights. Here the young men with the delicate wrists and the bobby pins in their hair come to dance the night away, with one another. Friday night, police from the First Division raided.

They had a warrant. They said they had been informed that liquor was being sold on the premises illegally. They cleared the club of the 200 boys inside. The young men milled about in the street. When the police emerged, they were pelted with garbage and rocks and cans.

Four policemen were injured; 13 persons were arrested. Julie and Maude, whom he loved deeply, his passions were mostly abstract--for justice, honesty, flag and country. This makes him sound formidably ferocious. In a sense, he was. He stood six feet tall, and in his prime weighed well over 200 pounds.

He had a great florid face, marked by the shaggiest eyebrows west of John L. Lewis, and when he came dripping from the pool that afternoon at Casa Cholla, it was like Poseidon rising from the deep. So far as I know, he was an utterly fearless man. Yet much of this was sham. Away from that typewriter, he was shy, sensitive, gentle and generous.

When he swore, he swore in manly oaths, but he shunned obscenity and smut. He never wrote an offcolor line. In the public prints, he could be rough on women; he loathed Eleanor Roosevelt and loved to lampoon "My Day." Privately, he was as chivalrous as any knight who ever served the table round. Perhaps that is the image in which he saw himself. In one of his last columns, he described himself as a "tireless crusader." In the newspaper business, we knew him as a legman, a reporter, a gruff voice on the telephone saying, "Could you help me with a couple of facts I need?" Mostly we knew him as writer, polemicist, master of the churlish phrase.

Harold Ickes was the house dick of the New Deal. Henry Luce was China boy. A. A. Berle Jr.

was a bloodthirsty bull twirp. He slaughtered Henry Wallace as "Bubblehead," and exposed Wallace's "Riverside guru." He once assailed J. Edgar Hoover as a nightclub fly-cop. (Hoover responded by remarking that Peg had mental halitosis.) Frank Sinatra was a ratty bum, Justice Frankfurter was Old Weenie, the blind umpire. Clifton Fadiman was the bull butterfly of literary teas.

Now he's gone, and in the world of serious writing he leaves no lasting monuments to mark his truculent crusades. His memorial lies in the heart of every crusty city editor who ever smiled over a piece of glorious copy. And one day such a city editor, seizing happily upon a story by some unborn reporter, will cry with unexpected joy. "My God," he will say, "he writes like Peg." 'Firefighters' Saturday night, the interior of the Stonewall was a cluttered mess. The jukebox had been smashed, and the money taken.

The cigaret machine had been smashed, and the money taken. The pay telephones had been smashed, and the money taken. The glass and lights above the bar had been shattered. Even the bowls in the rest room downstairs had been smashed to pieces. Spokesmen for the club said that the police had done it all, with axes and sledge hammers.

The police said that there may have been some destruction while they fought two small fires inside. There was no visible evidence of fires. The talk of the street for some time had been that the club was owned by the Mafia. A spokesman, heavy-set, dark-haired, tough-looking, denied this. But why the raid now? The talk on the street is that there must have been trouble about payoffs.

Whatever the reason, the boys on Christopher Street were caught in the middle. "If they close all the fag one of them said, with as much menace as he could muster, "it's going to be a long, hot summer." Saturday night it was hot enough to make mascara run. But the boys gathered in greater numbers than ever before. By 1 AM about 1,000 of them were milling in Christopher Street. Then it began.

A car came along, and the boys wouldn't let it pass. One of them jumped on the hood. He was wearing yellow pants, an orange blouse, thick makeup. His blond hair was combed over his eye, a large pocketbook was on his arm. "Come on, girls," the boy shrieked, and they began rocking the car.

A bus came along. They climbed all over it, rocking the bus. Then a taxi, then more cars. For more than an hour they blocked traffic, laughing and giggling. One of them touched the forearm of the driver of each passing car.

About 2 AM, the helmeted Tactical Patrol Force arrived, and spent two hours clearing the streets. There were five more arrests, and at least one bloodied head. The boys taunted the police with a conga line across the street, and sang some ditties: "We are the Village girls, We wear our hair in curls, We wear our dungarees, To hide our bony The blond boy with the makeup and pocketbook looked ecstatic. "I've never had so much excitement in my life," he said. Newsday Newsday.