200 Attend a 'Town Meeting,' Call for Nixon's Impeachment

The organizers of last night's "town meeting" on impeaching President Nixon said they hoped to fill MIT's Kresge Auditorium's 1200 seats. That would have been the largest pro-impeachment demonstration in Boston since 5000 people celebrated the bicentennial of the Boston Tea Party.

The organizers didn't make it. Instead, about 200 people gathered at Kresge to hear four speakers, including George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology, moderators from the MIT Peace Coalition and the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, and "testimony" on impeachment from the floor.

"I'm for impeaching Mr. Nixon," Wald told the audience, "but only as a step, I would even say a small step, to the changes we need in this country. Mr. Nixon isn't the master, he's the servant--he's serving the same clients as when just before he became president he was a corporation lawyer in the same firm that employed Mr. Mitchell."

Wald said he thinks Nixon may have outlived his usefulness to these clients, who he said may now be prepared to accept his replacement by Vice President Gerald R. Ford--who, he said, "sure has been a faithful servant of the corporate state."

"Mr. Nixon may go down," Wald said. "The corporate world is doing fine. The New York Times makes it easy--it comes in sections. First, I read the first section. That's got the news--it's almost all bad. And then I open the second section and look at the financial pages."

"My goodness!" Wald continued. "One is in a different world. They've never had it so good." Wald cited large increases in oil companies' profits in 1972, and a 10.9 per cent increase in General Motors' "very clean old men" directors who, he said, nevertheless claim to be "doing poorly."

Wald also denounced corporations for paying taxes he described as minuscule, for carrying industrial espionage to lengths he characterized as "murder," and for helping to induce the U.S. government "to supply arms and all other kinds of aid to the torturers, the murderers" in such countries as Chile, the Philippines, and South Vietnam.

Speakers from the floor added denunciations of Nixon's support for Greece's military dictatorship, his cutbacks in government aid to education and social welfare programs, and his opposition to the United Farm Workers.

Besides Wald, the meeting's scheduled speakers were Richard Barnet, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think-tank based in Washington; Alnita Bond, a field organizer for Local 1199, a hospital workers' union; and Hubert Jones, associate professor of Urban planning at MIT.

"1199 wants Nixon impeached," Bond assured the meeting, "and by God, we'll impeach him."