But it has been just a series of off-the-record decisions and refusals to answer critical arguments that has contributed to the tragedy that is Vietnam. Is it really such an awful shock that students will react with "unmannerly" and "impolite" demonstrations? Is it the bad manners of students demonstrators that has killed 6000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese? Or is it an Executive branch that, with as little open discussion as it can get away with, continues to drag a divided American people and a reluctant and brutalized Asian people into a larger war?  ROBERT GINSBURG 1L

Mc Namara at Harvard

The day of his visit bullets argued ad hominem

Blistering retorts to the villages exceeded the norms of decorum

Lives were rudely interrupted  HUGH DEANE '38

Shoddy Ploys

The editorial from the New York Times of Monday, Nov 7, should explain the necessity for the personal confrontation here at Harvard of Secretary of Defense McNamara. He is the President's principal adviser on the Vietnam war and its principal manager. That this is true is incontrovertible on the evidence of his off-the-record remarks at Eliot and Quincy Houses. These remarks should be made public. The entire country should know.

Further causes determined the particular form of the confrontation. Richard Neustdat, head of the Kennedy Institute, turned down a petition signed by over 1600 students, 93 teaching fellows, and 52 faculty for McNamara to debate Robert Scheer, editor of Ramparts. He stated academic reasons for this decision, including the "difficulty" of attracting national figures to the Institute. That a public debate should "embarrass" or "upset" a cabinet member, can only demonstrate that he has some lapse of rationality in his record, which he would like to hide. This makes the decision not to debate a political one, motivated by a desire to obfuscate American foreign policy.

That this decision was not moti-shown by the informal offer made to a representative of SDS by a close associate of McNamara's: McNamara might meet privately with your organization if you will drop the issue of a public debate. SDS did not fall for this ploy. Barney Frank, the Kennedy Institute's liaison with undergraduate affairs, offered to arrange the personal presentation of the petition to Secretary McNamara as he arrived at Eliot House on Sunday. The SDS representatives were then told that Frank would take the petitions himself. That he did, in spite of our best efforts.

Further ploys, including lying about McNamara's schedule on Monday and the use of decoy cars, failed to frustrate our attempts to confront McNamara in public at Quincy House. They did, however, succeed in turning the planned silent confrontation into a mass of running people angry at the deception characteristic of both the government's Vietnam policy and the Institute's evasion of its responsibility to the public. In spite of this, and of McNamara's "tougher-than-thou" attitude, he suffered nothing worse than considerable, and deserved, embarrassment. Meanwhile rowdy students managed to create the sound and smell of a mob by physical attacks on outlying protestors, including women. This happened after McNamara had agreed to answer two questions.

We are sick of the whole series of shoddy ploys aimed at discrediting the anti-war movement and avoiding public debate, at Harvard and in the country at large. We're tried of being manipulated by so-called liberals.  THOMAS W. HOLZINGER.  EUGENE W. JENNESS  DAVID F. LABAREE  DAVID S. WYLIE  JONATHAN M. HARRIS  GARRICK F. COLE

Veneer

Since the views of Deans are sometimes all too readily dismissed as expressions of pious paternalism, may I express my shame and revulsion on seeing (over national television) the disgraceful treatment accorded Secretary McNamara by some members of the Harvard community. If the purpose of the student gathering was to convey certain views to Secretary McNamara -- and the manner in which the meeting was conducted leaves one with serious doubts about the validity of that premise--one can hardly think of a way less calculated to succeed and more likely to alienate the listener. Understandably Secretary McNamara, who seemed initially as-