UP IN the State Department press room, the Associated Press reporter furrowed his brow as he argued with his editor on the phone about the "so-called student leaders"--42 student body presidents and college newspaper editors--who had met that afternoon with Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

"No Jack, they didn't really criticize anything," he said impatiently, "they just kept repeating this stuff about 'erosion of confidence' and 'misgivings.' No, they said they were just here as individuals, not representatives."

The students, after earning a front page story in the New York Times barely one month before with their letter to President Johnson, may have been bewildered the next day when no major newspaper devoted more than eight inches to the Rusk meeting. The Times ignored it completely.

But the AP reporter, whose job at the State Department consists in a very large measure of assessing the verbal nuances that make news, could have given them the explanation that night. "I guess they just played it too smooth," he said simply as he put down the receiver. "You kept wondering what the hell they were really after."

The failure to draw the newspapers' attention was a critical setback, for it indicated that the press, which had given the student leaders their springboard to the general public in December, was no longer interested in vague generalizations about growing dissatisfaction.

The Real Objectives

Although the students have phrased their discontent in the form of questions, their aim has been much broader than a simple exchange of opinion.

Their objective has been twofold. They have wanted, first and most obviously, to provide a means of expression for broad-based moderate dissatisfaction with the war, an alternative to the strident protest of the New Left. In the belief that student discontent is prevalent and that the Administration may soon decide whether to further escalate the war, they have sought to mobilize a "middle course of opposition."

Their second objective, really an extension, of the first, has related to the methodology of student activism. The student leaders have attempted to prove to their contemporaries on the left that widespread student criticism, brought to bear on the government through the channels of the establishment, can be more effective in changing policy than sensational incidents of protest.

This second objective has led the student leaders to dress their criticism in the establishment's language and manner. Their letters and statements have been moderate and restrained, delicately balanced and qualified. In appearances at press conferences--pipe-smoking and neatly groomed, in striped tie or three-piece suit--they have carried the image of responsibility and reasonableness across the national networks.

Their appeal so far, based primarily on a vague sense of malaise, has not dealt with the specifics of government policy; nor has it taken a position on possible alternatives.

But the apparent rigidity of the government's position--particularly in Rusk's responses last week--is gradually prodding them to be more critical and definite. The middle, as viewed in the perspective of past events, is moving further and further left.

I.

The original letter to President Johnson, which earned a front-page story in the New York Times on Dec. 31, was inspired, quite appropriately, by a debate on methodology, not on substance.

In a plenary session of the National Student Association's annual conference, held at the University of Illionois last summer, former NSA president Allard Lowenstein argued against David Harris, bearded and blue-denimed president of the Stanford student body, on the tactics of political involvement. Harris claimed that extreme action in the form of protest was necessary in support of a moral position. Since the entire society appeared to be unshakably corrupt, he contended, a pragmatic, peicemeal approach to social action was doomed to failure.