There was an even deeper unhappiness about the meeting in the groups that had worked for a month to arrange it. "Everything he said was dull, boring drivel and made me more despairing than ever," a member of SDS's executive committee said about an hour after it was over.

After being questioned, applauded and hissed for more than two hours, Arthur J. Goldberg tried to sum up for his Sanders Theater audience a week and a half ago what he thought of the discussion.

"I think we have done something worthwhile here, having a meeting, exchanging points of view," he said. "This is in the libertarian tradition of the United States, something I value. I hope I am not old-fashioned in this regard."

He had caught, for a moment, just the point on which he was vulnerable. Later, those who were dissatisfied with the meeting would claim that he was "old-fashioned," that he had relied on old-fashioned platitudes, had never met their arguments directly.

But they would not go much beyond that in their criticism. The former Secretary of Labor and Supreme Court Justice was not a man who could be heated. He could not arouse--even in the most determined opponent of the war in Vietnam--the violent emotions that Secretary McNamara had during the Mill St. confrontation last November.

That was understood weeks before Goldberg arrived, from the time when Students for a Democratic Society, the deans and officials of the Kennedy Institute of Politics began talking about what he ought to do when he got here.

The discussion never really centered around Goldberg personally. It was always more abstract: The Kennedy Institute invited a member of the Johnson Administration to speak off-the-record to small groups as part of its Honorary Associates Program. SDS insisted, as it had insisted before McNamara's visit, that no Administration spokesman should come here without facing publicly hs anti-war critics. Could both he satisfied without a McNamara-like clash, without a clash at all?

Institute officials were not sure at the beginning that it could be. But they were determined to start talking early and not be--as they had felt they had been with McNamara--caught unprepared.

"If we had perceived last Spring that he [McNamara] would be coming against the background of such frustration, we would have done it very differently or not at all," Richard E. Neustadt, director of the Institute, said in a recent interview.

"But nobody expected trouble. SDS's demand for a public confrontation reached us late in the process. We felt there was no way to ask for such a thing as a basic change in the terms of his invitation; we wouldn't have dreamed of it."

The terms of Goldberg's invitation, of course, were the same as McNamara's. It was private; he was coming to talk informally with students (several Law School and Kennedy Institute seminars were on his schedule) and to consult with Faculty members (he asked to talk with Edwin O. Reischauer, University professor, and a group of "China experts").

But the way in which the Institute looked at the invitation was different. Institute officials still insisted that they were not running a "speaker's bureau." Yet the McNamara demonstration, and the discussion that followed it, had lent some weight to SDS's argument about why officials like McNamara should be asked to speak publicly.

"The questions SDS raised was whether the terms of our invitations to men like Goldberg and McNamara didn't inferentially put the University's prestige behind them," Neustadt said. "We found that this was a view held strongly by a fraction of this community, including some of its permanent members. And if, in their view, we are lending this prestige, then, in a way, we are."

Even more important, the Institute was not alone in caring intensely about the arrangements for Goldberg's visit. Dean Monro attended a meeting and went to dinner with SDS leaders after the McNamara demonstration; he was to have four long meetings with them during the month before Goldberg's arrival. Mill Street had changed the Administration's thinking and made it willing to share responsibility for the visit, to help get the Institute around the terms of its invitation.

In early January, a member of SDS's executive committee called Neustadt and told him the group had started thinking about the Goldberg visit. Neustadt arranged a meeting between three members of the executive committee and the Institute spokesmen--John Wofford, its associate director, and Ernest R. May, professor of History and chairman of its student activities committee. Neither had been involved in the planning for the McNamara visit.