On Feb. 6, a day before the SDS deadline, Dean Ford released a statement announcing the public meeting. "There . . . will be no arranged debate," the statement said, "but there will be an opportunity for faculty and students to question Ambassador Goldberg on all aspects of American foreign policy. Obviously, this format does not conform to the specific requests of any one student organization; but it will, I believe, satisfy widespread interest within the University."

The statement said that John T. Dunlop, David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy, would serve as chairman of the meeting and set up procedure.

SDS leaders, like everyone else, read the statement in the newspapers. And they were angry. They had talked to the Institute and Dean Monro on their own initiative; they had spent most of January "bargaining in good faith." Yet no one had seen fit to let them know about the statement in advance.

They told Dunlop this when they met him for the first time, the Tuesday before Goldberg's arrival. Dunlop had remarked, when Dean Ford first approached him, that he wasn't the man for the job. But his qualifications were obvious. He is one of the country's leading labor arbitrators and an old friend of Goldberg's. When Goldberg was Secretary of Labor, Dunlop had, in fact, helped arbitrate several important disputes for him, such as the missile base work stoppages. The meeting was, as he said through that week, just "another job" for him--and not a particularly difficult one. He was not arbitrating or negotiating, he insisted; he was simply consulting any groups interested in the meeting. The final decisions would be his and his alone.

Yet he won SDS's trust early and, except for one brief episode-- with which he clearly had nothing to do--kept it. One reason is that he knew, as any good arbitrator does, how to hold his counsel, and when not to hold it.

In the beginning, he spent most of his time simply listening to SDS's presentation, its argument that there must be a speaker or some kind of a panel to follow up Goldberg's answers. He did not commit himself. But, on Wednesday morning, SDS leaders told him they needed something to bring to their membership that night. He told them, he agreed that there should be some "preferential right to ask questions"--that was all. But, for the purposes of the SDS leaders, it was enough.

He was also incredibly frank. He thought the importance of the meeting was being exaggerated and he told them so. On Wednesday afternoon, Dean Ford, who had not been keeping in touch with the talks, said in answer to a reporter's question that it was his impression Goldberg's letter ruled out a selected group of questioners. SDS, in response, made public what Dunlop had told them that morning.

Dunlop was in New York at the time, but when he met with SDS leaders the next day he began by saying simply that it wasn't his custom to report closed meetings to the newspapers and that he didn't intend to operate that way. Again, that was all.

He also felt, and SDS agreed, that the group of questioners he put together didn't have to be "representative" in any sense; they simply had to be good questioners. The group of five he finally selected were all critical of the continued escalation of the war.

All of them, though, came to Sunday's meeting with very different kinds of questions--something Dunlop encouraged. Loud, who has been building up a file on Vietnam for years, wanted to challenge the official history of the war. Michael L. Walzer, professor of Government, tried to point out inconsistencies in Administration policy. Thomas C. Schelling, professor of Economics, talked about long-range policy in Southeast Asia. Gregory Craig '67, president of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, concentrated on problems of leadership; Jay B. Stephens '68, now president of the Young Republicans, on tactics.

And none of them were very satisfied with Goldberg's answers. He had not come armed with the facts and figures necessary for the kind of debate Loud wanted, nor did he engage in the kind of speculation Walzer and Schelling wanted. He was waiting for someone to ask him about the alternatives he sees for Vietnam in the very near future; nobody did.

There was an ever deeper unhappiness about the meeting on the part of 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. "It wasn't worth the effort. What is there to be said between government spokesmen and us?"

In the past few months, SDS has spent much of its time and emotion on two men--Goldberg and McNa-