The story was picked up by the Montreal Star, and following his return from Washington Bator received an incensed phone call at his home from a professor at McGill University. "He asked if we had lost our wits, and if we had no respect for academic freedom," Bator said. Then the Washington editor of the (London) Sunday Time, a friend of Bator and Neustadt, called Bator at 11:45 Monday night to say he had heard that at a lunch Sunday at the home of Katherine Graham (publisher of the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine), someone had alleged that the Harvard group had arrived at Kissinger's office Friday with a taperecorder.

"Imagine myself and Dick Neustadt and all the others arriving at the basement of the White House with a tape recorder!" Bator sputtered. "It's grotesque! It's incredible how utterly grotesque paranoid rumors circulate as reality. Reston's column Monday suggested that in the end we protected Henry's confidences. But there were no confidences! The idea that this has to do with Kissinger's relation to Harvard is grotesque on its face."

THE PROFESSORS returned to the Hay-Adams from their meeting with Packard-barely an hour after they'd left-in a highly agitated state. William Capron, associate dean of the Kennedy School and former assistant director of the Budget, complained, "He gave us the straightforward party line-he sounded just like John Foster Dulles. It was nothing like Kissinger in terms of emotional content. We gave it to him very hard and he said to please wait six weeks and we'd see that everything will turn out all right. He said he understood our concern, but asked for our forebearance! In six weeks, he said, we'll be out and it will be a great victory! We were just talking past each other."

Neustadt (author of Presidential Power ): "Mr. Packard heard us out, then responded in a perfectly canned way that we should be patient. His explanation was irrelevant to our concern. It was a matter of our reporting our feelings to him and hearing no attempt at exchange. Perhaps we underestimated the credibility gap. Ghastly. The President's credibility is hopeless. And nobody can call us radicals, either. The purpose of giving our views was precisely that. We're not voicing our concern because of Harvard or the domestic impact. We were offering our professional judgment as former advisors to Presidents that it was a horrendous act of foreign policy.

"We said to Henry, we said to Mr. Packard, that the military-civilian imbalance today is the greatest threat to the Presidency since McCarthy's challenge to Johnson in 1968. I myself don't see anything that can restore military credibility."

Bator said, "From Packard we got a canned speech-a casual pat speech about his administration and Vietnamization and wiping out a few bases. He said it would all please us in just another six weeks. He seemed very aware of our campus origins. We reacted quite strongly."

Konrad Bloch, Higgins Profesor of Biochemistry, said. "It was the straight-forward drivel. It's like leaving the radio on. He coldly misinterpreted what we had to say. It was hard to know how to explain our position, although Schelling put on a great performance with his Monster Speech when Packard was finally through. Later Packard started talking about Stanford-he said it is infiltrated by a hard core that will have to be climinated. He said tension in this country will have to come to a head some day, and it might as well be now."

Walzer commented, "It's one of the most frightening things we head all day."

A bellhop brought Pepsi and Michelob for the overheated professors. Bator had iced coffee. The phone rang. Bator answered it.

"Hello. Averili!" He smiled. "Well hello governor! Yes governor, I'm here. This is Francis." As Bator talked to Harriman, Yarmolinsky dashed to the extension phone in the bathroom to listen. "Yes governor, well Scotty said. . ." When Bator finished, Yarmolinsky started talking on the bathroom extension. Neustadt quickly established possession of the bedroom phone. Alarmed to discover the conversation wasn't over, Bator scurried to the bathroom to listen in when Yarmolinsky was finished. Finally they all said goodbye and hung up. "That was averill," Bator explained. The professors nodded appreciately, put on their coats, and poured back out of the room for their meeting with Undersecretary of State Eliot Richardson, muttering at McGrory in the Star over each other's shoulders.

THE meeting with Richardson was long, but uninspiring. It began at 5:30 and the professors did not return to the Hay-Adams until ten minutes of 8 p. m. All the professors except Yarmolinsky, Lipset and Neustadt were trying to catch a 9 p. m. plane. These three had promised to appear at a meeting of Everett Mendelschn's larger Harvard student-Faculty delegation-the Peace Action Strike-at the Cleveland Park Congregational Church that evening. So the professors washed up, took their messages (Max Frankel of the New York Times for Yarmolinsky; National Educational Television, which wanted Schelling to debate Herb Klein on T. V. about the strategic implications of the invasion), and rushed down to dinner as Bator reserved a cab to take them to the airport. A sign in the elevator warned guests that all the hotel's vital functions would be shut down and guards placed at every door in preparation for the huge anti-war demonstration Saturday. Over double martinis for most and Caesar Salad (the quickest thing on the menu), they summed up the day.

"Richardson was different from Packard because many of us knew him." Bator said. Richardson '43 is former Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. "But he was different from Kissinger because no one knew him really well, and we didn't regard him as a stand-in for the President."

Schelling said, "I used my lugubrious pitch-words like 'horror' and 'monster.' I think he felt we were overreacting, therefore he felt he could go back and try to convince us that the foreign policy was not wrong, but maybe merely mistaken. It was late in the day; perhaps we did get carried away. But he was his usual urbane, deft, intelligent self-a fine human being. He can disguise his pain."

Capron: "We all share the impression that he seized on the ground rules of not talking about domestic consequences. This was clear. He talked about acties of battle. Packard had talked about the problems of liberals'-as if he were going to end the war to do you a favor."

"I found our meeting with Kissinger deeply moving. It went better than I could have hoped for. It must have impressed him deeply-it did me. Did it make any difference? I don't know." Schelling said.