"So afterward we all got up and shook hands, with a sense of sadness. It was painful for us, but it wasn't a personal thing. It was an impersonal visit-to try to save the country. I think Henry fully understood the gravity of what we were talking about."

Back in their headquarters-a room in the Hay-Adams Hotel across Lafayette Park from the White House-the professors discussed their confrontation lunch with Kissinger.

Block said, "Kissinger told us 'When you come back a year from now, you will find your concerns are unwarranted.' " Holton: "But he doesn't understand that the end-justifies-the means philosophy is exactly the problem, and what is antagonizing the large part of the population. Kissinger just did not realize that we'd crossed the threshhold. He said our concerns would be brought to attention upstairs."

Westheimer: "He said the invasion of Cambodia will not affect the withdrawal of troops from Southeast Asia, that Nixon's withdrawal schedule will eventually be met. Someday that statement will be true like the stopped clock which is true twice a day."

Schelling said, "We had a very painful hour and a half with Henry, persuading him we were all horrified not just about the Cambodia decision, but what it implied about the way the President makes up his mind. It was a small gain to be had at enormous political risk."

"He did just right with his response, actually," Bator commented. "He could have done two other things that would have scared me more: He could have said things on-the-record that he shouldn't have said, or he could have given us a canned war briefing, which would have demeaned whatever relation we have with him. If he'd tried to dissociate himself with the policy, I would have walked out. But he behaved with great grace and dignity and courage under intense emotional pressure from his peer group."

Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of Government and Social Relations, said, "I think we have a very unhappy colleague-on-leave tonight."

Schelling added, "I hope so." Then, as with a flushing of toilets and a straightening of ties the professors swirled out of the room to catch cabs for the Pentagon and a meeting with Undersecretary of State David Packard, he turned back into the room and perspired, "You know, this is hard work."

ONE OF THE purposes of the Harvard professors' trip to Washington was to get publicity for the anti-war campaigning then going on. But the kind of publicity they got was not what they expected. The first person to pick up the story (besides the CRIMSON, which had it a day and a half carlier) was Mary McGrory of the Washington Star. McGrory wrote Friday that the professors were "descending" on the White House "with blood in their eyes" to tell Henry Kissinger that "if he doesn't quit soon-or reverse policy-Harvard will never have him back again." The same story was reprinted in McGrory's syndicated column, and appeared in Saturday's Boston Globe. The next week's Time magazine improvised further on the same theme. Time had Kissinger replying to this threat, "quietly" (if somewhat disingenuously): "I want you to understand that I hear you."

McGrory called Neustadt at the Hay-Adams Thursday night with this interpretation already uppermost in her mind. Neustadt told her that the group was talking to Kissinger purely as a surrogate for the President, and that his relation to Harvard would not enter the discussion at all. Unsure that he had communicated this to her, he had Bator call her back again with the same story. Then Yarmolinsky called her too, for good measure. After this final phone call, Yarmolinsky told the group, "Mary's message is that no one else needs to call her."

"But she printed the story exactly the way she wanted to anyhow," Bator said.

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 Times, 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 KatherineGraham (publisher of the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine), someone had alleged that the Harvard group had arrived at Kissinger's office Friday with a tape recorder.

"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."

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 irreivent 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.