SO HERE I AM, looking back over my life and times at Harvard, finding clever phrases that will somehow sum it all up. These marks I'm making on yellow paper will be sent out to the multitudes, some of whom (I am supposed to believe) will read them with something approximating interest, most of whom will ignore them, Some of them, I guess, really will use our product to wrap fish.

And what can I say to that but "right on"? Or maybe "so it goes."

Harvard. Well, I have to admit that the first thing that comes to my mind, even after seeing the blood all over the steps of University Hall one nice spring morning a while back, is John Kennedy. Did you know he was on the business board of the CRIMSON a few years before Camelot? He was. I read in Time last month that the editor of the Wisconsin Daily Cardinal refers to John F. Kennedy '40 as "one of the biggest pigs." And what can I say to that, too, but "right on"? But I cried for six hours, drunk, after his brother died.

John Kennedy; Love Story; coffee and other things to get us through impossibly boring papers; Henry Kissinger; page-proofing the CRIMSON and walking back to Eliot House at sunrise; friends booted out of school for fighting the war in the only way they knew how; tenured professors making jokes about other tenured professors who are homosexual; subtle but vicious racism between blacks and whites: the great view from between Lamont and Houghton of lovely Holyoke Center, the weird red Mass Ave buildings from which Harvard ejects tenants, and Wigglesworth; Nini's Corner; and sherry. We didn't drink sherry in Indiana, and I found out at my proctor's one night freshman year that you couldn't drink as much of that as you could of bourbon, and I haven't had any sherry since. Which may, or may not, explain why I was always lonely here.

Enough of that garbage.

So what am I going to say? Well, I could mention the futility of words. That's always a winner in CRIMSON closed reports. Or I could talk about how Harvard should either time-travel back to the seventeenth century or adjust to the newer ones. Or I could talk about my amazement at discovering that Harvard buildings are often littered with hand-scrawled signs bearing institutional messages instead of neatly printed ones. Or about the pure hate I have felt on occasion for University administrators-like on April 10, 1969. Or about the cold fear I feel when I realize that after the Class of '72 leaves very few of you will remember that dawn, which has always seemed to me the purest expression of Harvard's special grace I have ever seen.

Well, who knows. As much as I despise journalism for the way it conspires to deprive people of the truth in order to soothe their spirits and "draw them into the story." I retain enough (more than enough) of the journalistic ego that I just may talk about some of those things someday. Take me out for a beer, as they always say, and I'll tell you-especially if you can get me a job or build my career.

But journalists aren't the worst people in the world. Most of them aren't as bad as the Hitlers, or the Stalins, or the Henry Kissingers. And I'm afraid we have plenty of the latter, at least, around town.

So, you see, I'm going to devote my Parting Shot to the war. The ultimate sacrifice for the poor wretches we are bombing in Southeast Asia. You notice a slight edge of self-contempt? It's not your imagination. And I can't begin to express the contempt I have for you, too, all of you. But especially you little motherfucking Henry Kissingers-on-the-make.

(Whatever can he mean?)

Let me tell you a little story first. At home over Christmas I had my ritual fervent fight with my parents to counterpoint our otherwise pleasant time together. In fifteen minutes we managed to hit all the sore points, and finally we got to the war. My parents were urging that I go on into the Army rather than get out in some "dishonorable" way. And then my father said, "Look, you kids seem to think that you're the only ones who hate this war, who think about it every day. You're not. It's a goddamn mess-I know that. If I were drafted, though. I'd go-but I'd be damned if I'd kill any Vietnamese." My mother: "I don't know, David, sometimes I can't believe we're the beasts we seem to be."

OH, MOTHER, we're at least as bad as we seem to be. If you don't believe it, look at, say, Harvard. You might want to look at the Government Department first.

Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the department: "At no time during the eight years on which I can speak with authority on these matters have members of this department acted on political grounds or divided along political lines on an appointment issue. There was no such division on Kissinger."

I can't complain that you don't divide along political lines, Mr. Huntington, but why don't you ever try moral lines. (Isn't it incredible that mentioning morality should instantly consign one to the realms of the banal?) Political lines. So it looks as if old Henry, fresh from the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Asians fighting for their right to self-determination, will come back here to bask in the glow of adoring undergraduates and (mostly) graduate students. What kind of people are these? What kind of person am I that I talk civilly to them? How can I have gone to dinner with the past head of the Government Department, sipped my wine and listened to his jokes about the foibles of certain professors-and to his arguments for kicking my friends out of school? The shame I feel at belonging to the same species as the men who thought up our little adventure in Indochina is bad enough, but to think that I actually enrolled in a school that trains such beasts!

It boggles the mind. Now, would you like to discuss meter in the works of Dryden, or speculate on the new trends in cinema, or examine the thought of the Puritans?