TO LOOK at their Palm Beach sport jackets and their wives' Lord and Taylor prints, you'd never guess that the boys from '46 suffer from an acute lack of class consciousness. But that's exactly the problem that every one kept uneasily in the back of his mind when the organizers of this year's 25th Reunion sat down to map out their respective strategies nine months ago.

"This class just didn't seem to want to get involved," explained Diana Statler, one of the secretaries who man the Reunion's 1 Court Street office. "They all seemed to be too busy. They just never felt like a class."

"Most of us feel like comparative strangers to one another," repeats Robert Aaron in the very first of the alumni biographies that comprise the '46er's mammoth 1600 page class record. "It would have been nice to have had it otherwise."

But, of course, that was not to be. After all, there was a war out there to fight and so the Class of '46 never had much time for traditional college paraphernalia. Many arrived in Cambridge during the summer of '42, eager to enter upon a hectic round of three semesters per year as the University escalated its schedule in an effort to process more troops and officers for the front lines overseas.

Dillon Field House was laundering over 4000 towels a day at the time, as the existing athletic program gave way to an intensified effort at civilian fitness and military drill. Simultaneously, actual civilian enrollment in the University shrank to less than 1000 as 5000 servicemen enrolled in a panoply of 13 different on-campus military programs. Even the CRIMSON shut up for a moment as its editors suspended publication in favor of printing a non-editorializing, twice-weekly-sheet unimaginatively titled the Harvard Service News.

The Coop jumped on the bandwagon by advertising "Slightly Used" Naval Uniforms for a mere $22.50. Humphrey Bogart hit town in a new flick called Casablanca. And a move to liberalize parietal hours by permitting women in the dorms until 8 p.m. instead of seven (just a few years earlier, the rule that required that a third person also be present had fallen by the wayside) was defeated by the masters.

NOT THAT a good deal of the old Harvard didn't also remain, if only in their memories, to remind the Class of '46 of the world they were so rapidly leaving behind. After all, they well knew, they had been the last class to have known waitresses in the dining halls. And they were also the only class capable of bequeathing Harvard traditions to those who would follow them in the postwar years. For they could recall the days when they-and not the Navy-had lived in the Yard. And they could also tell of those publications like the Guardian and the Advocate which had collapsed only when their editors went off to war.

When the construction of Lamont Library was first suggested, the CRIMSON, almost salubrious with the class's sense of the past, protested: "TheUniversity must not allow the Yard to disintegrate into just another Cambridge block. To do this while disregarding outside and convenient sites is to misuse a treasured locale and to insult generations of men who lived there."

Not that the Class of '46 felt the least bit sorry about the sacrifices it had made. In fact, when the CRIMSON resumed publication in the spring of '44, one could almost detect the first intonations of a new reverse-snobbishness: "The handful of pre-war students had too many memories of peacetime luxury," a '46 editor wrote of the class that had preceded him. "[They had] too many good times for them to be very happy this last year, or so they said. At any rate, the Class of '46 was too busy or too ignorant to be so gloomy."

A sullen frown was about the only kind of dissent that was at all tolerable throughout the turmoil of the war years. If anyone chose to criticize the ROTC drills, it was only on the grounds that their massing in the Yard destroyed the grass which kept the topsoil from blowing off into Somerville.

The minor controversies that did exist were like that which surrounded the appearance of Hitchcock's Life boat in the spring of '44-unfortunately, many felt, Walter Slezak in the role of a Nazi gunboat captain had been spotlighted too sympathetically.

On a more serious level, there was something of a genteel attack on anti-Semitism in the air-particularly after the Gilbert-Poor Affair in which two freshmen, victimized by townies because one of the two was a Jew, received a column and a half of attention in Time magazine, but only one inch in the Service News. Similarly, when F. O. Mathiessen, professor of American Literature, submitted a review of "Strange Fruit," a 1943 novel on racism, to the News, he was forced to run it as a letter because of the editors' fears of potential editorializing. So clearly the times weren't as tranquil as the gauzy haze of nostalgia would make them appear at first sight. As '46 classmate James G. Trager wrote at the time, the Service News was forced "to walk a tight rope carrying a fine-silk parasol" to maintain its pose of equanimity, and, one suspects, many other aspects of college life were forced to pursue a parallel course.

IF THERE was no other reason to tame youthful exuberance, there was always the constant specter of death that haunted the fortunes of the class. The 32 classmates who graduated as scheduled in June '46 (the rest of the record-breaking class of 1400 had either already managed to leave with diplomas or else they had enlisted or been drafted to return to Harvard at some later date-or, in a sizeable number of cases, not at all) were painfully aware of the fact that an even larger number of their classmates, 35 to be exact, were already dead. One classmate, in what surely must be a courageous story he is too reticent to tell, spent 14 years hospitalized as a result of wounds received during the war.

What of those who had been to the war and survived? "We returned, most of us, to get our degrees and get started, it would seem, on safe somnambulating lives," wrote John P. Marquand, Jr. in his 25th report. "I don't think we had a trace of youthful radicalism nor of conservatism beyond a wish not to be threatened again."

As if to bear witness to that fact, the dominant impression one has of the class's subsequent choice of occupation is that of dogged professionalism. Lawyers, brokers, doctors and professors abound. Scholarly monograms are listed in abundance. But traces of flamboyant personality are rare. And the true eccentrics must have made off with those last of the Union waitresses for they are almost nowhere to be found.

For every former advertising man who has shucked his job in mid-career for a chance to make a go at real writing (there are a handful of such confessions in the class's report), there is a lawyer on the Boston firm of Ropes and Gray (Harvard's own lawyers, if anyone should pose the question.) There are a sprinkling of established writers-critic John Simon (of Andrew Sarris Fame); novelist Julian Moynihan ( Pairing Off ); screenwriter Frank Pierson ( Cat Ballou and Cool Hand Luke ); psychiatrist Willard Gaylin ( In The Service of Their Country: War Resisters in Prison )-and a number of veteran newspapermen (two from the Christian Science Monitor others from the Boston Herald and the Globe ), but, again, there are also an equal number representing the field of corporate journalism, working for Time/Life and Newsweek -including, of course, Osborn Elliott, Newsweek editor-in-chief and chief marshal for Commencement.

Of course, with a pool of 1400 you do get a few, at least slightly unusual occupations. Richard Chapin grew up to assume the unenviable job of college president (at Emerson). Larrick H. Glendening manufactures and freezes bacterial cultures for food fermentation. And Richard le Ray Borden, Chief of the Pamphlets Staff of the U. S. Information Agency, deserves attention for his brief biographical note:

Not by birth, legacy or tradition, and not so much by free choice, but rather by force of circumstance, I have caused my lot to be cast among those who, collectively and anonymously, bear the label of "government functionary."

(It is appropriate to this mode of anonymity to state that no current photograph is, or voluntarily can be made available.)

To retain their sense of character, the class has attempted to steer the course of their Reunion onto a somewhat less frivolous route than might be expected. A crash course of seminars and panels has been organized to tell them where students are at and where administrators intend them to go. (Topics range from "Have We Moved Backward or Forward in 25 Years?", a Winthrop House discussion led by Physics professor Gerald Holton, to "The Spiraling Costs of Higher Education and How To Pay For It," by John Dunlop, Dean of the Faculty.)

Insists Caroline Head, the Reunion's senior secretary, "This class has been very conscious to emphasize the intellectual side of the Reunion. They really do want to talk to undergraduates and to get away from all of a reunion's connotations of fun." Where last year's reunioning Class of '45 found themselves burdened with the heavily criticized theme Funfest '70, the more pragmatic men of '46 have decided not to bother with the foolishness of a reunion theme at all.

The class that forced the dining halls to save $750 dollars a week by omitting extra cookies, deserts, bread and cereals from their wartime menus, has also exhibited a corresponding practicality in its plans for the week's festivities. This year, the traditional reunion hat is a baseball cap, so that classmates can still wear it to the ball park or the golf course when the whole affair is over. And the Harvard emblem has been stitched on extra lightly so that it need not permanently brand its wearer.

And while the Reunion Committee hasn't yet taken the drastic step of watering the riverfulls of drinks that will be consumed, they have decided "to save money this year, by going to plastic cups from glass," according to Robert MacNamara, a Boston attorney in the class who's made all the arrangements for the week's liquid refreshment. (One thing, though, that MacNamara probably didn't foresee-and perhaps he never even realized-was the panicky rumor that raced through parts of the class of '71 earlier in the week. Word, it seems, got around that it was the Robert MacNamara who had been billeted in Stoughton, thus making the former Secretary of Defense the prime candidate for an honorary degree-and, to those who remembered MacNamara's last public visit to Cambridge, it sounded like Commencement would be a nightmare of pandemonium.)

Percentage-wise, fewer of the men of '46 are returning to reunion as compared to more spirited classes like '42 or '43, but, in terms of actual numbers, this year's is probably the largest ever. For that, credit must be given to the crisis) and many kids are returntility. Each alumnus averages slightly over four children (most also list overpopulation as the world's number one crisis) and many of them are rterrning with their dads for a taste of the serious "fun." Which shouldn't be at all surprising, for, reading through the class biographies, one discovers that their families have made for the largest part of this class's life. Robert Cordell appears typical in writing that "Seven children keep Louise and me too busy for any deep philosophical thought."

(By the same line of reasoning, the classmates' earnest efforts to commandeer families often seemed more doomed than not. The personal histories of the class of '46 would fill months of Divorce Court dramas and the subsequent remarriages weeks of Search for Tomorrow. )

Although most of the alumni appear uneasily aware that the times are, indeed, changing, it doesn't appear that their kids have yet won them over to Consciousness III. A class poll reveals the men of '46 to be several points more conservative in their opinions than were their predecessors in a similar poll taken last year of the class of '45. (Unless that class, too, has dramatically retrenched over the course of the past year.) Seventy-six per cent would object to their son becoming a hippie (making that avocation slightly worse than that of SDS leader, to which 75 per cent of the fathers recoil. Eighty-three per cent believe President Pusey was right in calling in the police to bust University Hall in '69. Only 25 per cent think victory in Vietnam is undesirable. Sixty-eight per cent support ROTC in public and private schools, while a good nine per cent more would also add sex education to the curriculum. Fifty-nine per cent of the class believe the law should allow adultery, 69 per cent would permit homosexual acts, 88 per cent approve of abortion, birth control receives virtually unanimous support, but 49 per cent nonetheless maintain that it is immoral to violate parking laws.

STILL, it is probably quite unfair to so characterize the whole class. For all the personal testimony that reads in support of more discipline-both parental and in loco pariental-and for all the appeals for a return to older, more conservative standards, the class of '46 has its share of incipient radicals-both political and cultural. Edwin Randall, Jr., one of the two black men in the class, writes "for the minorities, power is the only answer-first political and then economic, legally acquired and wisely used." Melvin Maddocks of the Christian Science Monitor echoes the confusions of the class of '71 when he writes, "I guess I'm not sure Harvard really exists. But then, I had the same problem when I was there." And, Jacob Leed, an English professor at Kent State University, simply writes:

It's well an old age is out and time to begin a new.

One of the young students shot at Kent is paralyzed for life. The injured at Kent State and Jackson State have immediate medical costs of about $65,000 not covered by any insurance. Though this is not a huge amount, some of the families are under considerable financial strain, If you will help, send to the Kent State-Jackson State Medical Fund, Kent State University, Ken?? Ohio, 44240-an incorporated fund for which contributions are tax-exempt.

Leed's particular example aside, however, it is nevertheless quite possible to see aspects of our present generation of graduates in the history of those of '46. For, where fear of the draft kept the class of '71 chafing within Harvard's walls, it freed the class of '46 to wander the world. Yor could even avoid exams by enlisting in the Army and still be granted credit for a semester's work-a fact no one seemed to remember when last year's protestors demanded similar treatment. In the case of each example, the needs expressed are pretty much the same-it's just that the forms through which they were channeled are so dramatically different.

"From a personal point of view," Hal Friedman confessed, "the interruption was beneficial. When I came back I appreciated what was available. Without it, I would have just gone through in great haste."

For the class of '46, the 25th Reunion is one more such return, another chance to survey their pasts andtheir futures. They're not a class, perhaps, in the traditional sense. Maybe, in some dim way, they even foreshadow new legions of alumni. But then, who knows why they all decide to return this second time? One alumnus made the decision only after seeing Love Story. "It made me nostalgic," he told the secretary. "And are you going to bring your family?" she asked. "Do I have to?" he replied.

At the very least, their return seems emblematic of a group of lives that were filled with the kind of options that, amid the frantic energies of the times, might have appeared nonexistent, but, to a much more determniistic age, appear in some sad but nonetheless special way, somehow charmed. If only for the fact that, surrounded by the chaos of the forties, the silent death of the fifties, and the threats of the sixties, they once again survived.