WHEN McGOVERN BEGAN his early primary campaign with the sort of position papers Roberts and the others had advised, Roberts was drawn towards his candidacy. He spent a week in California during the spring drawing up a policy statement on conversion of the aerospace industry, and later was a staff director of McGovern's task force on environmental issues.

Roberts said that he was frustrated by McGovern's inability to present the arguments which he and others developed in the position papers. One source explained that Roberts's frustration could be traced to a McGovern decision following the release of the environmental white paper. McGovern decided that the campaign would issue no more detailed policy statements because they put the candidate himself in the background.

"I'm not sure how well McGovern understands economics," Roberts said simply. "His greatest quality is his capacity to sustain moral outrage at a time when the repetitiveness of moral disaster numbs the average person. But, the most successful political figures in modern times have known how to integrate this moral outrage with an apparent confidence and sophistication on nuts-and-bolts issues, like the economy.

McGovern never developed such confidence, and as a result he made the very error which the faculty study group on populist strategy had decided would be most disastrous for a left-leaning Democrat--he built a constituency of moral individuals who shared his outrage about the war, but had nothing new or persuasive to say about domestic issues.

Marty Peretz, another position paper writer, wonders if the issues were cut away from the McGovern campaign by deliberate decision or inadvertant organizational sloppiness. Peretz joined Michael L. Waizer professor of Government, in authoring McGovern's position paper on the Middle East. "That paper was ready five weeks ago," Peretz said this week. "But it wasn't released until this last Saturday which meant that it never even got published in the Jewish weekly newspapers. That's lost pure in competence.

Whatever the reasons George McGovern defaulted on his "new politics" promise in make serious discussion of the issues the heart of his 1972 campaign.

One man, who has worked in every Democratic campaign since 1960, said with some chagrin that by yesterday McGovern and his staff had made fewer substantive progressive proposals that John F. Kennedy '40, Lyndon B. Johnson or Hubert H. Humphrey did in their "old politics" campaigns.

What did the Eagleton Affair Cost McGovern?

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE Democratic Convention, George McGovern believed that he would be elected President because he was an honest and moral man who had been right on Vietnam since the beginning and would prove himself right on most other issues as the campaign wore on.

Even if McGovern sometimes seemed a little stupid as in the California $1000 give-away blunder, he was a decent and likable fellow. But this winning image disappeared within two weeks, just as most voters were beginning to find out about the unknown from South Dakota who had captured the Democratic nomination.

The Eagleton medical disclosure was a bad business to start with, but McGovern made the worst of it. The presidential candidate had to make a quick decision. He could have told the public that because he was not a doctor, he would postpone a judgment on Eagleton for 72 hours, which would give him time to consult the proper medical authorities. Or he could have condemned Eagleton, with some justification, for failing to mention his psychiatric problems when the vice presidential nomination had been proposed, and then dumped him from the ticket. This would have been cruel to Eagleton, but it might have preserved McGovern's reputation as a straight shooter.

At the very least, McGovern could privately have decided to ignore the advice of the two men who had been given the job of checking into Eagleton's medical history, which had been the subject of countless convention-time rumors. But McGovern listened to the only people who had a vested interest in minimizing the importance of the Eagleton crisis--Eagleton himself and the convention name checkers, Frank Mankiewicz and Gordon Well, who had earlier been responsible for briefing McGovern on the $1000 grant scheme. And they told him that McGovern listened to the architects of disaster, and pledged his 1000 per cent support to Eagleton,

Roberts described his powerlessness and a campaign neophyte, silently watching the professional politicians put McGovern's hard-won reputation through a shredder. He believes that the nature of decision making during the Eagleton crisis can only be explained by the fact that a Campaign organization is not so much a bureaucracy as a "very unstable feudal court, with people clearly jockeying for positions and influence in the next White House."

The Eagleton matter did not blow over, and it soon became clear that McGovern had decided not a decide until after he had gauged public reaction. Deciding no to decide is a time-honored political strategy, but it requires timing, grace and absolute self-confidence, all of which McGovern lacked.

According to Kearns, a former side to President Lyndon Johnson who wrote some of Sergeant Shriver's 1972 campaign speeches, and participated in many of the McGovern leadership's strategy sessions, the momentum which McGovern had developed through the primaries and the Convention was dissipated by his vacillation on the Eagleton question.