Two choices on the registration checklist are: "I'm impecunious. Can you call me and let's talk about deferring the registration [fee] until my finances are better?" and "I will need housing at good ole Harvard. I'll need some place to crash [pick a night]." Or, for humor, "I'll be arriving by plane, bus, train or sailboat and will need to be picked up."

The impecunious no doubt had the $25 registration fee waived by the CRNC. The press did not even get a chance to pay it.

Last Thursday, the managing editor of The Crimson called the CRNC in Washington and received a preliminary okay to attend the Fieldman session here (no waiver of the registration fee, though). He showed up at the Phillips Brooks House Parlour Room Friday night to sign in.

The local brass reversed the preliminary approval of the CRNC. No press, they said, and they then confirmed their decision with Joseph Abate, the chairman of the CRNC, who was in Cambridge to oversee the Fieldman School.

Like their elders, whom they emulate with such verve, the CRNC chief and the soon-to-be fieldmen recognize the maxim of Watergate politics. Internal political operations are to be kept secret--unless you happen to believe in open government or there is a way to spy on the other guy's operations without anybody knowing what you're up to.

This is what is known in the present Republican Party as hardshell realism. It works, too.

Indeed, any tempered idealists who envision 1976 as a broad-based rejection of Nixon-Republican realism had better consider the groundwork being done on all levels by Republicans before reassuring themselves that the mandate of 1972 cannot be foisted upon the American people again four years hence.