It was a favorite image during the Kennedy administration: busloads of Harvard professors converging on Washington to serve as advisors to a president, who, as an alumnus of Harvard, always remained enamored of his alma mater.

The Harvard-Washington axis, as it became known, flourished during the Kennedy and Johnson years. No matter where you looked, there was a Harvard personality in a top government job: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. '38, former professor of History at Harvard, was special assistant to the President; Edwin O. Reischauer, University Professor, was ambassador to Japan; John Kenneth Galbraith, Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus, was ambassador to India; McGeorge Bundy, former dean of the Faculty, was the President's national security advisor; Archibald Cox '34, Williston Professor of Law, was solicitor-general. The list was seemingly endless.

In appearance, Harvard involvement in the campaign to elect former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter to the White House rivals that of the Kennedy era, although Carter is no Harvard alumnus. And, at least at first, not too many members of this academic community were particularly swept away by him.

Jimmy Carter's now-fabled desire to avoid overt reliance on the traditional Boston-Washington axis in this year's presidential campaign consequently doesn't appear to be ruffling too many feathers at Harvard. What does concern many of Carter's hundreds of newfound advisors, however, is that their massive output may not receive adequate attention, by dint of its sheer bulk.

Carter, who publicly projects ths most populist image of any presidential candidate in recent memory, has gone about the task of assembling his cadre of policy advisors in an eclectic manner--and on such a large scale--that makes it difficult to tell which players will still be with the team if Carter wins the election.

The Carter campaign has already generated what one advisor estimated to be hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and position papers, a large portion of which originated in Cambridge.

The papers have been solicited from members of Carter's approximately 12 task forces, and, according to Harry K. Schwartz '55, Carter's national task force director, they are sifted through, refined, and summarized long before they reach the candidate. If they present nothing worthy of Carter's attention they are discarded or returned to their sender, Schwartz says.

The number of individuals who have been asked to serve in some capacity on one of Carter's task forces is so large that no one in Atlanta, Washington, or Plains knows it offhand.

"The term 'task force' is actually a misnomer," says Schwartz. "These task forces are not really committees, they do not produce white papers, they tend to be low-visibility--pools of individuals with expertise in various areas."

That seems to be the beauty of the Carter task force operation. Carter can simultaneously give the appearance of breaking the insidious Harvard-Washington nexus while still involving unprecedented numbers of Harvard people on his task forces and advisory panels.

The experience of several Harvard faculty members whose support has been sought by the Carter-Mondale ticket tends to corroborate the notion that Carter is not only avoiding sole reliance on one institution, but he is also shunning long-term commitments to his campaign advisors. There are few, if any individuals, from Harvard or elsewhere, who are currently earmarked for "automatic" Carter administration appointments.

The entire Carter advisory operation to date is described by Schwartz as "building Rolodex files which provide instant access to a funnel of expertise."

Milton Katz, Stimson Professor of Law, has perhaps a longer standing commitment to the Carter campaign than anyone from Harvard currently involved in advising the ticket. He has been serving in what he describes as "a general advisory capacity" to Carter since September, 1975, and had been in touch with Carter by mail several months before that.

"Last September, Jimmy came to my house for dinner," Katz explains. In July, Jimmy reciprocated by inviting Katz to his large scale foreign policy briefing session in Plains, Georgia. Katz, who is the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a trustee of several international-relations-oriented organizations, was one of only two Harvard faculty members invited to Plains for any of the briefing sessions. (The other was Robert Pastor, a research assistant at the Center for International Affairs.)

The complete list of those invited to Plains, in fact, reads more like a comprehensive guide to American academicians and researchers than excerpts from a Harvard course.