TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO, in a small house-hospital in the tiny town of Silver Creek, N.Y., 30 miles southwest of Buffalo, Ross Charles Gennuso looked down at his grandson Brian Ross Gennuso and muttered, "There's gonna be a bright boy."

Yes, auguries of brilliance began early for Brian Ross Melendez, born Gennuso.

When Brian was no more than seven or eight, his natural father Charles Gennuso recalls, "he could recite the presidents back and forwards within one or two minutes. He amazed me. I well near fell over."

When Brian was all of 12 years old, he was on the verge of being confirmed in the Catholic church when he decided that he could not intellectually reconcile the church with his own beliefs. "We had gone through all the classes and I was going to be his sponsor," says his mother Dolores, an administrative assistant at a local community college. "I decided, before I go through with this I want to see if maybe I'm not right and they're wrong," Brian recalls. Brian refused to go through with the ceremony, becoming a born-again Christian a few years later.

Those are the kinds of anecdotes that people generally tell about presidents after they've been elected.

But Brian Melendez '86 is the kind of guy who over-achieves in his spare time, and Dolores skips nary a beat when asked where her son wants to go in life: "To the White House."

That may be because the word 'president' has been attached to Brian's name a number of times already. To wit: Brian was national president of the 900-chapter Junior Classical League as a senior in high school, class president of his Florida public high school in his junior year, governor of Boy's State, Florida state president of the national honors society, college resident of the Junior Classical League, and chairman of the Harvard-Radcliffe Undergraduate Council. Brian's Government Department thesis was on presidential disability and succession.

All this success has left Brian with something of a public image problem. People aren't really sure he's human. He is impeccably groomed, neatly dressed, speaks with usually irrefutable logic, writes constitutions on the side, regularly churns out massively footnoted and detailed reports of all sorts, and is not given to flamboyance of any kind.

He has almost single-handedly developed the Council's machinery, as parliamentarian, vice-chairman, chairman, and member of numerous student and student-faculty committees. Among other achievements, he produced definitive reports on freedom of speech at Harvard, after students pegged Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger '38 with tomatoes; the potential for an honor code at Harvard; and the controversial disciplinary Committee on Rights and Responsibilities. He has also played a major role in establishing the Endowment for Divestiture, an alternative to the Class Gift Fund designed to pressure Harvard to divest its South Africa holdings.

YET, FOR ALL HIS accomplishments in four years at the Undergraduate Council, he may forever be identified with the 90 pages of by-laws he unloaded on a shocked council at the end of his freshman year. (One provision stated, "The term 'shall,' with respect to persons shall entail a duty to perform.")

And while Melendez is now universally admired and acknowledged as the father of the current student government, his public persona may have accounted for his near defeat at the hands of little known challenger Betsy Touhey '86 when he ran for a second term as Council chair in February of 1985. Touhey, who became a candidate only after a group of council representatives drew straws earlier that evening, lost to Melendez by one vote.

Melendez readily admits that has not always been his own best advertisement. "I'm still an extremely shy, insecure, socially inept person," he says. He is leaning back Lee Iacocca-style on a cushion in a closet-sized South House single, packed with electronic gimmickery, file cabinets, and impeccably stacked back copies of The Crimson, The Independent, The Salient, The Gazette, and the Harvard College Forum.

Melendez regrets that for all his success at Harvard, he has not been able to overcome his own insecurities. "I'm very uncomfortable at parties; I'm very awkward at dealing with people; I can't ask women out on dates for the most part--although I can ask people for votes and I can try to persuade people to think like I do," he says. "I'm not afraid of crowds and speaking to people. I'm afraid of small groups where I have to be myself rather than be an officer of the Undergraduate Council or a public official. I wish I had gotten through Harvard feeling more comfortable with people."

Touhey remembers, "One time I threw a party solely so he would go out and have a good time--I invited all his friends and everybody he knew--but he was in a horrible mood, which is something I never forgave him for."

Yet, it is in small groups that Melendez sheds some of his business-like exterior, exposing a side rarely seen in public.