The letter, from Ford to President Nathan M. Pusey' 28, suggested ways that Pusey and the Harvard Corporation might be able to subvert the Faculty's recommendations for the future of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). The Faculty had voted in February 1969 to stop giving credit for ROTC courses and to reduce ROTC to an extracurricular activity.

Ford advised Pusey to return that vote to the Faculty Council for revision until any recommendations could become "usable as a basis for further action."

Ford added that such action--through it might elicit "loud squeals" from the Faculty--was the best course.

To this day, no one knows who "liberated" the confidential documents from University Hall and gave them to The Old Mole.

"That was always the mystery," says Marvin A. Hightower '69, a senior staff writer for the Harvard Gazette. "No one knew how they were getting what they were getting."

'Distinctively Political'

Even after University Hall had been cleared by police, The Old Mole's small but dedicated staff continued to cover events at Harvard for the next few weeks.

The Old Mole was a "distinctively political." magazine, according to Tom Gallagher, a former Boston College student who wrote for The Old Mole during the summer of 1969. In this way, it was unlike the majority of underground publications in the area, which often focused on culture.

Gallagher says writers on the paper were responsible for circulation. Gallagher says he would go out on the street and sell as many papers as he could; he kept the money he made as his salary.

Most of the publication's writers had been active in the Harvard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Old Mole staff members say.

"If there was one organization whose point of view [The Old Mole] embodied, SDS would have been it," Gallagher says.

Some Harvard alums returned to Cambridge years after their graduation to work on The Old Mole. Jean C. Tepperman '66, who helped to found Harvard's SDS chapter in the fall of 1964, says the writers were united by their opposition to the University.

"It was definitely a Harvard-oriented ambience," Tepperman says. "That was the glue of it."

Expansion of The Gazette

But Old Mole's damaging releases changed more than what students thought of the University. As a result of the embarrassing revelations, Harvard reevaluated the way it disseminated information on campus.