Two weeks ago, Harvard's Senior Lecturer on English Richard C. Marius was on top of the world.

Marius, who helped Vice President Al Gore '69 write at least two speeches in the past, had accepted a $70,000-per-year offer to do the job full time.

Marius, 62 got a year-long leave of absence approved by Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, rented out his Belmont house and even started packing. Everything was in place for the bow-tie-wearing former Expository Writing director to be Gore's new chief speech writer.

Then, on July 9, Marius received a message in an early morning telephone call from Gore's communications director Lorraine Voles.

He had been "unhired."

The cause for the change of heart was the allegation, stemming from a Harvard Magazine article authored by Marius in 1992, that the writer was an anti-Semite.

In the March-April 1992 Harvard Magazine the University's alumni publication Marius authored a review of Helen Winternitz's book "A Season of Stone: Living in a Palestinian Village."

In the review, he compared the Israeli secret police to their counterparts in Nazi Germany.

"Many Israelis, the Holocaust fresh in their memory, believe that that Horror gives them the right to inflict horror on others," he wrote. "Winternitz's account of the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police, is eerily similar to the stories of the Nazi Gestapo, the Geheimstaatspolitzei in Nazi-occupied territories in World War II--arbitrary arrests in the middle of the night, imprisonment without trial, beatings, refined tortures, murder, punishment of the families of suspects."

Marius's review was followed by a flurry of letters upbraiding him for the review and the magazine for publishing it. One alumnus wrote demanding that Marius be replaced as a reviewer for the publication.

The prospect that this review could embarrass the vice president--or alienate some of his constituents--was apparently enough to get Marius the axe.

But Marius maintained in an interview Wednesday that there is more to thestory than political caution.

He said that what happened to him is not reallya case of his past coming back to haunt him.Instead, Marius said that the incident is aparable about the personal influence of Martin H.Peretz, who was less than thrilled upon learningof Marius's appointment.

Peretz, a Harvard Social Studies lecturer whowas Gore's tutor at Harvard in the late 1960s, iswell known for his close ties to the vicepresident.

When Gore spoke at Harvard's Commencement in1994, the reception party was held at Peretz'sopulent but understated Cambridge home. And thisJune when Gore returned for his daughter Karenna'sgraduation the vice president and Peretz alsocelebrated together.

"You have to make a moral and intellectualjudgment on someone who compares Jews to Nazis,"Peretz said in a telephone interview Wednesdayfrom his summer home on Cape Cod.