Cambridge politicians are making it clear that they do not want a peace resolution on the ballot in the Nov. 7 City election. They are fighting it in the courts. They are also waging a kind of administrative guerrilla warware--sniping at it from behind--by exploiting procedural delays to prevent the resolution from being processed in time for the election.

Finally, they are being unashamedly hostile in their public dialogue with the peaceniks. When one group supporting a peace resolution attended a recent City Council meeting, Councillor William G. Maher asked one of them if he were a Communist. "That's a rather low blow," the petition pedlar said. "There is no blow too low," Maher retorted, "you are the lowest of the low."

To everyone's surprise, the peace forces have come off with victories in the initial skirmishing. A Middlesex Superior Court judge ruled Monday--contrary to City Solicitor Andrew T. Trodden's opinion--that there was nothing illegal about an initiative petition bearing a peace resolution. The City Election Commission determined last Friday that the peace petition filed by the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on Vietnam bore the number of valid signatures required to put it on the ballot.

Today, however, the City is appealing the Superior Court decision to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. In another discouraging development, the Election Commission has refused to order the printing of the ballots because of a technicality requiring competitive bidding on the printing contract. "The ballots are miles away," Thomas J. Hartnett, one of the three commissioners said Friday. And there are clearly not miles of time before the deadline.

Time has been a big problem from the beginning. The CNCV didn't decide to launch a petition drive until the end of July, barely four months before the election. Another local peace group, Cambridge Vote on Vietnam, had been circulating an antiwar petition since February. But the CNCV disagreed with the ideology expressed in the other group's resolution.

Progressive Labor Petition

Cambridge Vote on Vietnam was organized by three members of the Progressive Labor Party, a Marxist-Leninist group which sides with Peking in preferring revolution to co-existence. Its petition reflected the PL analysis: "We are opposed to the U.S. policy in Vietnam. The war in Vietnam is against the interests of American workers and students because it spends out men and our money to suppress the Vietnamese. The war serves only the interests of business. The U.S. should get out of Vietnam."

"We thought it would be better to have a referendum on the war, not on Lenin's theory of imperialism," Michael L. Walzer, CNCV co-chairman and associate professor of Government remarked last week.

Accordingly, the CNCV drafted a statement they felt anyone who opposed the war could sign. Its main thrust was "Whereas: This war is not in the interests of either the American or Vietnamese people: Now therefore be it resolved: That the people of the City of Cambridge urge the prompt return home of American soldiers from Vietnam."

The CNCV asked assistant City Solicitor Edward D. McCarthy for help with the precise wording of their petition. McCarthy, who is now arguing the City's case against the resolution, rewrote the original CNCV version, putting it in the correct form. A technical, but perhaps crucial, point in the CNCV's legal case is based upon a word which was McCarthy's substitution.

Middle Initials

The CNCV set itself a Sept. 1 deadline to collect the 3624 signatures (8% of registered Cambridge voters) necessary to put a question on the ballot by popular initiative. The CNCV's canvassers -- mostly young, college graduates--stood on street corners and rang doorbells. In one month they collected over 8000 signatures. Then they checked the signatures against voting lists searching for incorrect signatures. (A signature which differs by so much as an omitted middle initial from the person's name as it appears on the voting list is considered invalid.) They went back into the streets and had over 800 people sign their names again, correctly this time. That extra effort was crucial. The Election Commission certified Friday that 3893 of the CNCV signatures were good, a surplus of less than 300. The rival Vote on Vietnam group was not so painstaking, and its petition effort seemed doomed to fall short late last Friday. With one-third of its 8000 signatures checked, the commissioners were throwing out three out of every four names.

The CNCV filed its petitions with the Cambridge City Clerk on Sept. 12, and its struggle with City Hall began immediately. The law gives the Election Commissioners 5 days from the date a petition is filed to determine whether it carries enough valid signatures. Instead of checking the signatures, the Election Commissioners asked City Solicitor Trodden for an opinion on the petition's legality. Trodden wrote them, "There is no need to further process this socalled Initiative Petition." It was illegal, he said.

When Superior Court Judge Joseph Mitchell overruled Trodden last week, in his decision he criticized the Commission for failing to process the petition; they "exceeded their authority," he wrote, when they sought Trodden's opinion. The Commission's duty is limited by law to "the ministerial function of ascertaining whether the procedural requirements for submitting an initiative petition have been met," he stated. Judge Mitchell gave the Commissioners just 48 hours to do their job because they had already wrongly wasted so much crucial time. Eight people worked through Columbus Day in order to comply with the court order.

So, instead of five days, it was almost exactly one month before the petition was ready to be sent to the City Council. The City Council is allowed 20 days to consider the petition and then it must either adopt the resolution or place it on the ballot. Had the Commissioners performed their "ministerial function," the Council would have received the petition on Sept. 17. The Council and the Superior Court could have deliberated concurrently. As things stand now, the Council will take up the petition tonight for the first time.