PRESIDENT EMERITUS Nathan M. Pusey '28, must be eating his heart out. The nasty events that made his last years here so painful--building seizures, picket lines spewing obscenities, the threat of constant disruption--disappeared this Spring, leaving only faint memories, seniors regaling freshmen in library alcoves and dining halls. Pusey probably wishes he had ridden out the storm and not retired early.

The only feeble attempt to stage a disruptive activity--the graduate student strike last March--was an unmitigated failure. Undergraduates ignored picket lines, crossing them in droves, keeping class attendance from falling off appreciably and breaking the strike in four days.

After that, it was all downhill. Undergraduates did not get another chance to ignore bullhorn calls to action because none were sounded. In past years, the Yard at 12 noon has been the recruitment site for afternoon demonstrations. This Spring, the Yard was as quiet as a murmuring meadow.

In retrospect, the prospects for any resurgence in radical activity this Spring were dashed last January when the Vietnam peace agreements were signed and one phase of the decade-long American involvement in Indochina came to an end. The war is not over by any means, but its searing vividness has been dimmed enough to sever left-liberals from the radical coalition and leave radicals themselves temporarily floating about with nowhere to turn.

Opposition to the genocide in Vietnam and varying degrees of support for the National Liberation Front has always been the issue that has unified radicals and left-liberals at Harvard and shaped the character of protest here for the past six years. Every Spring radicals have sought to make the war the central issue in activist campaigns; every Spring, the success of those campaigns has hinged upon the extent to which the radicals could persuade the liberals to close ranks.

In 1967, the coalition formed briefly: Robert McNamara came to town and was greeted rudely by demonstrators clambering over his automobile. The coalition was bound together more strongly in 1969: the link between ROTC and the war, aided by the bloody bust that followed the takeover of University Hall, insured the success of the ensuing strike.

In 1970, the alliance was imposed from the White House: Nixon's aggressive television speech announcing the invasion of Cambodia, coupled with the killings at Kent State, sparked resistance at Harvard and at hundreds of other campuses.

The coalition never formed in 1971. The radicals who shouted down the pro-war speakers at the Counter-Teach-In in March ran roughshod over liberal territory. Denying the Nixon supporters their right to free speech, however disgusting their positions, rubbed the liberals the wrong way--and served to splinter the coalition, thus eliminating the chance for an active Spring.

Even in 1972, when the Spring's activism was given a decidedly local flavor by the black students waging their struggle to force Harvard to sell its shares of Gulf Oil stock, the war added to the tumult. Nixon's decision to increase the bombing and to mine Haiphong Harbor in an attempt to stem the North Vietnamese offensive, coincided nicely with the blacks' seizure of Mass Hall. The war prompted unrest; enough to swell the size of the picket lines that circled constantly around the embattled Administration building.

Vietnam is not yet free from war, and Nixon's criminal bombing continues to murder, maim, starve and make homeless the people of Cambodia. Yet even to a skeptic, the overall situation in Indochina seems today more peaceful than it has been since America's original escalation in the early sixties. The relentless aerial bombardment of Laos and of both sections of Vietnam for the past decade, highlighted in a perverse way by the savage terror bombing last Christmas, have ended--perhaps for good.

Although the bombing in Cambodia--now in its 99th consecutive day--may be just as severe, it does not have the same immediate impact. Most students know little about Cambodia yet. Reporting from the country is scanty and shoddy, the outlines of the political dispute are hazy, and the revolutionary Khmer Rouge, to whom many Harvard students would be attracted, are still a shadowy and elusive force.

As a consequence, Watergate--which is close to home--has gripped students as well as the rest of the nation while the more monstrous crimes go unnoticed. There is no Cambodian Bach Mai Hospital yet to which one can point as a vivid and burning reminder that the war has not ended.

If the bombing continues uncontested, the eerie quiet will be shattered. Eventually, the voices of the screaming children will be heard at Harvard. Protest will slowly mount again, first in the form of picket lines and peaceful demonstrations, then, if the killing continues, the tear-gas and the riot-equipped police and rocks sailing lazily into the plate-glass windows will return to the Square. It may take as long as a year, but the criminality in Indochina will again be answered in the streets at home.

Vietnam, we recognize more as it seems to matter less, has touched all of us deeply. The first generation of sixties radicals links its conversions to the early civil rights movement and Cuba, but for those of us who quickened out anger in the latter part of the decade, Vietnam has been the critical experience.

THAT HAS there been about the character of this far-off struggle that has changed the lives of many of us? The professional sophists claim students opposed the war because they feared the draft. This analysis is a cousin of the explanation that hot weather caused ghetto rebellions. No revealing correlation between draft status and the intensity of antiwar militance has ever been proferred, and the skeptics will have to search deeper for a reasonable explanation.