From Galbraith

A. G. NOORANI

Letters to Kennedy by John Kenneth Galbraith; edited by James Goodman; Harvard University Press; pages 192, $24.95.

THERE are very many considerations that may draw an intellectual to a politician. Not all of them are self-serving. They may be ideological soul-mates. Not seldom, intellectuals aspire to mould policy by exerting their influence on a politician-friend.

John Kenneth Galbraith and John F. Kennedy were good friends long before Kennedy threw his hat in the ring in the presidential contest. Democrats both, they agreed broadly on many issues. Galbraith helped Kennedy ardently in his bid for the presidency. Yet it has never been fully explained why Kennedy did not keep Galbraith near the seat of power, once he became President in January 1961, along with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and other intellectuals. He sent him, instead, to New Delhi as Ambassador. Galbraith returned to the United States only in July 1963, a few months before Kennedy's assassination.

This is a collection of Galbraith's letters to Kennedy from around March 1959 till July 1963. They cover, broadly, three subjects - domestic politics, economics and foreign affairs. James Goodman, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers, provides excellent historical references and explanations in the end notes. "On no writing have I lavished so much attention," Galbraith claims in his Introduction. "Possibly some of my better writing, certainly some of my most attentive writing, was for an audience of one." The style is elegant, as one might expect; the wit is spontaneous for the most part. Not always, though.

Neither the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, nor the Assistant Secretary whose remit covered India, Phillips Talbot - whom Galbraith criticises sharply in his memoirs Ambassador's Journal - was happy about the correspondence. Rusk asked Kennedy's National Security Adviser, George Bundy, to have Galbraith's letters go through the State Department. Significantly, Kennedy asked Galbraith what he thought about the proposal instead of scotching it himself. Galbraith did that himself, most devastatingly. "Communicating through the Department would be like fornicating through the mattress."

Galbraith did not share Rusk's world view nor, it is evident, some of Kennedy's views on the Cold War. On one major issue Galbraith emerges with flying colours in these letters. He foresaw in 1962-1963 the debacle in Vietnam in 1975, over a decade earlier, and warned against it in unambiguous terms in letter after letter to Kennedy. During his tenure as Ambassador to India, the border war with China broke out in October 1962 just when the Cuban missile crisis was about to reach its climax. It was no mere coincidence as recent disclosures fully establish.

It is of some relevance to the current debate in India on nuclear strategy that, in Galbraith's opinion, expressed on August 25, 1959, it was necessary for the U.S. "to find some durable alternative to the present strategy of deterrence with which we can live in greater safety."

Not all his exertions were as highminded as this. The phenomenon is widely prevalent. When the intellectual hitches his wagon to a star in the political firmament, he tends to try to prove himself to be as able and willing to do the dirty work as any professional politician. Galbraith was worried by the patent contrast between the inexperienced Senator Kennedy and the better-equipped Vice-President Nixon. "The claim could get away from us and keep the campaign on the defensive. I don't think it can be met by subtleties. We must hit back directly," he advised Kennedy on July 29, 1960 as Kennedy's election campaign got into its stride.

Come September 11, 1960, we find Galbraith at a fund-raising soiree at Henry Fonda's. Many a letter was full of praise for Kennedy. "I thought you were simply superb." His advice on the Inaugural Address was very sound. "This is pre-eminently a speech for those who will read it rather than those who will hear it." Kennedy's Inaugural Address in January 1961 ranks among the truly historic speeches of the century. Theodore Sorensen had prepared the draft with Kennedy himself making the major contribution. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Galbraith also contributed. It was Galbraith who suggested the now famous words: "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate." It was marred by a mishap, alas. "On television that day John Steinbeck, with whom I attended the proceedings, said in a voice from off camera that that was the best line in the speech; but, as shown, it sounded as if I were speaking. Kennedy called to congratulate me on an epochal exercise in self-promotion. Oddly, I was innocent."

Nor was Galbraith too shy about lending his services in press management whether it be the American press or, with the willing help of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), the Indian press. A letter to President Kennedy from New Delhi, dated January 23, 1962, records his exertions with the editorial page editor of The New York Times: "In accordance with our conversation I got hold of John Oakes for lunch, without, of course, his knowing that the suggestion had come from you." His theme was that the paper was "one hell of a lot harder on Kennedy" than it was on Eisenhower. On November 13, 1962, he informed the President that the MEA "at my behest has asked the press to be very quiet in response to the Pakistan fulminations." Such a Ministry of National Guidance can as easily ask the press to play up a theme to its liking if it can, as in this instance, ask it to be very quiet." In his memoir Hungary and Suez: 1956 the distinguished Canadian High Commissioner named two senior correspondents, each of a leading English daily, who were known to be the MEA's mouth-pieces. Only a fool or a knave would assert that the practice has died.

The publication of Nixon's book Six Crises provided another occasion for advice and offer of service: "I could do a thin scalpel job on this which by nuance and irony could be exceedingly destructive without giving anybody a handle for suggesting a partisan attack. The technique is to explore with great but lightly bogus sympathy why it is this good, good man goes through life being so persistently, terribly and sadly misunderstood by so many, many people. I can promise a devastating operation without any quotably adverse comment." Nixon was ripe for the attack. "One could shove him over. On the other hand, there are obvious questions about my doing the job."

Beyond a doubt, Galbraith was one of the best U.S. Ambassadors India has seen. His lectures to university audiences in India deserve to be published in book form, not to forget the book Indian Painting, which he co-authored with M. S. Randhawa. He showed sound judgment on international affairs, bar some issues. A letter of April 3, 1961 he wrote while in Washington D.C. cautioned Kennedy against "the surviving adventurism in the Administration." He had heard of the impending invasion of Cuba from Chester Bowles and was greatly exercised. The letter had no effect on Kennedy who had to face the tirades that followed the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Galbraith got along as well with Nehru as anyone in his situation could. "My first talk with Nehru was not quite so easy - I am not entirely at home in his presence and I rather wonder if anyone is. He does not take kindly to argument." Even so devoted a biographer of Nehru as S. Gopal records testimonies of persons who had little in common with one another like Pablo Neruda, Malcolm Muggeridge and Hugh Gaitskell, himself a man of outstanding urbanity, but who found Nehru inordinately vain. Zhou Enlai was not being petty, pace Gopal, but only truthful when he told some Sri Lankan MPs in October 1964: "I have never met a more arrogant man than Nehru." (S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru; Vol. 3 (1956-64); Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 270-271).

Galbraith enjoyed his stay in India but did not view New Delhi as a plum posting for an Ambassador. He took a detached view of things, including the Central Intelligence Agency's antics: "Some adventuresome and spooky enterprises which do not lend themselves to these letters." It was not only the "guerillas of indifferent personal hygiene" who made forays into Tibet but also "various covert activities in India." The technical assistance programme was not overlooked. Indian suspicions about some "expert" or the other "was amply confirmed when at intervals some truly remarkable stumble-bums were off-loaded at the local airport."

Galbraith's letters on Vietnam are not noteworthy only for the fact that his dire predictions came true but more so for the clarity and precision of the assessments he made in his letters. He sized up the Diem regime's weaknesses and the Viet Cong's strengths with calm realism. This is all the more remarkable for the fact that, as the number and length of the letters tesfity, his feelings on Vietnam were strong.

He once asked Kennedy: "Incidentally, who is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to have his name and address and ask him what is so important about this real estate in the space age." Galbraith was ambitious and deferential but he was never anybody's yes man. Not all intellectuals were as independent.

There are some wise bons mots such as this: "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." He added: "I wonder if those who talk of a ten-year war really know what they are saying in terms of American attitudes. We are not as forgiving as the French." The trauma that followed the debacle in Vietnam in 1975 proved the wisdom of this warning delivered from India on March 2, 1962. Kennedy was unmoved, evidently.

GALBRAITH'S travels within India included extensive surveys of the frontier. He noted the restiveness among the "ethnically separate groups" in northeastern India. For reasons hard to understand, one passage has been censored. It is in cable sent during the Sino-Indian border war. The date is not given. The sentence reads: "However, the immediate question concerns Menon... (material censored). Menon has supporters and a loud press."

In the Ambassador's view "the Chinese have a serious claim to the Aksai Chin Plateau in Ladakh ... they had been building their road there for two years before the Indians reacted." On Kashmir he ruled out a plebiscite and held that "the only hope lies in having a full guarantee of the headwaters of the rivers. Each side should hold on to the mountain territory that it has and there should be some sort of shared responsibility for the valley. I really don't think that a solution on these lines is impossible."

By the time Galbraith left India, Nehru's health and power were, both, "in serious decline and a major transition is in the offing." An era ended. No American Ambassador who served in Delhi since commanded comparable access, influence or confidence. The fault was not theirs. The situation had changed radically.

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