The Worldly Ways of John Kenneth Galbraith
Hook, Sidney
Sidney Hook THE WORLDLY WAYS OF JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH When it comes to knowledge of the theory and practice of Communism, J.K. Galbraith remains an innocent. Like other autobiographies of...
...One does not have to endorse every silly decision of uninformed security boards, who disregarded or could not distinguish the difference between Norman Thomas Socialists and Communists, or countenance McCarthy's demagogic antics to accept as a premise, to which even Roger Baldwin subscribed, that anyone who owes a superior allegiance to a foreign government is unqualified to serve his own in any sensitive post...
...In 1952 as one of the organizers of Stevenson's campaign, Galbraith asked me through Arthur Schles-inger, Jr...
...They show Communist influence in areas far removed from where our national interests lie...
...Not only were they not used, they were apparently unread (perhaps they were lost in the mail...
...The Kremlin knows better than Galbraith how useful its agents can be...
...Yet Galbraith mistakenly attributes the chief opposition to the Communist movement to big business which notoriously has been more interested in trade with Communist countries than have the trade unions...
...Although the original architects of this disastrous policy are long dead, Galbraith is convinced that their spirits have poisoned the minds of the current inhabitant of the White House and his advisors...
...But if character is relevant to politics what act of Nixon's begins to compare in infamy, moral cowardice, and deception with that of Edward Kennedy's...
...To be sure, those he supported, with the exception of JFK's fluke victory, lost, despite not because of his counsel...
...Much more significant to the serious reader is the theme song that runs through the book with respect to the mischievous role American concern with Communism has had on our foreign policy...
...His style is lively and entertaining...
...Intelligent" and "unintelligent" are the only appropriate epithets to apply in considering alternatives of policy, not "hard" or "soft...
...He prefers not to stress the drab unisex uniforms of Chinese adults in order to point up the brightly attired five-year-olds...
...Galbraith never forgets a slight nor a compliment...
...Ideology is not everything...
...There are many causes for a person's beliefs but in considering their validity only the grounds are relevant...
...Ideology is not the relevant force...
...Actually, political and cultural conditions in the Soviet Union since Galbraith made this prediction have worsened but he still clings to his simplistic technological determinism that would have shamed Howard Scott, the father of the technology movement...
...His final prouncement: "For the Chinese, the system works...
...But once the invasion was launched, North Korea could not have continued to wage the war against the U. S. and UN resistance without the active collaboration of the Soviet Union and Communist China...
...Baruch personally knew the persons in high places whose names he mentions at least as well as Galbraith knew those whose names in far greater number stud his pages...
...He is scornful of the necessity of a security program in the apparent belief that membership in the Communist Party is hardly different from membership in any other political party...
...We may not like it nor the French...
...Were he consistent, it would be because on his theory of convergence, as we shall see, technology not ideology determines our future under any system, and the technological imperatives of Communism and capitalism as industrial systems are the same...
...There is an interesting passage in the volume that possibly accounts for this...
...Galbraith was in China while "the cultural revolution" was still raging, when its economy was crippled, its universities paralyzed, and the manifold terrors of the Chinese Gulag Archipelago pervasive in most areas...
...Granting that Communists behave like human beings, and that they behave like Russians, too (or Chinese, as the case may be), the question is: Do they behave like Communists...
...He has a lamentable tendency to impute motives of self-interest to those with whom he disagrees about defense appropriations and taxes without adequate assessment of their argument...
...Party loyalty prevents him from seeing that a better case can be made for finding the roots of the current attitude in Truman's belated policy of containment than in the actions of Eisenhower and Dulles...
...Nixon was certainly foolish beyond words and his political villainies, albeit flowing from an excess of personal loyalty to subordinates and political partisanship, are reprehensible...
...In many ways he confirms Auden's rueful comment on my "Ethics of Controversy": To abide by them Sidney Hook is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, New York University, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author, most recently, of Philosophy and Public Policy {Southern Illinois University Press...
...ruins the aesthetics of controversy...
...But if he argues that the imposition of unnecessary suffering on sentient creatures is morally wrong and that mankind can survive without the necessity of consuming the flesh of slaughtered creatures, the causes of his beliefs are irrelevant to the logical force of his position...
...This is a valuable and much neglected public service particularly with reference to the records of economists and military men who have profited from what Galbraith calls "our system of upward failure" - reward and promotion despite their miserable batting averages...
...And as for cover-ups, what act of Nixon's was as degrading as the bribe to the parents of the victim of Chappaquiddick to forbid an autopsy whose findings might have raised the question of whether what occurred, that is, the delay in getting help and reporting what happened, was purely an accident...
...He has an appreciative eye for the aesthetic delights of the countryside but seems blind in both eyes to the totalitarian character of every social landscape...
...But neither does he note anywhere the absence of freedom except in a Pickwickian sense...
...Dissidents are brought firmly into line in China but one suspects with great politeness...
...They are not to be found...
...My hope in Vietnam is that resistance there may establish the fact that changes in Asia are not to be precipitated by outside force...
...This is the point of the conflict in Vietnam...
...Like other autobiographies of contemporary figures, J. K. Galbraith's A Life in Our Times* may be approached on various levels and from various points of view...
...In 1966 to make this simplistic technological determinism more palatable he predicted that the Soviet Union "will necessarily [sic!] introduce greater political and cultural freedom" (New York Times, December 18, 1966...
...To Galbraith's credit he forbears mentioning the absence of flies in China...
...But he did not go public with his opposition or resign in protest as he should have done...
...He denies therefore that there is much sense in defining the world conflict as one between capitalism and Communism as economic systems or especially between democracy and totalitarianism...
...The only choice the Chinese have had since the Communists took over .was when the Chinese prisoners of war, after the Korean conflict, were given an opportunity to return home or go elsewhere...
...Most puzzling of all is Galbraith's undeviating support of the hero of Chappa-quiddick whom he regards after George McGovern as possibly "my closest friend in politics...
...He is silent about Robert Kennedy's role in Joseph McCarthy's rampage, and his wire-taps when Attorney General on Martin Luther King and others...
...Another major mistake to which Galbraith contributed was to conspire against Diem who might have come to terms with the North before our massive involvement...
...His appetite for power whetted by his experience during the war years had grown in the period he was out of government service to a point where it overcame his fidelity to liberal principle...
...It is the Chinese future...
...There is a monument to Sorge in Moscow and he has been immortalized like Lenin and Stalin on postage stamps...
...More serious is the factual error that United States foreign policy, of which I have often been a critic for reasons quite different from those of Galbraith, has taken as axiomatic the monolithic character of the international Communist movement...
...The first, relatively minor, is his attempt to preempt the designation of ''liberal'' for his position in which he is abetted by some stupid conservatives...
...But there is no way of telling in advance who will and who will not...
...When he mentions Communists who have served in government, or those suspected of Communist connections, here as in his other writings, they are portrayed as victims persecuted because of their views, victims of a witchhunt...
...Why this did not occur in the new industrial states of Germany and Japan he does not explain...
...But that is not enough to develop "intelligent" and avoid "unintelligent" policies resisting it...
...Because his Chinese hosts invariably smiled at him...
...As a commentary on our political history since the thirties, Galbraith's book is absorbing, in places highly amusing, and fiercely partisan...
...Galbraith sees no threat to his abiding liberalism in the convergent tendencies of industrial societies which result in oligarchies both in Communist and capitalist societies...
...But it is hardly disputable that if Srevenson, McGovern, or Edward Kennedy had ascended to the presidency, Galbraith would have been an important power in the nation...
...Before addressing myself to this criticism of American foreign policy, I should like to challenge two assumptions that invariably attend Galbraith's exposition of it...
...He has a peripheral consciousness of some oppression but it is the easy and satisfactory functioning of the economy that impresses him most...
...The true state of affairs, economic as well as political in China at that time, or at any time, could have easily been learned by talking to recent refugees in Hong Kong-especially those who fled to avoid religious persecution and who had no political axe to grind...
...Galbraith does not yet go as far as George Kennan who has abandoned advocacy of the policy of containment for Bertrand Russell's position-"Rather Red, than Dead"-if an arms agreement cannot be negotiated...
...It is also to be hoped that in his discussion of the subject Galbraith will avoid the elementary confusion between cause and ground that mars almost every mention he makes of defense and defense appropriations as well as taxes...
...He probably has not heard of Richard Sorge whose report to Stalin that the Japanese warlords had decided to strike at the United States and not at Russia-something Stalin carefully concealed from the United States while accepting its aid-enabled Stalin to transfer the Siberian regiments in time to save Moscow from the Nazi assault...
...It is a pity Galbraith does not tell us how he knows that the Chinese like it...
...They are of primary concern to me and should be to all Americans regardless of their differences on domestic economic issues...
...In closed societies any attempt to do so would invite summary execution...
...On this view, the only individuals who are obsessively hostile to it are those who mainly live on profit, rent, and interest, and who sense in the intrusion of government into economic life the ultimate take-over of the system of collectivism...
...Integral to the debilitating syndrome of the anti-Communist complex that has gripped American statesmen from the onset of the cold war is that the Communist movement is a monolithic world organization driven by an unchanging ideology which has inspired its zealots everywhere to engage in conspiratorial practices...
...Galbraith's A Life in Our Times concludes with a plea for nuclear arms control about which no person of intelligence need be persuaded...
...Of course, Galbraith would be the first to oppose Soviet aggression if there were any evidence of it that trenches on our vital interests...
...His views on foreign policy, had they prevailed in the past, would have had momentous consequences...
...We can now understand how anachronistic free trade unionism is in the new industrial state...
...Of course it is fatuous to contrast "hard" and "soft" attitudes towards Communism, or do I recall any policy being accepted or rejected by leading American statesmen in these terms despite Galbraith's assertion that their use was systematic...
...That may or may not be so, and in many cases it certainly is not so, but that has no bearing on the truth or falsity of their position...
...J. F. Kennedy in his campaign speeches irresponsibly attacked the Eisenhower administration for not actively supporting the Cuban freedom fighters-which was tantamount to a call for invasion...
...Although knowledge of Communist theory and practice is certainly no guarantee of wisdom here, that is, of developing an intelligent policy, ignorance of Communist theory and practice almost invariably results in unintelligent policies, policies, for example, that assume that since Communists are just as human as we are, their foreign policy is therefore motivated by the same considerations as those of other non-Communist states, or that since they are Russians, their foreign policy must therefore be a continuation of czarist foreign policy...
...It is to be hoped that he will devote his thought to its many intricate problems, especially to the difficulties of reliable inspection without which arms control may prove a sham...
...This was during the very week in which the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to suppress with ruthless bloodshed the indigenous political development of a government formed, according to the words of George Lukacs at the time, "to represent every shade and stratum of the Hungarian people that wants peace and socialism...
...All American political figures, including Henry Wallace and George McGovern, have been against Communism...
...He obviously has not pondered the moral of the Nobel Peace Foundation...
...Galbraith falls below the level of a sophisticated Marxism in failing to realize that human ideals, which are always at the heart of an ideology broadly conceived, cannot be reduced to economic or technological equations of the first or any degree...
...I know very well why some physicians are Opposed to socialized medicine, but anyone who favors it must be prepared to meet their arguments against it...
...It makes one wonder why Galbraith goes out of his way to praise, and sometimes to withhold expected criticism of, some of his colleagues...
...And to imply that Baruch's friendly telephone calls before the appearance of his Autobiography was to insure a favorable review is hardly justified...
...It threatens to end the world in a nuclear holocaust...
...Those who are ignorant of the theory and practice of Communism cannot answer this question...
...All this is relatively minor save as an illustration of how the double standard in morals and politics pervades Galbraith's memoir...
...The development of polycentrism was a slow process in the Communist world, and the United States was not unduly tardy in recognizing it...
...Even more mysterious in such a highly principled man and one who rather smugly proclaims his inveterate tendency to be "compulsively against any self-satisfied elite," and "to oppose and infuriate" the well-heeled, is his undeviating loyalty to the Kennedys...
...All the palaver about free enterprise is so much hokum or what Thurman Arnold, who long ago recognized Galbraith's economic genius loyally reciprocated by Galbraith, called "folk lore...
...It is this topical theme which deserves closer attention...
...Before detailing them I must confess that the conclusion is a blow to my vanity...
...And what passes thus for candor is only a minor loosening of the chains...
...The proposition is demonstrably false-historically, psychologically, and politically...
...It cannot survive, according to Galbraith, where we have large industrial organization "that sustains technology, and the nature of the planning that technology requires...
...The worldwide campaign against the United States that circulated the monstrous lie that the U. S. was waging germ warfare in Korea was initiated and.orchestrated by the Kremlin...
...It is the same foreign policy defended by men like Adolf Berle, Paul Douglas, Reinhold Niebuhr, and scores of others whose liberal credentials are as long standing and every whit as authentic as Galbraith's...
...To be sure, because the American Communist Party pledged allegiance to the Stalinist regime to a point where its leaders publicly acknowledged that in the case of conflict between the United States and the USSR they would side with the latter, it did not follow that every individual member would carry out instructions to betray his country...
...And Galbraith's great public conceit is that he is a profound and original thinker...
...The theme is too complex for exhaustive or even adequate analysis here...
...As a story it is a fascinating account of the ascent of a Canadian farm boy to dizzying political heights in the United States where he became a spokesman and at times a critic of the Establishment...
...Thus his characterization of Bernard Baruch as a "name dropper" seems unfair...
...This is no great fault in a work of journalism-and Galbraith is indisputably a brilliant journalist-but rather a drawback in the serious analysis of ideas and policies...
...My disap pointment may be due to the fact that my expectations were so high...
...There are suggestions, however, towards the close of the book, that this may soon be Galbraith's view, too...
...Beard's eminence as a historian and his reputation as a master craftsman among his colleagues far exceeds Galbraith's standing among professional economists...
...I am still an unreconstructed advocate of the welfare state who believes its waywardness and abuses can be corrected...
...Galbraith's insensitiveness to the totalitarian character of Communism is a corollary of his theory of convergence according to which the society and culture of the future are determined by the technological imperatives of large-scale industrial organization...
...One can forgive his apparent arrogance since it is an obvious protective device against the suspected judgment of economists of the first rank...
...The Chinese do...
...It is notoriously true that the most dedicated Soviet agents are drawn from the nationals of satellite Communist Parties, a proposition that only a fool would simply convert into the statement that all members of the Communist Party are Soviet agents...
...Technology makes certain ideal uses possible, it does not determine them...
...Suffice it to say that the initial error of the United States was not to bring pressure on France, as it did on the Netherlands with respect to Indonesia, to live up to de Gaulle's war-time pledge to give Vietnam independence...
...Distrust of agreements with Communist powers and insistence upon safeguards that are verifiable (which require mutual site inspections) he tends to regard as a kind of paranoia...
...When did they choose it...
...of subordination of the individual to the organization which is very much less than the individualism that has been properly identified with the Western economy...
...I had looked forward to reading Gal braith's memoir of his busy political life for revelations that are not on the public record...
...He rationalized this to himself and others by saying that Stevenson was a "born loser...
...A cognate failure to grasp the animating ideals of Communism as a movement grasping for power by any means is evidenced in his discussion of the Vietnam war...
...It was Adlai Stevenson who stated the true issue on the day of his death...
...Naturally, knowledge of the causes of their belief will impel one to look hard and carefully at their arguments and evidence...
...For him Communism is purely an economic system in which private property in the instruments of social production has been abolished...
...And as for Marxism-Leninism, and all its variants, that is so much theology whose chilling language imperialists and militarists, and their academic hirelings, often cite out of context to increase appropriations...
...His memory fails him when he writes about Robert Kennedy to whom he would have undoubtedly transferred his allegiance from Eugene McCarthy at the 1968 convention had Kennedy not been assassinated...
...Neither does democracy...
...Were his concern with the myriad of victims of a Communist takeover more than a face-saving piety, he would have at least supported the Accords Kissinger worked out with the North Vietnamese, protested the congressional cutoff of arms to the South Vietnamese to defend themselves, and urged some counteraction when with blatant cynicism the North Vietnamese violated the Accords we had pressured Thieu into accepting...
...The foreign policy Galbraith and his confreres are attacking is the foreign policy more strongly advocated by the liberal, organized labor movement in the United States (the AFL-CIO) than by any group of plutocratic monopolists and/or free marketeers on the scene...
...But on some matters of momentous significance like his celebration of the economic success of the Chinese Communist economy, then in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, he suffers a lapse of memory...
...Galbraith tends to believe that those who argue for greater military appropriations or tax policies of which he disapproves do so out of self-interest...
...It was the same point that led the United States government to condemn and therefore reverse the war of England, France, and Israel against Egypt a decade earlier...
...Those who stood in the way of his promotion or hold economic views at variance with his, get it in the neck without a convincing exposure or refutation of their positions...
...The fear-and-tear-jerk rhetoric in its behalf is unnecessary...
...But it certainly is not nothing as the history of our century shows...
...I am convinced that if George Kennan does not win him over and he continues to resist the lunacy of unilateral disarmament, Galbraith, too, would fight for human freedom in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Townsend, Vermont...
...The result is that we have done more harm to ourselves than to our reputed enemies...
...It varies little from the position of those like former Secretary of State Vance and his advisors, Marshal Shulman et al., who believe that the Soviet Union, far from being a threat to the United States, feels threatened and insecure by its "failures" in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and that the invasion of Afghanistan is a sign of Soviet "weakness...
...The one exception is Lauchlin Currie, of whom Galbraith strangely says nothing at all...
...And now that the United States has decided to play the China card in a very modest opening in order to restrain the current expansionist tendency of the Soviet Union, Galbraith and other appeasers deplore the move as a dangerous provocation even as they continue to indict American policy for its "mindless" assumption that the world Communist movement is monolithic...
...As a journalist one of Galbraith's important contributions to the gaiety of the nation is the exhumation of optimistic predictions and assurances of bigwigs on the eve of disaster...
...On these economic issues I am closer to Galbraith than most of his critics...
...Once the United States became involved, given the ineptness of the military, the hostility of the media which turned the defeat of the Viet Cong Tet offensive into a psychological and political victory, and the political constraints on military operations, the real question was how to get out of Vietnam without inviting horrible excesses on a population unwilling to accept Communist despotism, and whom we encouraged to resist...
...One may doubt whether totalitarianism as an "ideal type" in Weber's sense exists anywhere in the world...
...It goes without saying that he ignoreselsewhere he scoffs at-the possible usefulness and effectiveness of intelligence agencies and espionage in our modern world...
...The only sense of the term "liberal" that would justify such presumption is one that defines liberalism as the belief that there are no enemies to human freedom on "the Left"-often a euphemistic expression for Communism...
...American statesmen have been rendered both foolish and bellicose out of fear of being considered "soft" on Communism by those who are rhetorically "hard...
...I am put in mind of a conversation I had with Charles Beard whose attitude towards Japanese and Nazi aggression was somewhat similar to that of Galbraith's towards Soviet Communism...
...The changes in global power reflected in the changes in the map of the world since the end of World War II do not constitute persuasive evidence to him...
...But the fact that some may be cannot be dismissed...
...My reasons for concluding that Galbraith lacks understanding of the nature of Communism are varied...
...Note that even if one believes that the rulers of the Soviet Union behave like Communists, this does not mean that they behave only as Communists or always as Communists...
...Like so many other memoirists whom he reproves, Galbraith has his own historical dustbin...
...Galbraith never asks himself why the Communists feel free to violate their agreements whether at Yalta, Potsdam, or Helsinki...
...But there is something macabre in his self-vindicating remark: "My warning of the boat people was better than I guessed...
...the suggestion, I was told, originated with John Macdonald, a former colleague of Galbraith's at Fortune) to write two speeches on Communism for Stevenson...
...One senses this absence of candor in the account of his switch in 1960 from Stevenson to Kennedy at a time when Stevenson's prospects of winning the presidency I have substituted the word "service" for "office" because Galbraith tells us that he had come to think of himself as part of the permanent government of the United States...
...His pages tell more about himself than about others but still not enough...
...Communism constitutes no danger in the United States nor to the United States...
...He is still wedded to those views and the chief moral of his tale is an apologia and defense of them...
...Galbraith tells us now that he vehemently opposed all these moves except the last...
...Nonetheless, to me the basic issue of our time is not capitalism or socialism in any of their variants and combinations but the defense of the open society against totalitarianism...
...It is both in large matters and small that Galbraith reveals his innocence of Communism as an ideology and as a movement...
...Although he is rather boastful of his size and achieve ments, at second glance there is not as much to him as meets the eye...
...Some might say any post...
...This is indeed passing strange for such a stern moralist for whom Nixon's character, despite Galbraith's enthusiasm for his policy of detente and the opening towards China, unfit him for any public office, even that of lowly dogcatcher...
...II Galbraith is convinced that the bane of American foreign policy since the end of World War II has been its obsessive anti-Communism...
...On his theory, why should the Soviet Union become like the West rather than the West become like the Soviet Union since ideology is irrelevant and technology is decisive...
...Only in the most infrequent cases can there be escape for autobiography or memoir...
...After a lifetime in public service self-censorship becomes not only automatic but a permanent part of one's personality...
...But the existing differences in one type or another, and the possibility that under certain historical conditions one may be transformed into the other, do not preclude the proper use of the designation...
...I still remember Agnes Meyer's blazing fury at Galbraith's "opportunism" and "betrayal" in attaching himself to the Kennedy clan whose reputation for liberalism at the time was not high, and what she said about the hardly more contained indignation of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the deep hurt rather than anger of Stevenson himself...
...Even under Truman, despite the fact that Tito's Yugoslavia was ideologically the most intransigent and aggressive of the Communist states, the United States was quick to offer economic and military assistance to Belgrade after the Tito-Stalin rift...
...He is tolerant of what he calls "enlightened malfeasance" in destroying official files on possible security risks...
...All the Communist powers want are safe borders...
...Anyone who believes, as Galbraith does, the proposition that "technical specialization cannot be reconciled with intellectual regimentation," to use one of his favorite expressions, is capable of believing anything...
...Nonetheless he reported to the world that China's economic system is "highly effective," that it "functions easily and well," with a performance rivaling Japan's...
...It is this bitter attack on current and past American foreign policy with respect to the Soviet Union and Communism that is likely to have the greatest influence on uninformed readers...
...That was the point of the Korean War...
...To be sure, this has no bearing on the validity of the policy but it is sufficient to expose-nothing can apparently limit-the patronizing arrogance of the assumption that where Galbraith stands, even in his call for quota systems and reverse discrimination, the liberal flag waves...
...When I visited Beard late in 1940 in the company of Herbert Solow he scoffed at the idea that Hitler was out to conquer Europe, no less the world...
...I have no doubt that some who urge higher defense appropriations have stock in defense industries but if there has been an absolute and relative decline of American defense power with respect to the Soviet Union, they may be right...
...Like so many others, Galbraith seems unaware that a security program is designed not to detect or apprehend those guilty of malfeasance, a task beyond its powers and irrelevant to its task, but to prevent the likelihood of such malfeasance by identifying and excluding security risks...
...Although Galbraith was aware of this feeling among Stevenson supporters, he shrugs it off without really explaining why as a liberal he switched...
...This kind of liberalism is always anti-Fascist but more often anti anti-Communist than anti-Communist...
...A person's belief in vegetarianism may be caused by his aversion to killing, a weak stomach at the sight or thought of blood, or an allergy to meat...
...Feasting on the elaborate, exotic haute cuisine in a succession of banquets the Chinese lay on for distinguished visitors-just like those the Kremlin provided for visiting Western dignitaries during the famine of the early thirties-Galbraith does not in so many words say that the general population ate as well but implies that it was well fed-despite the suspicious absence, noted by one of his companions, of any cats or dogs...
...Although I found it difficult to believe, I have reluctantly concluded, on the strength of this book and some others of his writings, that Galbraith really is innocent of knowledge of the theory and practice of Communism...
...In short, Communism as a system of totalitarianism is beyond his ken...
...Celebrate democracy as one pleases, the same technological imperatives "impose a measure of discipline...
...Conscious decision by Galbraith not unconscious censorship operates here, not only in the failure to make even passing mention of the incident but in not informing the reader what advice, if any, Galbraith gave at the time...
...It was imprudent to get involved in an area so distant but it is false that the United States was seeking to impose its own way of life on a foreign nation...
...When the Communist Chinese officials lifted the bamboo curtain for a few days, they hurriedly dropped it lest Southern China be depopulated...
...Despite the bullying of their Indian interviewers, the great majority chose the bitter bread of exile...
...were excellent without the necessity of Cook County electoral larceny...
...To this cause Galbraith pledges the rest of his life...
...He actually writes that the Chinese "command with a smile.'' No one was ever a more willing and self-deluded victim of skillful Chinese Potemkins...
...Such aid, under existing law, would not have been possible then...
...He remains silent about the educational and cultural significance of these children pirouetting and celebrating with Mao's little Red Book in their tiny hands...
...And why does he suspect this...
...Galbraith has no notion of what the dictatorship of the proletariat means in Communist theory and practice, of the dictatorship of the party as the necessary and only means of carrying it out, and of the theory and practice of democratic centralism which insures the dictatorship of the Political Committee of the Communist Party to oversee and enforce the political, cultural, social, and intellectual orthodoxy of the members of the Communist Party and of the entire population over whom they rule...
...Galbraith himself defended not complete withdrawal but a system of enclaves in South Vietnam, which would have resulted in a series of Dien Bien Phus but which might have provided for a short time a sanctuary "for those who have joined our enterprise in Vietnam...
...After his election he approved the ill-advised and ineptly planned Bay of Pigs imbroglio-mistakes that could only have been retrieved by American air support, cancelled after Kennedy's failure of nerve...
...It may be true that Kim II Sung decided on his own to invade South Korea after Acheson had gratuitously declared it outside the confines of the American national interest...
...It is odd that although large chunks of his other volumes are reproduced or summarized in this memoir there is no reference to the book in its pages or a revaluation of its judgments in the perspective of later years...
...Denounce totalitarianism as one pleases...
...As for the defense of freedom, Beard told me: "I am prepared to fight Hitler in defense of freedom in the streets of New Canaan...
...He takes pains, in order to claim an intellectual humility he does not feel, to document some minor errors of economic and electoral prediction of his own...
...Actually, there is a good precedent in United States policy for helping, in the national interest and the ultimate cause of freedom, one form of totalitarianism resist another, about which we hear little from human rights absolutists, namely, United States military and economic aid to the Kremlin after Hitler double-crossed his erstwhile ally and invaded the Soviet Union on june 22, 1941...
...In an open society there is sure to be a public-spirited citizen who will blow the whistle in the ever vigilant press at the slightest transgression...
...But some of his malicious comments are sparked not by memory of conflict but only of friendly disagreement...
...Here, too, there is a hard and fast treatment of the facts...
...The most striking of Galbraith's assessments of a Communist society is to be found in his book China Passage published after his visit to mainland China in 1972...
Vol. 14 • October 1981 • No. 10
