Meat and Salad Days

...In turning to fiction instead of articles and essays, Galbraith can much more urgently demonstrate the ironic effects of statecraft, those clumsy shadows that fall between political men's conceptions and their ultimate creations...

...That "New Republic" is a fine Galbraithian touch...

...When the Air Force agrees with the Rostow doctrine that counter-insurgency (in this case, bombing) must "be combined with a strong effort to win the minds and hearts of the people," Galbraith shocks us into recognizing the crazy salad of idealism Americans eat with the meat of their opportunism...

...She did not notice, the difference being not excessive, and so intent were they on themselves that neither did any of the men or more than a handful of the other women...

...But the more important and original use of the novel is to show the relation between language and political position...

...To those of us still susceptible to the glamor of university lectures, the final outcome of The Triumph will seem choice...

...The general effect, not alone of the portraits, is hideous and admirably reflects Mr...

...she merely got a lot of sleep...

...It is a real triumph for the academy...

...This is a novel without heroes or villains, though it does contain one poignant figure, Pethwick's deputy, Joe Hurd, crumpled and ulcerous, who adheres to truthful observations and declines in the Foreign Service...

...We get a dour look at what is still called the "New" State Department building, with its heavy, brown, official furniture and giant blocks of white marble guarding the entrance to the suites...

...Galbraith is a specialist at capturing the exact shade of mentality behind a phrase...

...and the story is about the political reasoning of men who can only envision a single familiar enemy, Communism, embodied in some vaguely dangerous conglomerate "they...

...Juan Martinez, the dictator's son, is brought to power by the Americans and the junta...

...In the warm climate of Puertos Santos, the Galbraith prose grows quite efEulgent...

...And yet there can be a more exacting morality in the examination of tactics than in speculation on principles...

...Galbraith has gone to considerable trouble not to make his disguises too impenetrable...

...To explain American diplomacy, The Triumph leads us into prosaic places like the west wing of the White House, where even newsmen fear to tread...

...One crisis cable, one example of public conduct, may tell us more of political man, of moral evil and good, than all the ideologists can...

...Thus by the calculated gentleness of his formulation, he succeeds in denying to the first progressive government in Puerto Santos any chance of American assistance...

...The events described are a mixture of the fall of Trujillo ("Martinez" in the novel) in 1961, the overthrow of Juan Bosch ("Miro") by the connivance of Dominican and American military officers in 1963, and the popular revolt aimed at bringing him back in 1965...

...Urgent need program strongly supporting Martinez earliest possible moment...

...He smilingly calls for a frank, free dialogue "with no holds barred," mildly suggests that we would surely not want our aid to be used to build a Communist regime, and deploys to their greatest advantage such phrases as "minimize risks" and "danger of Communist takeover...

...Dulles' conviction that diplomacy pays no homage to a lesser art...

...and the hilariously sanguine but querulous wording of Pethwick's second crisis message after Martinez is overthrown: "Car surrounded by young hoodlums who removed Ambassador's flag, threw stones, vegetables...

...He is willing to tell us that unlike most wives of public men, who felt obliged to keep themselves in a state of compassionate strain, "Loretta May Campbell's solution was different...

...Coming back to Galbraith's parallel between love and politics: The participant in either can, as long as he boasts the sportsman's gifts—timing, judgment and resilience—be as petty as he pleases...

...Worth Campbell, instructed to review the entire Puertos Santos policy, calls a larger meeting and manages, precisely by his experienced manipulation of the anxiety-ridden American political vocabulary, to make his own view prevail...

...No police in evidence...

...The Triumph gets into high gear when the President is told by members of his own staff, as well as observers for the Defense Department and the cia (Galbraith loves to reverse a stereotype), that Miro is a decent liberal trying to do a good job on education and economic reform...

...Extremism stalks the American imagination, and with the exception of Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey (on politics) and Nabokov's J^olita (on love), recent fiction writers have mainly confined themselves in both realms to stark abstractions and villainies...

...In Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Worth Campbell, pink-cheeked, self-controlled and somewhat infirm of eye, who "had maintained a measure of scholarly reserve toward the political excitements of the time," and in Ambassador Pethwick, a man of regular habits and unswerving loyalties to the status quo, we can easily conjure up some of our policy-makers of a few years ago...

...Campbell...

...And the sun reached across the coarse, sparse uneven grass to two white Leghorn hens which were scratching industriously in one comer...

...It uncovers the dusty paraphernalia of cables, letters, conferences, proposals drafted by Presidential assistants—all the monumental drudgery behind the headlines where our foreign policy begins...

...But to understand, and to write well about them, he must possess, as do those in the great tradition, like Freud, Henry James, and the ada chairman, magnitude of outlook...

...I don't want to get credit for another military dictatorship down there...

...All of the action takes place in an area where emotions are hard to discern, in habits of thought...

...All in all, his sprees of salaciousness only increase our confidence in this man of wit—especially if, in accordance with his views, we see something suspect in the character of a person who disparages with too much gusto the licentiousness of others...

...The Triumph gives an almost palpable physical sense of Trujillo's rapaciousness and the reduction of the country during his regime to rusty roofs, green mold and unalienated squalor...

...From Henry Adams to Gore Vidal, Corruption has been the real hero of the story, and the inevitability rather than the dynamics of its victory has usurped the stage...

...It fell on untidy banana trees around the border...

...Like many large men, Galbraith has inordinate patience with small details...

...indeed, to show the power of language to influence political events...

...He never passes up a chance to draw a seduction, a mistress, or a scandalous innuendo into the proceedings, and it is all the funnier to think of them in his green and clean, nasal, New England accent: "It is told that once the magnificent new wife of a washing machine magnate attended a White House reception in an exceptionally low-cut evening gown...

...In any case, it has been left to a Harvard professor and former civil servant, John Kenneth Gal-braith, to bring news and information about this active center of our society back into the novel...

...In view of this, it is remarkable how well our novelists have conspired to keep us from finding out very much about either one...

...On another occasion, Juan Martinez, son of the dictator, is chatting with a girl friend in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he studies political science, about his father's reputation with women...

...In The Triumph (Houghton Mifflin, 239 pp., $4.95), which is about a revolution and a coup on a small Caribbean island, Puertos Santos, Galbraith expertly amalgamates several different periods in the recent history of the Dominican Republic...

...There is a delightful streak of academic prurience in Galbraith's fiction...

...He has caught the Presidential drawl ("Get on to those fellows and find out what they are thinking...

...Remaining in closest touch...

...Galbraith goes on the amusing assumption that esthetics and intellectual outlook are connected, and it is in his hardy Scotch grain, at least half optimist, to note how often personal temperament determines political events...

...Damage to finish, trim, also top...

...He nurtures a particular distrust for puritans...

...But the best part of The Triumph is its irrepressible levity...

...A man in The New Republic once said that my father wanted to be the father of his country and went about it in the only way he knew...

...The slanting sun was lighting up the salmon-pink walls of the big resort hotel above the town...

...Eventually they were replaced by a secretary to the President's wife who was mildly rebuked by the lady for an unnatural act...

...While conversing expansively with an elderly Senator, her breasts fell out...

...And there is a sliver of Evelyn Waugh mischief in his movie-like shot of the dark empty streets of Flores after a day of revolution: broken glass, a boy crumpled on the sidewalk, and a long black slowly-moving automobile in which "Pethwick was passing...

...Galbraith is not a great novel writer, but he is a great reader, and this gives his fiction an infectious literary buoyancy...

...Perhaps our writers have simply been wearing their indifference to the business of politics as the badge of their alienation...

...And he is not above describing the flowing silk pajamas, worn by a handsome Frenchwoman, that nearly undo the austere Mr...

...Firmly grounded in his courses at the University of Michigan, inspired only by American models like Douglas MacArthur's land reform in Japan, the young leader quietly, efficiently and irrevocably brings socialism to Puertos Santos...

...It may seem that in the tangle of meetings and messages, the plot's emphasis has traveled from morality to tactics...

...Apostles of continuity, living by wisdoms culled from what were for many their halcyon years in government service just after World War II, these defenders of the democratic faith are made nervous by any sign of flexibility...

...But the real Galbraith scorn—that cutting "edge" he feared would wear off his style in the process of sending diplomatic cables from India—is reserved not for the ancient Latin American sins like greed and venality, but for the small modern bureaucratic sins of North America: caution, literalness, complacency...

...in his fable it is the righteous desexualized office-holder, malicious toward opponents and unenthusiastic toward friends, who becomes the most destructive agent of political life...