Howling in an Elegant Wilderness

...That political capital could far more profitably have been devoted, say, to public education...

...As early as 1961, Galbraith worried about proposals to increase the size of American personnel commitments in Vietnam...

...Nor did it help that gifted academics like McGeorge Bundy and W. W. Rostow proved themselves more belligerent than the generals and the admirals...

...In his letters he argued simply, persuasively and accurately that to send a few troops at one moment was to insure the subsequent dispatch of a great many more...

...He is in the midst of great events...

...Such old national security managers as Rusk, Berle, Acheson, Lovett, and McCloy were men of weight and position in the New Frontier...

...as a sidelight upon the complex personalities of Jawaharlal Nehru and V. K. Krishna Menon...

...Within the Kennedy circle the early years of the New Frontier were a time of almost limitless possibility, of intellectual activity, of political hope...

...Occasionally these correspondences dealt with Indian matters, but more often they focused on other aspects of foreign policy or on domestic economic affairs...

...in 1961, during the days of counterinsurgency planning and Green Beret enthusiasm, Galbraith's was a lonely voice...

...He was equally sound on tax reduction...

...Beneath the wit, style and sheer fun of Camelot, the real stuff of politics and policy was depressingly familiar...

...Though there are indeed few sights less alarming than militant intellectuals at faculty meetings, we apparently have some reason to quake when these intellectual hawks are penned in the basement of the White House...

...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN Over the years, John Kenneth Galbraith has accomplished the feat, rare among academics, of making himself a public personality...

...But what of the friends who disregarded his warnings...

...He is the trusted, even pampered envoy of a President whom he respects and admires, and he is confident he can command his embassy despite the attempts of Washington, the military, and (one is allowed to infer) the cia to nibble at his authority and bypass his communications...

...Rather late in the game, this is a point widely understood...

...These qualities are again quite amusingly presented in his journal of two and a half years' service as Ambassador to India-a period covering the Chinese border war, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, confrontation in Berlin, and several lesser emergencies in the rest of the world...

...From this and other accounts it is hard to see the Johnson and Nixon years as other than the dreadful sequel to a drama written by playwrights of the political New Wave...

...Galbraith's tone is usually exuberant...

...As the spirit frequently moved him, Galbraith either personally descended on Washington or wrote long letters to the President...

...This intellectually alert young President, surrounded by some of the sharpest brains the Cambridge-MIT complex could boast, blundered in Vietnam and Cuba, played a deadly game of nuclear chicken with the Russians, dramatically enlarged the budget and the influence of the military, showered tax favors upon the wealthy, and only belatedly and inadequately faced up to racial and urban necessities...

...Had this course been followed, it might have been possible to persuade Congress in 1962 to increase public expenditures rather than reduce taxes to stimulate a sluggish economy...

...Individuals of softer style and more diffuse verbal habits, such as Adlai Stevenson and Chester Bowles, were soon either edged out of office altogether or relegated to the fringes of the councils of power dominated by hard-nosed pragma-tists...

...For on narrower inspection, that drama proved indistinguishable from the older theatrical conventions against which it ostensibly tilted...

...The author of The Affluent Society could not be expected to glance complacently at tax reductions which further swelled the tide of trivial private spending and rendered more difficult the uphill task of winning financial support for the starved public sector...

...The letters demonstrate their writer's prescience on the two key Presidential issues of the decade, Vietnam and domestic fiscal policy...

...What makes this book a good deal more important than the miscellaneous achievements I have thus far described is Galbraith's second role in India: adviser, urbis et orbis, to his friend and former pupil John F. Kennedy...

...Here the Journal can be read as one more confirmation of the serious failures of the Kennedy Administration...

...As the Communists are wont to say, "objectively," the Kennedy Administration was adventurist abroad, soft on the rich at home, and exceedingly timid in its approach to social reform...

...or as a chapter in the voluminous case against Dean Rusk and the backward State Department, whose bad habits he encouraged...

...It is enough to make the angels weep...

...Galbraith's judgment was again accurate when he concluded that the President was spending far too much political capir tal on passage of the marginally significant Trade Expansion Act...

...As it is displayed in print or on the podium, that personality is ingeniously compounded of wit, icono-clasm, arrogance, an easy circulation among the rich, mighty and fashionable, and the capacity of this extraordinarily tall man to look down upon the remainder of the universe...

...According to taste, one can read this distillation of the author's experiences in a tumultuous time as an ingratiating record of how an ambassador spends his days (largely, judging from the Journal, entertaining official American visitors, fending off unneeded study groups commissioned by Washington, or being entertained by Indian dignitaries...

...All honor then to Galbraith as a prophet howling in an elegant wilderness...