The Great Mogul

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You cherish those predictions that turn out right, even if they are predictions of disaster.

--John Kenneth Galbraith

As a popular economist and polished diplomat, a veteran lecturer and fledgling novelist, a former presidential adviser and current cynosure of the Eastern intellectual set, John Kenneth Galbraith has long been a purveyor of predictions. For two decades they have come tumbling from his typewriter and tongue in prodigious quantities, covering every topic from women to world politics. Yet there are few predictions that Galbraith cherishes more--or wishes more that he had never felt com pelled to make--than his warning that a major U.S. involvement in Viet Nam would lead to disaster.

To Galbraith, the war in Viet Nam is one that "we cannot win, and, even more important, one we should not wish to win." As far back as the early days of John F. Kennedy's presidency, when Berlin, Cuba and Laos loomed as the most menacing trouble spots for the U.S., Galbraith was counseling against the dispatch of even a few American combat troops to South Viet Nam. "A few," he advised Kennedy in 1962, "will mean more and more and more." His forecast proved flawless. From 773 advisers at the start of the decade, the U.S. force grew to more than 16,000 under Kennedy and half a million under Lyndon Johnson today. The war that they are fighting, cries Galbraith, is "perhaps the worst miscalculation in our history," and he sees the Viet Cong's bloody rampage through the cities of South Viet Nam as complete vindication of his position. "We were winning," he argues, "only in the speeches of our generals and ambassadors."

Certainly, President Johnson does not want for critics of his war policies. What is all too often lacking, however, is criticism that meets the tests of rationality and responsibility. Galbraith, 59, a Harvard economist whose power of persuasion and talent for popularization are as noteworthy as his Brobdingnagian size (he is 6 ft. 8 in.), offers more convincingly than almost anyone else the respectable alternative that Johnson has repeatedly demanded of his attackers. He is neither a name caller nor a placard carrier. He is no Mary McCarthy, who fatuously insists that it is the intellectual's duty merely to oppose the war, without deigning to suggest how it ought to be ended. Nor does he resemble those clergymen whose justifiable indignation at the war's barbarities is diluted by the fact that it is usually directed solely at the U.S., not at the Communist terrorists as well.

The Whole Issue. For a decade the most quotable--and possibly influential --critic of U.S. society, Galbraith has spent a good half of his time in recent months focusing on the single issue of Viet Nam. He has promoted his plan for de-escalation on TV, held forth from college platforms across the country, argued his case in publications as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and Playboy. His How to Get Out of Viet Nam, a 47-page, 350 broadside, has gone through a printing of 250,000. As national chairman of the liberal, 50,000-member Americans for Democratic Action, he has helped push the group to the brink of a possibly irreparable split by promoting the presidential candidacy of Viet Nam Critic Eugene McCarthy on the ground that no domestic gains can be achieved until the war is halted. "Viet Nam," says Galbraith, "is not one issue. It's the whole issue."

Galbraith contends that the U.S. went into Viet Nam under the mistaken notion that it was fighting "a centrally directed Communist conspiracy." In the light of the Moscow-Peking split, he adds, that notion is no longer valid, and the U.S. ought to quit wasting its energies there at the expense of domestic needs and of other, more important areas, such as Japan and India. Viet Nam is "the wrong place to make a stand," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966. "If we were not in Viet Nam, all that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves."

Galbraith insists that the U.S. is in conflict "not alone with the Communists, but with a strong sense of Vietnamese nationalism" that has been captured by the guerrillas. Since military power is ineffective in the face of this intangible force, the U.S. should accept Viet Cong domination in those areas where the enemy now holds sway, and contest only those parts of the country that are controlled by the government or are necessary to assure the security of American forces. In many respects, this strategy closely resembles General James Gavin's enclave theory. Galbraith maintains, however, that his proposal differs in calling for active patrolling beyond the cities and the U.S. bases to keep the enemy beyond mortar range.

Galbraith allows for the possibility that he might be wrong--a concession rarely made by the more dogmatic critics of the war. "Should our continued presence be necessary," he says, "the course I propose will accord us a foothold for a time and thus allow us a second look." In any event, he says in a tart aside, past policy "has been wrong so long and so alarmingly that even a modestly right one will seem superb."

Whether Galbraith's program can be considered superb--or even modestly right--is questioned by defenders of U.S. policy. It is hard to believe, for example, that abandoning most of the countryside to the Communists--the very core of Galbraith's plan--would not embolden and stiffen them rather than give them greater reason to come to the conference table. Secure in the countryside and immune from interdiction by air, they could husband their forces and then assault the allied-held cities with far greater strength than they showed in the past two weeks. Nor is it true that the Viet Cong alone guard the grail of Vietnamese nationalism. They are simply better organized than the hopelessly fragmented moderates, who also qualify as genuine nationalists; and the V.C. are far more adept at the use of terror and brutality to gain their ends. Still, despite more than a few drawbacks, Galbraith's proposals do offer at least a foundation for a responsible opposition policy.

Massive Putdown. Opposition to established thought--or to "conventional wisdom," as he derisively calls it--is hardly a new role for Harvard's Warburg Professor of Economics. TV crews wait so often outside his home in Cambridge, Mass., to catch him for a pungent comment on events of the day that Galbraith, jokes one admirer, now trails only Lexington and the Concord Bridge as a major Massachusetts tourist attraction. He has become an all-purpose critic in the U.S. and beyond, jousting with as many demons as a latter-day Vishnu, the many-armed Hindu god of a thousand names. To some, he is just an all-purpose bore. "The two necessities for 1968," says one detractor, "are the defeat of Lyndon Johnson and the massive putdown of John Kenneth Galbraith. It's difficult to see which would be the more difficult."

The foundations for Galbraith's current fame--or notoriety--were laid a decade ago with publication of The Affluent Society. Along with David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, the book was one of the two most influential social critiques of the '50s, has been on reading lists at more than 100 American colleges, and in a dozen foreign languages--including Gujarati, Hindi and Tamil--continues to jangle 'cash registers around the world.

The book did more than add a colorful catch phrase to the language. With its analysis of poverty in America and its plea for greater attention to the public sector--housing, police, mass transit, education and welfare--it established clear guideposts for both the New Frontier and the Great Society. Galbraith offered the best summation of its philosophy when he testified against tax reduction before a congressional committee in 1965. "I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend," he said, "if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the streets are filthy and the schools so bad that the young, perhaps wisely, stay away, and hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in taxes."

A Myriad of Myths. Galbraith's latest published work, The New Industrial State, a bestseller for the past 31 weeks, is an even more ambitious book. In it, Galbraith sets out to describe the modern economic structure minus the myriad myths that surround it. What he finds in the U.S. is a phalanx of giant companies, perhaps 500 in all, dominating the landscape. The competitive market has largely disappeared, the victim of an advertising machine that creates and manipulates demand (mostly, he maintains, by means of commercial TV). Well-schooled technicians and managers--the "technostructure"--run the show. Though a certain profit level is still necessary for survival, profits are no longer the primary goal. The technostructure's chief aim is self-perpetuation through corporate growth.

As a producer of goods, Galbraith argues, the system works very well, and he scoffs at those who look upon bigness as inherently evil. Yet he does find one overriding fault: the present system puts too much emphasis on goods--washing machines, cars and gadgets--and not enough on beauty and man's search for higher values. In a sense, Galbraith is raising anew, as he did in The Affluent Society, the question of priorities and how wealth is to be divided. Instead of working 40 hours a week in order to be able to buy the full panoply of gadgets he sees on TV, asks Galbraith, might not a man be happier working only 25 hours and giving up some of the goods for leisure time? According to Galbraith, he should, at any rate, be allowed to make the choice.

The New Industrial State goes too far in making its case. "Changes in management, takeovers, the old saw that you're only as good as your last balance sheet--these are facts of life that Ken ignores," says M.I.T.'s Paul Samuelson, a former Kennedy adviser whose economics texts are used on more college campuses than any others. "The book makes modern corporations into kings who rule unilaterally. They don't. They're constitutional monarchs; they try to shape the market, but they can't make the market react." Nor do TV's insistent pitches always succeed in artificially stimulating demand--as manufacturers of detergents, breakfast cereals and the Edsel ruefully concede.

Old Wine, New Bottle. In any case, the work will probably be as much debated in the '60s as The Affluent Society was in the '50s. "Anybody who talks about modern economics from now on," predicts former Kennedy Speechwriter Richard Goodwin, "is going to have to talk about it."

Economists already have spent years talking about Ken (he detests being called John) Galbraith, often in exasperated tones. "Mr. Galbraith is a very talented journalist and a very bad economist," declares Neil Jacoby, dean of U.C.L.A.'s Graduate School of Business Administration. "I wouldn't have him on my faculty." University of Chicago Economist Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater's former economic adviser, dismisses him as a phrasemaker--"old wine in a new bottle." Purrs Conservative William F. Buckley, a personal friend but philosophical foe: "Econo mists I know say everything he writes on economics is either platitudinous or wrong--or both." Sneers Jacoby: "Sure, his books sell well. So did Valley of the Dolls."

Smith & Keynes. Galbraith's defenders pooh-pooh much of the criticism as little more than naked envy. "His tremendous vogue is very annoying to many university economists," observes the University of California's (La Jolla) Seymour Harris, a onetime Harvard colleague. "They reason that anyone with that kind of rapprochement with the general public just has to be a lousy economist. It's not true. He's the most-read economist of all time. Not even Adam Smith has been read as much." Galbraith, adds Economist James Warburg, "is the most outstanding explorer of economics since Keynes." There are those, in fact, who believe that while John Maynard Keynes was the Darwin of modern economics, Galbraith will some day be considered the Huxley.

For Galbraith, economics is a vehicle for achieving broad social aims. More than anyone else, he injects social ideas into the bloodstream of economics. As prodder, pleader and proselytizer, he is unrivaled in the U.S. today. "Galbraith is an antenna and a synthesizer," says Samuelson. "He senses what is in the air and puts it together and packages it."

Bureaucrats & Morticians. He has been doing a staggering amount of packaging. Since 1959, when his secretary first started counting, the professor has written eight books, 32 articles, 54 book reviews and 35 letters to the editor. He has also provided eight introductions to books by other authors, delivered scores of major lectures, and composed numerous drafts for major speeches by such luminaries as Lyndon Johnson and John, Robert and Edward Kennedy (Gaibraith's pen, for example, was responsible for the lines in J.F.K.'s Inaugural: "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate").

After the economic tomes, a satire (The McLandress Dimension) and a memoir (The Scotch), a novel was almost inevitable. The Triumph, a lampoon of U.S. diplomacy during a Caribbean revolution that is scheduled for April publication, has already been bought by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a close friend and erstwhile next-door neighbor in Cambridge, concedes coyly: "It is entirely as good as its author thinks it is."

The author has no lack of ambition, in any event, and he hopes that the book will do for diplomacy what Evelyn Waugh did for undertaking. Will it have the same apoplectic effect on State Department bureaucrats as Waugh's The Loved One had on morticians? "I certainly hope so," he says. The book is even now bringing in a pile of money, a commodity that Galbraith, always proud of his Scots ancestry, has never been inclined to undervalue. More nov els may well be on the way. "Populating the world with people of my own invention," Galbraith avers, "was the most pleasant and beautiful thing I ever did in my life."

Another major economic tome, "an examination of the U.S. as an exercise in economic development," is beginning to take shape and may emerge, as have other Galbraith works, in some future Harvard course. "Harvard students," he allows, "receive the enormous benefit of having classes in whatever I happen to be writing about."

One Splendid Paroxysm. Skilled as the versatile Scotsman may be at budgeting his time, critics complain that he cannot possibly have much left over to spare for the A.D.A. Actually, Galbraith's chairmanship has given new life to the somnolent A.D.A.--even if it is to be only for one splendid paroxysm of harakiri. The dispute over Viet Nam is deep and may very well, notes one high-ranking member, "blow the whole organization to smithereens." The A.D.A. has, in fact, often come close to destroying itself. In 1948, a year after it was formed as a coalition of anti-Communist liberals, it threatened to withhold its support from Harry Truman. In 1960, the organization's bitter-end Stevensonians tried vainly to deny John Kennedy its endorsement, and in 1964, the New York state convention refused to endorse Robert Kennedy in his Senate race.

The decision whether to support L.B.J., Gene McCarthy or nobody has proved the most wrenching of all. As Galbraith noted last week during a dinner at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel honor ing Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the organization faced a perplexing choice. "Are we to rally behind men who have been so persistently, so flagrantly wrong?" he asked. "Don't we have a right to ask that they first be replaced by those who have been sometimes right?" Presumably McCarthy qualifies as one who has been "right" on Viet Nam--but not very consistently right on the domestic programs that once were the A.D.A.'s major concern.

During the last session of Congress, the A.D.A. gave McCarthy a mediocre 62% report card. Galbraith frankly admits that the Minnesotan is "an improbable winner, to say the least." Thus, he told his Plaza audience, A.D.A.'s choice may be "between a Democratic Administration which we have ever less reason to support" and "a Republican prospect that is in every respect worse." Concluded Galbraith: "If the Democrats seem to be lacking in credibility, the Republicans produce a man you can really mistrust--Richard Nixon." At week's end the A.D.A. national board voted, 65 to 47, to endorse McCarthy's candidacy--with an amendment, introduced by Chairman Galbraith, recognizing that individual members are free to support other candidates. Whether this halfhearted compromise will prevent an irreparable split is questionable. One obvious apostate was former Chairman John Roche, President Johnson's house intellectual, who immediately said he would resign from the organization.

"Judas Rat." The odd thing is that, except for the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia, Galbraith has few complaints about Lyndon Johnson. "He's put all the right things on the plate in his domestic program, and apart from Viet Nam, he's been imaginative and flexible in his foreign policy," he says. Until the war, the two men, both from poor, rural backgrounds, were good friends. "I like him more and more," Galbraith said of the then Vice Pres ident in 1961. "He is genuinely intelligent and wants to do things." Despite his affection for Jack Kennedy, Galbraith had no trouble working for L.B.J. after the assassination--a fact that prompted some Kennedyites to scorn him as a Judas. Ironically, other liberals had branded him a "Judas rat" only a few years earlier when he switched from Stevenson to J.F.K. But, as Arthur Schlesinger points out, there would have been no government at all after Kennedy's murder had men like Galbraith not reacted as they did.

Galbraith unabashedly enjoys being close to the center of power. As he explains it, with a twinkle in his eye: "My father thought that we were obliged because of our enormous size to alter the world to our specifications."

An Absence of O'Hara. There was a great deal that wanted altering in lona Station, Ont., the dour, Scot-dominated farming community in which Galbraith grew up. "It was a dreadfully barren existence up there," says his younger sister, Mrs. Catherine Denholm, now a resident of the pleasant town of Elora, Ont. "It was totally arid." William Galbraith, a schoolteacher turned farmer, was a 6-ft. 8-in. giant like his son, but unlike him in other respects. Shy and modest, he nonetheless became a leading light in the local branch of the Liberal Party.

The Galbraiths were not as joyless as most of their neighbors, whom Galbraith limns in the bittersweet memoir, The Scotch, but the children were still imbued with their neighbors' stern Calvinist ways. "Sexual intercourse," he wrote, "was, under all circumstances, a sin. Marriage was not a mitigation so much as a kind of license of mis behavior, and we were free from the countervailing influences of movies, television, and John O'Hara." After a not particularly brilliant high school career, Galbraith entered Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph, "not only the cheapest but probably the worst college in the English-speaking world." Starting off in animal husbandry, he wrote his Bachelor's thesis in economics, reasoning that "if the Depression continued, there would be a great demand for people who could tell what was wrong." At 26, with a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Berkeley, he became a Harvard instructor, taking U.S. citizenship soon afterwards.

Up & Up. It was at Harvard in 1936 that Galbraith first read John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and became an immediate convert. It was there that he met a clutch of Kennedys: Joe Jr., then a sophomore; young Jack, who was "gayer, more easygoing, less politically inclined"; and Joe Sr., whom he approvingly describes as a "real operator." And it was there that he met his future wife, Catherine ("Kitty") Atwater, a petite (5 ft. 4 in.), pretty Smith valedictorian who was studying comparative literature at Radcliffe. "I looked up and up," notes Kitty of their first encounter, "wondering when it was going to stop." In 1937, the day after their marriage, they sailed to England, where Galbraith was to study for a year at Cambridge under Keynes. Galbraith did not meet Keynes, who by then had suffered the first of several heart attacks, during that year, though he saw him often in Washington during World War II. But he did learn book and verse of the Keynesian gospel.

In 1941, as a result of an earlier treatise on price control, Galbraith found himself Assistant Administrator of the Office of Price Administration--and price control czar of the entire country, with a staff that swiftly swelled from ten people to 16,000. It was a thankless, nearly impossible job, complicated by the guidelines laid down in his own treatise, which proved in practice to be "inapplicable in every detail." He quickly dumped it. In 1943, having irritated just about everyone by his zealous performance, he was dumped himself. A year on FORTUNE followed--he credits Henry Luce with teaching him to write--and then it was back to the Gov ernment, first to gauge the effectiveness of U.S. strategic bombing in Germany and Japan, later to work as an adviser on economic policies in the occupied countries. Since 1949, he has been on and off at Harvard.

"How Tall Are You?" The 1952 presidential campaign marked Galbraith's first active involvement in politics. He authored Adlai Stevenson's Detroit La bor Day speech and shaped his economic policy from the campaign train. With somewhat less enthusiasm, he repeated the role in 1956. "Tragedy the second time is comedy," he notes wryly. Along with Schlesinger and Averell Harriman, he acted as Kennedy's liaison man with the Stevensonian liberal Establishment during the 1960 campaign, did the same for Bobby Kennedy during his 1964 Senate race in New York.

In the '50s, Galbraith visited India twice to advise the government on its economic problems, and, after a few hints, he became Kennedy's first ambassador to New Delhi in March 1961.

Though he had once described India's economy as "the world's greatest example of functioning anarchy," he was welcomed as the biggest thing--in many respects--since Lord Irwin, later Viscount Halifax, who had traveled around the country as Viceroy 30 years earlier with an 8-ft. bed. "How tall are you?" Galbraith was asked soon after his ar rival. The reply: "I am the tallest man in the world."

The U.S. sent good ambassadors to New Delhi straight through the '50s, and Galbraith, despite his unorthodox methods, belongs on the list. "The Great Mogul," as he was called by the embassy staff, won no plaudits for such stunts as wading barefoot in a paddyfield or carrying sacks of cement on his head at a dam construction site. Nonetheless, he achieved a remarkable rapport with Nehru, a man who, he says, was "touched with magic." He also performed with great, still unappreciated distinction during the 1962 Chinese border invasion. "The Indians panicked," says one former assistant. "They just didn't know what to do, and for about two days Galbraith held that government together almost singlehanded."

The Perturbable Rusk. Throughout his Indian tour--and ever since--Galbraith also waged a hot war with the State Department. Communications from Washington took too long to arrive, he complained, and communicated nothing when they did get there. Occasionally, he set U.S. policy by himself. Entirely on his own, for instance, he announced that the U.S. recognized India's disputed northern borders. Washington gulped, but went along. Confronted by Galbraith, the usually imperturbable Dean Rusk has proved quite perturbable, and when the ambassador argued for a change in U.S. policy toward China, the Secretary shot back: "Your views, so far as they have any merit, have already been fully considered and rejected." "That," noted Galbraith with no little satisfaction, "was the first strong declarative sentence I had ever had from Rusk."

His mistrust of the State Department, which he has described as "the most ornate bureaucracy since the Ming Dynasty," was not altogether unfounded. Once, when he was away from New Delhi, an aide handed him a coded message from Washington. How was he to read it without a decoding machine? The practice, the aide said, was to call Washington--on the telephone--and ask what was in the message.

Galbraith's cables to the State Department were prized as titillating reading material. "Well, the President's policy has fallen on its face again," was a typical salutation. A postscript might be: "Now would somebody back there please get off his ass!" A little vulgarity, Galbraith found, assured a personal reading by President Kennedy.

Rather Flamboyant. No one has ever had to tell Galbraith to get moving. When he is in Cambridge, he generally breakfasts in bed before 8, then for four hours locks himself in front of an IBM electric typewriter in the downstairs study of his rambling Victorian brick house at 30 Francis Ave., Harvard's faculty row. (Among his neighbors: Urbanologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan and TV Chef Julia Child.) By his own stern command, he is never interrupted. Tuesdays and Thursdays he has noon lecture classes, Tuesday evenings a seminar. Afternoons, he receives visitors, counsels students, answers mail, and reads. He is a Trollope addict--"Trollope tells a story as it should be told, lots of nourishment and no nonsense"--and finds a few minutes' perusal of Jane Austen's easy "rhythm" just right to prime his own writing pump. Like Trollope, he believes that "writing is high craftsmanship, rather than inspiration." His wit and seeming spontaneity generally come only after five revisions.

After dinner at home, sometimes with students, he reads still more, gives a speech or, on rare occasion, throws or attends a party. He was perhaps the most visible guest at Truman Capote's lavish bal masque in Manhattan's Plaza Hotel in 1966, dancing for a while with a candelabrum, then tossing it around, quarterback style, with George Plimpton. "I would say," says Capote, "that he was rather flamboyant."

The Galbraiths' own commencement-time party in the spring is famous in Cambridge, as is the "young people's party" they give in the winter for sons and daughters of their friends. Galbraith's dancing style, which consists mostly of hopping up and down in place, has been described as the "pogo-stick stomp." The Galbraiths have three sons of their own: John Alan, 26 (Harvard '63), a clerk for California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk; Peter, 17, an eleventh-grader at Boston's Commonwealth School; James, 16, a sophomore at Andover. A fourth, Douglas, died of leukemia in 1950 at seven.

Drunken Pretzel. As an analyst of affluence, Galbraith does not speak from the curious outside. He summers on the family's 247-acre farm near Newfane, Vt., spends part of each winter at a commodious rented chalet in Gstaad, an elegant ski resort in Switzerland. William Buckley, a sometime skiing companion, says that Galbraith looks like "a drunken pretzel" coming down the slopes, but another observer describes his form as "graceful, lordly, solemn even--like Charles de Gaulle going down an escalator."

Lordly might also describe his pedagogical style. For all his fame, Galbraith is regularly panned by the Harvard Crimson's Confidential Guide to undergraduate courses. "Vague platitudes on assorted cosmic questions," complains one of his students, "are apparently received through the office of divine revelation." Is he arrogant? "Oh, yes, of course," says his sister Catherine. "But his arrogance is always with tongue in cheek. It's part of his charm. He is also a kindly man, which isn't often mentioned."

Neat & Unstarved. The charm and the kindness escape some people entirely. In India, secretaries were sometimes reduced to tears by his imperious manner, and a number of embassy staffers winced under his highhandedness.

Attractive women, however, almost invariably appreciate him--and vice versa. Manhattan Freelance Writer (and Jet Setter) Gloria Steinem finds him "overpowering." Actress Angie Dickinson describes him as "fascinating and funny." Galbraith's yet-to-be-published India diaries return the compliment. "She has fair, pure skin," he cooed after sitting next to Angie on a transcontinental jet in 1961, "blonde to vaguely reddish hair, merry eyes and a neat, unstarved body." Despite his obviously observant eye, Miss Dickinson, who visited the subcontinent in 1962, doubts that he has any "serious romances--or any romances at all."

When Jacqueline Kennedy comes to Cambridge, the last vestige of magisterial hauteur disappears. "He fawns over her like a cocker spaniel," harrumphs a neighbor. "He bounds out onto the lawn wreathed in smiles, escorts her into the house as though she were made of eggs, and hovers."

The truth is that Galbraith, with most people anyway, enjoys being thought arrogant, just as some people find odd pleasure in being thought ruthless or mean. Galbraith, says Buckley, "always gives the impression that he is on very temporary leave from Olympus, where he holds classes on the maintenance of divine standards."

A Voice in the Land. Politics fascinates Galbraith, and he is somewhat intrigued with the idea of running for the governorship of Massachusetts. But his sharp wit, irrepressible candor and donnish mien would be fatal handicaps at the polls. As it is, there are many who think that he has already spread himself too thin. "The peril with becoming a Voice in the Land," says Columbia Economist Louis Hacker, a friendly critic, "is that you are expected to be knowledgeable in every subject. Galbraith has no right to be pontifical on things like Viet Nam."

Galbraith would disagree vehemently. "If there are differences of opinion," he said at last week's Roosevelt dinner, "there should be men to represent them." The fact is that while there are more than enough men to criticize U.S. policy in Viet Nam, few have spoken so clearly and responsibly as Galbraith, or searched so hard for a viable way out. "I want to change things," he says. "I want to see things happen. I don't want just to talk about them."

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