Books: Far from Foggy Bottom

AMBASSADOR’S JOURNAL by John Kenneth Galbraith. 656 pages. Houghfon M/ffl/n. $10.

One of the inalienable rights of ex-Presidents, ex-generals and ex-ambassadors—and their ex-secretaries, ex-Jeep drivers and ex-valets—is the privilege of making public their diaries. The result, customarily, is to confront the reader with a literary chore roughly comparable to watching a three-hour slide show of his mother-in-law’s latest trip through Navajo country.

What makes all the difference in this book is Galbraith. The sometime Harvard economist (The Affluent Society), novelist (The Triumph) and dancing partner of Jacqueline Kennedy is that rarity among diarists, a writer of first-rate prose. As a journal of his two years and three months as U.S. Ambassador to India (April 1961-July 1963), the volume is inevitably filled with history’s largely forgotten and largely forgettable moments. But scarcely a paragraph is unredeemed by a flash of wit or a quietly neo-Machiavellian observation.

Galbraith sardonically sweated his way through the routines of a “ceremonial existence.” He met VIP planes. He attended weddings. He put in appearances at worthy institutions—farming villages, universities, factories. He gave countless speeches. He entertained American tourists: the Harvard Glee Club, the Davis Cup team, Lyndon Baines Johnson (“genuinely intelligent”) and, finally, Jackie Kennedy. Social duties also involved suffering fools gladly, like the Indian industrialist of whom he wrote: “No one could be rich enough to buy the right to be such a bore.”

Galbraith is down on the local food: “I have never been in a city where it is so easy to lose weight.” On the whole, however, India gets high grades from the professor. It is Washington that he really cannot abide. He complains of the way jet fighters were shipped to India’s unfriendly neighbor Pakistan. It was, he remarks acidly, about as furtive as “mass sodomy on the B.M.T. at rush hour.” But it is another vexing American institution, the State Department—which he considers short on policy, long on platitude—that Galbraith finds hardest to forgive. “Mindless,” “petty,” “pompous” and “late” are only a few of the acid adjectives he applies to Foggy Bottom, and for the most part he bluntly takes Dean Rusk to be its accurate personification.

Overdeveloped Women. Galbraith obviously was not easy for the bureaucrats to handle. In government, he observes, “people get boxed only when they won’t kick their way out.” Galbraith was a tutor at Harvard when Jack Kennedy was a blithe undergraduate. Perhaps partly as a result, he did not hesitate to go to the top with his complaints. He also took it upon himself to advise the young President not only on Indian affairs but about Berlin and Viet Nam too, sounding early warnings against military intervention in Southeast Asia. Counseling and criticizing, he variously complained that “money serves as a substitute for intelligence” in American foreign policy and that complex issues are too often reduced to simple-minded win-or-lose terms. As a gadfly, he kept pointing out, too, that it is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.

The author himself played to win. He counted his crowds like a star on opening night. He reveled in autograph hounds and—with proper irony, of course—did not neglect to record native comparisons of Galbraith to Moses, Tennyson and Jesus Christ.

The journal bursts with an exuberant assurance that the public arena is now the proper place for intellectuals. Some of this gusto was always Galbraith’s, but some of it unmistakably emanated from his boss—the man at the center of the New Frontier. It is hard to imagine a Nixon appointee ever commenting on the propriety required of a diplomat: “Being Ambassador to India is the nearest thing yet devised to a male chastity belt. But one can still gaze wistfully.” A little-known Galbraithian law: “The more underdeveloped the country the more overdeveloped the women.”

In describing a White House dinner, Galbraith speaks of the “fine glow that comes from being ‘in.’ ” Charming overconfidence shines all through the book, bearing witness to the wit and spirit of the Kennedy era. Less than ten years old, these memoirs read almost as if they had been written from another, far more cheerful planet.