Galbraith in Government

An excerpt from the new biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Kennedy School Lecturer Richard Parker

In September 1961, anticipating that China would soon be testing a nuclear weapon, State Department planners recommended, in a top-secret memo to Rusk, that the United States “beat the Chinese Communists to the punch” by persuading India to test its own atomic bomb first — if need be, by overtly supplying American technology and materiel. This would, they said, “be seen as a great victory for free Asia.” As the memorandum acknowledged, however, the plan was vehemently opposed by Ambassador Galbraith, who reckoned there was hardly a chance that Nehru would agree to it and the very suggestion would greatly damage U.S.-Indian relations. The planners noted that Galbraith, in a spirit of unexpected compromise, suggested that Jerome Wiesner, the President’s science adviser, stop in New Delhi after his planned upcoming visit to Pakistan, where he could meet the Indian science adviser and perhaps obliquely raise the question of nuclear weapons in Asia.

This is in fact what happened. Wiesner arrived in New Delhi early that October, whereupon Galbraith immediately recruited his old friend into opposition to the plan. In Ambassador’s Journal, Galbraith — sworn to secrecy — mentions only that he gave Wiesner “an earful on needed reforms in our diplomatic representation,” while noting obliquely that the future M.I.T. president recounted his own frustrations about his day-to-day battles in Washington on behalf of a ban on nuclear testing, and describes Wiesner’s meeting with Nehru as one in which he “gave a very effective and thoughtful exposition of the disarmament problem.” Finally free to discuss this forty years later, Galbraith says that Wiesner, just as appalled as he was by State’s proposal, delivered their views to President Kennedy, who agreed with them about its manifest dangers; the plan to help India go nuclear was never revived (although declassified records show that Pentagon and State Department planners continued for some years to draw up plans for a preemptive nuclear attack against Chinese weapons facilities).

Galbraith’s skepticism of official U.S. foreign policy and its planners wasn’t helped by the near invasion of Laos, undertaken soon after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs. This dubious activism contrasted with what he felt was American passivity about India. In a back-channel letter to Kennedy, he noted, “I think I dislike most the uncontrollable instinct for piously reasoned inaction. When the Department does respond to telegrams it is invariably to recommend evasion of issues that cannot be evaded. The result is that we get the worst of all available worlds.” He voiced his concern about keeping peace in Laos and preserving the kingdom’s neutrality, and he warned that to convince India, as head of the International Control Commission, to risk its prestige in support of U.S. aims in Laos was “an uphill battle. The Department expects me to explain our devotion to neutrality in Laos one day and our supersonic toys for the Pakistanis the next. This is called policy.”

For more information about the new biography.