Opinion: The Great Mogul

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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.

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