Playboy Interview: John Kenneth Galbraith

In an age of specialists, John Kenneth Galbraith defies categorization. As an economist and social theorist, he has been immensely influential in shaping the thinking of the current generation of Americans. As a witty and incisive writer, he has transformed the arcane and near-incomprehesible subject of economics into best sellers. As an on-and-off public official, he has advised Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson. As U. S. Ambassador to India, he turned a relatively minor diplomatic mission into an important and exciting office, bringing a new awareness of American purpose to millions of Asians. And as a Harvard professor, Galbraith belies the stereotyped image of the retiring, ivory-tower academician. His home in Cambridge is a focal point for the jet set; he walks towering and self-assured in the world of powerful men and beautiful women; no first-rate party (such as Truman Capote's bal masqué a year or so ago) is complete without him; and he winters each year in the poshest of Swiss resort areas. By inclination, and by virtue of his position as head of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (which he helped found), he is intimately involved in the decidedly unprofessorial infighting of practical politics. And in the past few years, he has emerged as one of the most energetic, prolific, articulate and responsible critics of American policy in Vietnam (as evidenced by his forceful article "Resolving Our Vietnam Predicament," which appeared in these pages in December). Late last year, Galbraith finished "The New Industrial State," a best-selling view of American business that—like its precursor, "The Affluent Society"—is probably one of the most important books of its decade. In mid-April, he followed this with his first novel, "The Triumph," also destined for the best-seller lists. In fact, before this interview appears, Galbraith may find himself one of the few authors ever to occupy both the fiction and the nonfiction best-seller lists simultaneously.

Not surprisingly, he describes himself as a writer, but he became one indirectly and relatively late in life. Galbraith, who will be 60 in October, was born in a small and rigidly Calvinist immigrant community in Ontario, on the northern shore of Lake Erie. (He has parlayed his boyhood into a book, "The Scotch," a haunting memoir that was published in 1964.) Galbraith's father was a teacher turned farmer and—like his son—a man larger than life. Galbraith himself is six feet, eight inches tall and likes to observe that he has lived all his years in the comforting belief that everyone around him is abnormally short. Considering his farm background, it was natural that young Ken (he dislikes the name John, which honors an uncle with whom he never got along) gravitated to Ontario College of Agriculture, at that time a part of the University of Toronto. He was graduated in 1931. A fascination with economics—a subject of growing importance during the bleak years of the Depression—then drew him to the University of California, whence he emerged with a Ph.D. in agricultural economics in 1934. After a summer job in the Federal Government, Galbraith took a post at Harvard University as an instructor and tutor. Shortly afterward, he became an American citizen.

About the same time Galbraith arrived at Harvard, another economist, in another Cambridge, published a book of truly vast consequence. The economist was John Maynard Keynes, and the book was Keynes' difficult "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money," a work as important—and almost as influential—as Karl Marx' "Das Kapital." In one seminal tour de force, Keynes rewrote the role of government in a national economy, showing that in economic affairs, the best government is certainly not the least government and laying the foundation for what is now called the "new economics." While Galbraith was tutoring at Harvard's Winthrop House—and avidly deciphering Keynes' cryptic prose—he became a close friend of Joseph Kennedy, Jr., eldest of the Kennedy brothers, then a Harvard sophomore and later killed in World War Two. Here Galbraith also met young Jack Kennedy, still at prep school but shortly to arrive at Winthrop House himself. And at Harvard, Galbraith met and married Catherine At water, a vivacious and charming Smith College valedictorian who had come to Radcliffe for graduate study.

In 1939, Galbraith took a post at Princeton, but his work there was interrupted by several War-related Government jobs. In 1941, largely as the result of a treatise Galbraith had written on the subject of price controls, F.D.R. appointed him de facto head of the Office of Price Administration. At the age of 33, he was, in effect, personally responsible for fixing the price of virtually every item sold in the United States. Unhappily, Galbraith's original ideas on the subject—the reason he'd been given the job in the first place—proved totally unworkable. Undaunted, he set up a different price-control apparatus, one that did work—and ran a staff that grew from a dozen to 16,000. With the vantage of hindsight, observers agree that the procedures Galbraith set up in his improvised operation were wise ones; the same rules were trotted out again when price controls became necessary during the Korean War. But in the hectic early years of World War Two, the job was thankless, frustrating and criticized from every quarter. Galbraith was quizzed regularly by Congressional investigators, most of whom felt his price-fixing rules were too complex. Through all this, Galbraith at least retained his sense of humor: He once toyed with the wryly simplifying alternative of setting a flat price of five dollars for every item sold. But by 1943, the job had drained even Galbraith's near-limitless energies. He left the OPA (amid variously motivated applause from all sides), made a perfunctory effort to join the Army (he was rejected because of his height) and wound up on the staff of Fortune, where he learned the craft of writing. At War's end, he returned to Government, to assess the value of U. S. strategic bombing attacks on Germany (the conclusion: ineffective), and then to help out briefly in the economic rehabilitation of the occupied countries. After this and another brief stint at Fortune, he returned to Harvard as a professor, where he has remained, between leaves of absence, since 1949.

Only after he settled at Harvard did Galbraith begin to write in earnest. Barricading himself for three or four hours each day, he has turned out a vast flow of typewritten words. He began to keep track of all his published works only in 1959. Even before that, he had written such popular and important books as "The Affluent Society," "The Great Crash, 1929," "Economics and the Art of Controversy" and "American Capitalism" —as well as a number of major campaign speeches for his friend Adlai Stevenson. Since 1959, his secretary reports, Galbraith has produced 8 nonfiction works (ranging from economic theory to social satire), a novel (he's now polishing another), 32 magazine articles, 54 book reviews, 35 letters to the editor, 8 introductions to others' books, numerous lectures, and major speeches for Lyndon Johnson and Edward, Robert and John F. Kennedy.

Galbraith was one of J. F. K.'s earliest supporters, much to the chagrin of liberal friends, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, who, before Kennedy won the nomination, were staunch Stevenson backers. He was a part of the Kennedy troupe at the 1960 Democratic Convention (where his towering height made him invaluable as a floor manager) and campaigned extensively for Kennedy in the months that followed. He also wrote occasional speeches on economics for the young candidate, though he confesses he never quite succeeded in capturing the Kennedy style. (A notable exception was a Galbraith line in Kennedy's inaugural address: "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.") For his efforts on the new President's behalf, Galbraith was rewarded with the Indian ambassadorship, which took him to New Delhi from 1961 to 1963. While he was a relative stranger to the wiles of diplomacy, his wit and intelligence served him well; President Kennedy subsequently observed that "Galbraith was my best ambassadorial appointment." During his two and a half years in India, he also wrote four books.

Since his return to the U. S. in 1963, Galbraith has been closely—though unofficially—associated with liberal politics and American foreign policy. His novel "The Triumph" is a fictional skewering of State Department paralysis. His role as head of A. D. A. has made him a particularly audible source of liberal opinion and antiwar criticism, and he has gracefully assumed the mantle—as Time put it in a cover story on him last February—of an "all-purpose critic."

To learn more about the versatile and controversial economist, Playboy sent Senior Editor Michael Laurence, the author of several Playboy articles on the economics of personal investment, to interview Galbraith at the gingerbread chalet he rents each winter in Gstaad, Switzerland. Laurence reports: "The interview took place over seven consecutive evenings. Galbraith would write every morning. In the afternoons, he and his wife would go skiing. Then he would take a nap, and after that we would talk for an hour or two before dinner. His chalet is built into a hillside; and during the interview, Galbraith sat next to a huge picture window overlooking the Bernese Oberland. It was one of the most beautiful vistas in the world: huge, snowy peaks and pine trees in the sunset. Galbraith usually wore a turtleneck sweater and baggy salt-and-pepper trousers. While he talked, he would slouch in his leather easy chair, pulling his knees up toward his chest and looking—from the side—like a giant letter N."

Shortly after Galbraith had returned to the U. S. and the bulk of this interview was on press, L. B. J. dropped out of the Presidential race and events in Vietnam tentatively moved toward reduced hostilities. Taking liberties with deadlines for this introduction, we asked Galbraith—then campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in California—how he felt his interview had been affected. Galbraith's recorded telephonic reply:

"Most of this interview was conducted in January. In March came all sorts of political events. I was able to amend it to the extent of introducing Robert Kennedy into the Presidential campaign. The reader will have to drop Lyndon Johnson out for himself. He will also have to decide to what extent the Vietnam policy I have criticized has been officially repudiated. I venture to hope that it has and that Secretary Rusk, Professor Walt Rostow and Mr. William Bundy—the architects of the policy that produced the President's decision not to run—will take note of the warm approval the President's withdrawal produced and seek a share of it.

"As to who will be the Democratic candidate, Senator McCarthy or Senator Kennedy, I do not know. I do guess that Richard Nixon, unluckier than ever and at this point the only surviving defender of the Vietnam war in the Presidential race, will be the Republican loser. It is said that he erased his loser image in the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries, but it might be suggested that he did so in elections in which he had no competition."

In our own estimation, the prescience and insight revealed in Galbraith's interview become even more impressive in the light of the unanticipated events that ensued after its completion. Galbraith's foregoing pronouncements about Nixon seem especially appropriate, since we had begun the interview by asking him about the plight and prospects of the G.O.P.

[Q] Playboy: In moments of candor, even Republicans will admit that the performance of their party in the area that really counts—winning elections—has been less than ideal. Do you think the Republican Party is destined to a permanent minority position?

[A] Galbraith: No, I certainly don't. I think the Republicans have been more fortunate in recent years than the Democrats.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Galbraith: Well, economics has been the bane of the Republicans, just as war has been the bane of the Democrats. The Democrats won elections for years by tying the Depression to the tail of Herbert Hoover and to the Republicans. I have little doubt that the Republicans are now going to try to win elections for quite a few years by tying war to the Democrats. The Democrats were in power in World War One; they were in power in World War Two; they were in power in the Korean War and they are in power now. Until Vietnam, there was justification for the Democratic case—they could say they weren't really responsible for the particular wars. They were only in a custodial position and their policy had nothing to do with precipitating those conflicts. But now, with Vietnam, the Republicans have a very good case. And the Democrats will suffer for that for a long while. In 1953 and 1954, President Eisenhower, who was then a good deal less militant than he has become on the matter of Vietnam, was strongly pressed by Secretary Dulles to commit American troops to Vietnam, but Eisenhower very stoutly refused. This was a wisdom that subsequent Democratic Administrations didn't show. I have very little doubt that in one way or the other, the Republicans—inept as they are—will make capital of this. If they run Richard Nixon, of course, they are going to be handicapped, because Nixon was one of the people urging Eisenhower to send troops to Vietnam in 1954. On the issue of the war, Nixon thinks he can beat the Democrats not by taking a wiser position but by extending their errors.

[Q] Playboy: Some cynics have said that the Republicans in the past few elections have revealed a death wish. Every four years they have a fine chance of taking the Presidency and then they pick a candidate who can't possibly win. Is this a valid observation?

[A] Galbraith: Yes. this is undoubtedly a Republican talent—but not exclusively. For example, the Democrats in my own state, Massachusetts, almost always come up with the candidate best calculated to lose. I remember once rehashing the 1960 election with President Kennedy. I suggested that he was the only Democrat who could have won and Nixon the only Republican who could have lost. And I think President Kennedy rather agreed with that assessment. In 1964, there is no question that the Republicans unerringly picked Barry Goldwater, who was the weakest candidate they could have found, a man with an almost eccentric innocence about the great issues of our time. He was laboring until very late in the campaign, for example, under the assumption that oldage pensions are unpopular with old people. I don't have any gift of foresight, but I think there is considerable likelihood of the Republicans' going back to Dick Nixon this autumn; and, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, it would be hard to imagine anyone who would be weaker than Nixon. When the Republicans picked him in 1948, Thomas E. Dewey was a one-time loser; but Nixon hasn't won an election on his own account since he defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas for the United States Senate. That was in 1951.

[Q] Playboy: Who do you think would be the strongest Republican candidate?

[A] Galbraith: Rockefeller. There's no question about that. Rockefeller would be very strong and I think possibly even unbeatable.

[Q] Playboy: In a contest between Johnson and Rockefeller, who would have your vote?

[A] Galbraith: I couldn't answer that right at the moment, but my party regularity is not such that I would be obliged to vote Democratic. To be sure, I would vote only with great regret for somebody other than a Democrat. I have never voted for anybody but a Democrat in a Presidential election and I've very rarely voted for anybody but a Democrat for other offices. But last year, I publicly supported the present Attorney General of Massachusetts, Elliot Richardson, who was a Republican, because he was the better man. And many years ago, when I was living in New York, I supported Jacob Javits, when he first ran for the House of Representatives. In fact, I made a sacrifice greater than that. After I left the city, Javits got my apartment. It was in his district and apartments were very scarce at that time.

[A] Getting back to your question, much would depend on Rockefeller's position on the war. This would be the attitude of a great many liberals. Rockefeller went underground on this issue about three years ago. When he went underground, he was quite a hawk. He was arguing for increased national defense expenditures and he was greatly committed to a bomb-shelter program. I remember seeing Prime Minister Nehru once, after he had a conference with Governor Rockefeller. The Prime Minister said, "Mr. Ambassador, your governor"—he referred to him as my governor—"your governor seemed to be enormously involved with bomb shelters. He did nothing but lecture me on bomb shelters. He even gave me a pamphlet on bomb shelters." That was Rockefeller before he became silent on international affairs. If he were to surface as a hawk, I certainly wouldn't vote for him. But if he were to surface with a sensible, conciliatory policy on Vietnam and on other foreign-policy issues, well, I'd have to think about it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the war might provoke a left-wing third-party movement in the United States?

[A] Galbraith: No.

[Q] Playboy: If not on the left, do you see any prospect of a right-wing third-party movement sparked by George Wallace?

[A] Galbraith: No. The two-party tradition in the United States is very strong. People think of themselves almost from birth as Republicans or Democrats and then differentiate themselves as liberal Republicans or conservative Democrats, or vice versa. This raises a very large moral barrier against third-party movements. Also, the legal barriers are great. To get a third party on the ballot in all the 50 states, or in anything approaching that number, is quite difficult. Things are loaded in favor of the two-party system.

[Q] Playboy: Do you share the view of those who feel that the effectiveness of the electroral process is threatened by the emergence of movie-star politicians—those candidates who have a previous reputation established in the mass media?

[A] Galbraith: Such as Ronald Reagan?

[Q] Playboy: Or Senator George Murphy, or Shirley Temple Black, or Congressman Robert Mathias, Olympic gold medalist.

[A] Galbraith: No, I don't think so. I think some popular identification of this sort is politically valuable and always has been. I just mentioned Helen Douglas, who was certainly widely known as an actress; but she didn't survive against a relatively unknown Congressman named Nixon. And there is nothing about the showing that Ronald Reagan is making around the country that would indicate his stardom is propelling him into the Presidency. Shirley Temple probably got more votes than if she had been plain Mrs. Black, with no previous fame, but not enough to get her into Congress. So, no. I wouldn't think there is anything more involved here than what everybody knows: that a measure of public notoriety is valuable in politics.

[Q] Playboy: Lack of public notoriety seems to be one of the problems facing Senator Eugene McCarthy. Do you think his candidacy—or Robert Kennedy's—will strengthen the Democratic Party, even assuming defeat at the convention?

[A] Galbraith: Well, there are elements of cliché here. Almost every day somebody comes to see me, to tell me that if there is any opposition to President Johnson within the Democratic Party, this will so split the party that it will improve the chances of the Republicans. Actually, the Democratic Party, in this sense, doesn't exist. The Democratic Party is not a cohesive entity that can be split. It exists, at any given time, as a vast multiplicity of factions. You can't split something that is congenitally fragmented. Are John Stennis and James Eastland united with, say, Wayne Morse? If Gene McCarthy or Bob Kennedy, reflecting as they do an enormous nationwide dissatisfaction with the foreign policy of the Administration, focus that dissatisfaction by running—among other things—as peace candidates, all they do is give expression to a split that exists anyway. Many regular members of the Democratic Party, people who are stringing along with the Administration, aren't happy about its foreign policy. I've been around the country a good deal in the past year, and I can say that the difference between people who have been leaning to McCarthy and Kennedy and the great number of the people who are stringing along with the President is not over the war. Both groups oppose the war. The difference is between those who think the war is such a transcendent issue that they will support whoever is opposed to it and those who are going along with the Administration in spite of the war.

[Q] Playboy: The war aside, do you think Senator McCarthy is qualified for the Presidency?

[A] Galbraith: Yes, there's no question about that. He's a highly intelligent and thoughtful man, and in many ways he's been an exemplary Senator.

[Q] Playboy: Yet in the view of the Americans for Democratic Action, which you head, his record has been less than perfect, hasn't it?

[A] Galbraith: Not over the years. People who say this are citing some votes of the Senator during the past session, and some of the issues were quite minor. We score people by their votes, you know; and since McCarthy has been in the Senate, he has been something over 90 percent right by our count.

[Q] Playboy: McCarthy has generated great enthusiasm among critics of the Vietnam war. An earlier Senator McCarthy also took advantage of the emotional climate of war to appeal to millions of Americans. In this case, followers of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy seemed to reason that since Communists were killing our boys in Korea, we had a moral duty to ferret them out on the home front. Do you think recent events—the indictments of William Sloane Coffin and Dr. Benjamin Spock, and General Hershey's repeated attempts to use the draft to curb dissent—indicate the possibility of a McCarthyite resurgence today?

[A] Galbraith: No, I don't. Most people felt the Korean War—unhappy an episode though it was—was necessary. It was a very unpopular war, widely regarded as necessary and widely regarded as having been provoked by the international Communist conspiracy. So, a very small minority of people who had at one time or another—innocently or otherwise—been associated with communism were extremely vulnerable. But they were a small minority, and those who continued to criticize the war were an even smaller and more defenseless minority. McCarthyism was directed at this tiny group.

[A] Perhaps for this reason, the critics of the Vietnam war have shown a heroism complex. They feel that they are being peculiarly brave in criticizing the Administration. Well, that's nonsense. There is no bravery involved in identifying yourself with millions of other people. To be specific, as a critic of the Vietnam conflict, there is no community in the United States into which I cannot go and be sure of a sizable and friendly audience. Last spring, I spoke at the most stouthearted military institution in the United States, Texas A & M College, where I had a huge turnout. I hadn't gone down there to talk about the Vietnam conflict, but I had a very friendly reception from people who wanted me to know they agreed with my views on Vietnam. That required no heroism. On the other hand, it requires considerable heroism for Secretary Rusk to go to Harvard to make a speech. There is no university community into which the Secretary of State can go without encountering hostility.

[Q] Playboy: Still, don't you think the draft resisters, as well as Coffin and Spock, who face a possibility of conviction and imprisonment, must be credited with a certain amount of heroism?

[A] Galbraith: Yes. And I'm puzzled why the Administration felt obliged to challenge them. That was the other point I was going to make. Who has suffered on the draft issue? Whose reputation has suffered? Has it been the people who are resisting the draft—or has it been General Hershey? Obviously, Hershey has suffered. Hershey has been, in a way, a tragic figure. Here is an amiable old man—I worked with him years ago—who has been an unspectacular but quite decent administrator. He becomes over-enthusiastic on this one issue and he is now an embarrassment to all concerned. If the Administration could find any graceful way of detaching itself from General Hershey, I think it would.

[Q] Playboy: You once wrote: "We may lay it down as a law that without public criticism, all governments would look much better and be much worse." Considering its salubrious aspect, what major criticism would you have of President Johnson?

[A] Galbraith: My abiding criticism of President Johnson is that he identified himself with a foreign policy—and with the exponents of a foreign policy, notably Secretary Rusk—just at the moment that it became obsolete. Consider the errors in our foreign policy in the past 20 years. First, it relied excessively on the mystique of military power. Second, it had the vision of a unified, international Communist conspiracy, just at the time the Communist world was breaking up and giving way to the stronger force of nationalism. Third, it was rigidly and narrowly anti-Communist. Far too many issues were decided in accordance with whether they seemed to advance or impede the Cold War with what was called the Sino-Soviet bloc. And fourth, it terribly exaggerated the possible American role in bringing about desirable social change in other countries. All of these things were the mistakes of the generation of people who dominated foreign policy in the 20 years following the breakup of the Grand Alliance. And all these mistakes came to a focus in Vietnam. We found ourselves involved with nationalism, not international communism. We exaggerated what military weapons could accomplish; we found we could not reform Vietnamese society. Yet this was the effort with which President Johnson identified himself. I remember—I don't think I'm violating any confidence here or being unduly vain in recalling it—I remember a conversation I had with President Johnson shortly after the death of President Kennedy. We were ranging over the problems to be faced. I told him that I thought there were no problems on the domestic front that wouldn't yield readily to the kind of social action that was already in process. But I said that if the old generation was able to reassert itself in our foreign policy, there could be nothing but disaster. I had in mind the pressures that had previously been placed upon us to intervene in Laos and the relentless pressures that were then upon us to escalate our intervention in Vietnam. And suggestions kept coming up for military intervention in other parts of the world as well.

[Q] Playboy: But President Johnson inherited Kennedy's State Department. Rusk was a Kennedy appointee, and there haven't been many high-level changes in the State Department since Kennedy staffed it. How would you account for these old pressures reasserting themselves under the Johnson Administration?

[A] Galbraith: As both Theodore Sorensen's and Arthur Schlesinger's books make clear, the great struggle in the Kennedy Administration was not between Republicans and Democrats and it was not between the Executive and the Legislature. It was between the White House and the senior foreign-policy establishment—particularly between the White House and the State Department. The instinct of the older, permanent employees in, say, the Department of Agriculture or the Department of the Interior, is generally progressive. These bureaus can get set in their ways, but they respond to leadership. The instinct of the State Department, however, was overwhelmingly to the older-generation attitudes, to John Foster Dulles' view of the world. They saw the problem of foreign policy simplistically, as a conflict between communism and the free world. Everything was forced into that dichotomy. This was a continuing point of conflict all through the Kennedy Administration. It came up with those who wanted—as I said—to send troops to Indochina. General Taylor and Walt Rostow came back from Vietnam in 1961 with a proposal to put a division of combat troops in there. Kennedy said no. The conflict came up with all the negotiations we were involved in in Europe. It came up with those who didn't want to make any concessions that might lead, for example, to the test ban. And it came up in Latin America. The point is that in each of these cases, Kennedy had to reject powerful and well-entrenched attitudes within the State Department itself; and for the most part, he succeeded. President Johnson has not succeeded.

[A] My second criticism of President Johnson would be briefer: He is a very shrewd tactician but a poor strategist. He is good at handling today's and tomorrow's business but poor at defining objectives and moving consciously and deliberately toward those objectives.

[Q] Playboy: Would you elaborate?

[A] Galbraith: Vietnam provides many examples. Last autumn, the President brought General Westmoreland and Ambassador Bunker back to sell the country and the Congress on the notion that we were winning in Vietnam. It was quite a successful tactic. Even the polls showed improvement. But as part of a longer-run strategy of promoting confidence in our foreign policy, given the fact that we weren't winning, it was a terrible mistake. The Tet offensive came along and disposed of the victory.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't much of President Johnson's style, as well as his attitude toward the issues, forged in the New Deal?

[A] Galbraith: No question about that. And it was very much my own case.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think, in Johnson's case, that some of his ideas and approaches are obsolete?

[A] Galbraith: That's a somewhat harsh statement. I would be rather cautious before agreeing. I might be indicting myself, too. On some matters about which I have been very much concerned—the problem of our environment, the protection of roadsides, the preservation of some of the natural charm of the American community—President Johnson has been very much in the vanguard, and so has Mrs. Johnson. Or they were, until this miserable war intervened. On the other hand, I think the President is probably open to a measure of criticism for his last State of the Union message, a criticism that was leveled at him quite generally: his excessive preoccupation with increasing national prosperity as the sole test of social performance. I'm not saying that increasing prosperity isn't important, but it's clear that this is not a remedy for the distress in our cities. And it's clear that the problem of the cities grows from a very bad sense of priorities on the part of the Federal Government.

[Q] Playboy: Some critics have said that Kennedy planted and all Johnson has done is harvest. Do you think Johnson's reputation for success in obtaining progressive social legislation is deserved?

[A] Galbraith: President Kennedy certainly put quite a good deal of legislation on the table. But I never doubted that President Johnson was a better manager of Congress than President Kennedy. President Kennedy saw the Congress as a coequal branch of the Government, in strict constitutional terms. President Johnson sees it as a challenge, as something to be managed. This has achieved results.

[Q] Playboy: Nonetheless, do you regard Kennedy as a great President?

[A] Galbraith: Yes. At least I regard him as having been a very great man. He was subject, of course, to the limitations of three brief years. Most of the people who made a mark in the Presidency, from Washington on, had eight years. Roosevelt had more than 12.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think was President Kennedy's most important achievement in domestic affairs?

[A] Galbraith: The one that he's commonly credited with: the final development of modern economic policy. It was under the Kennedy Administration that we finally got away from the clichés of the balanced budget and came to see the Federal Government as an affirmative instrument for maintaining the level of employment. This has become an accepted fact. But I would add that in a more general sense, Kennedy brought an air of excitement to Washington that, in turn, drew an extraordinarily talented group of people there from all over the country, lifting very markedly the tone and quality of the Federal Executive. On reflection, I might even say that this intangible achievement was his monument. There are also some other Kennedy accomplishments that even the historians tend to overlook. For example, the farm problem disappeared under Kennedy. He appointed a very talented man as Secretary of Agriculture and gave him a free hand. Secretary Freeman, in turn, had a great capacity for dealing with Congress. Until the Kennedy Administration, everybody assumed that the farm-policy problem was chronic and insoluble. Now, of course, we haven't heard much about it for years. It's curious how little we miss the problems that we cease to hear about.

[Q] Playboy: The mood of excitement you say Kennedy brought to Washington seems to have disappeared. Do you think this is because Kennedy himself is no longer on the scene?

[A] Galbraith: No. I think the war is the cause. Had it not been for the war, the sense of excitement generated by the legislative measures that President Johnson put through in 1964 and 1965 would have continued. I was very closely associated with the poverty program in its early years, first in the drafting of the legislation and then on the advisory committee that was established to oversee it. There was a great sense of excitement in the Office of Economic Opportunity in those early years under President Johnson. It began to dissipate when it became common knowledge that there wasn't going to be any important increase in appropriations. Instead of an all-out war on poverty, it became clear that the program's claim on the budget was wholly subordinate to military requirements. People began to drift away, first a few at a time and then in large numbers. One always has to keep in mind—and this also is something that is not very well understood—that liberals in the United States are summer soldiers. They go to Washington when the going is good, when there's an Administration they like, when there's a feeling of excitement. But when the excitement diminishes, they go back to the universities, or to journalism, or to the law. On the whole, conservatives are more stable. One sees this particularly in the State Department. The liberals come in for short periods of time—as I did—but the stuffier men have much greater stability.

[Q] Playboy: What would you say was Kennedy's greatest accomplishment in foreign affairs?

[A] Galbraith: The nuclear test ban.

[Q] Playboy: Not his handling of the Cuban crisis?

[A] Galbraith: No. That required sensible restraint. The wild men had to be kept down. But that was no great test of capacity. And the Soviets were quite cooperative, after all. I think the test ban was Kennedy's greatest achievement. And again, it's an indication of how little we miss problems that are no longer with us. Up until the negotiation of the test-ban agreement, there was scarcely a week, and often not a day, when there wasn't a story in The New York Times about fallout levels, about strontium 90 in our milk, about radiation poisoning the atmosphere. Now I suppose one could go through the Times index for the past year and find only a handful of such entries, mostly concerning the Chinese explosions. This oppressive problem has almost disappeared from our consciousness. When I went to India, I found that one of the subjects that came up most frequently in conversation was what right the Americans and the Russians have to poison the atmosphere that all the world must use. The alarm in the non-scientific community was very much greater than it was in the United States. Once I took Jerome Wiesner, then the President's Scientific Advisor, out to India for the specific purpose of putting the thing in perspective. He held what must have been one of the longest press conferences in history, answering in meticulous detail all the questions of the Indian news papermen about what the actual dangers from fallout were. He didn't minimize the dangers, of course; he was one of the architects of the test ban. But he managed to persuade the Indians that they weren't in imminent danger of destruction from radioactive air.

[Q] Playboy: About your association with India, Newsweek once wrote: "As U. S. Ambassador from 1961 to 1963, Galbraith allegedly conducted himself in a manner befitting a rajah, dealt too directly with Prime Minister Nehru, dashed off a volume of hot-lined cables that kept international wires smoking, and often disregarded diplomatic protocol to take problems directly to friend and boss John F. Kennedy." Would you plead guilty?

[A] Galbraith: No, I wouldn't. I might take up the indictment step by step. I'm quite certain that my behavior was not parallel with that of the rajahs. The rajahs are now a rather depressed and saddened caste in India, whereas I tried to conduct myself with slightly more style. I certainly dealt directly with Prime Minister Nehru. He was, in addition to being prime minister, a personal friend of some years standing. He was also the foreign minister, the person with whom I had to work. About hot-lined cables, I often found that a sharply worded communication to the State Department produced more results than the passive-voiced, soft and enfeebled prose that is customary in diplomacy. And I always maintained the fiction that I had a very close association with President Kennedy. This was extremely valuable in getting action out of the State Department. It gave me a measure of leverage. But if anybody in the State Department had ever stopped to ponder the matter, they would have known that I wasn't really close to Kennedy at all. If the President had more than one official communication every six months from his ambassador in India, he would quickly have tired of such pestering and told me to deal with the Secretary of State. So I carefully rationed my communications with the President, as any experienced bureaucrat—which I am—knows he must do.

[Q] Playboy: Still, you accumulated quite a sheaf of correspondence with Kennedy, didn't you?

[A] Galbraith: Yes, unofficially. When I went to India, President Kennedy said one day, in a joking way, "Why don't you drop me a letter every once in a while and tell me what you do?" He said, "I've always been a bit uncertain, ever since my father was an ambassador, just what the job entails." Since I had for years been in a degree of communication with the President, every fortnight or so I'd send him a letter—a personal letter rather than an official communiqué—describing what was happening. I described the more interesting or amusing or embarrassing experiences of being an ambassador, sometimes commenting on matters in the U. S., and giving a great deal of attention to the thing that worried me tremendously at that time: our deepening involvement in Indochina. Someday I'm going to publish these letters. The time is now approaching when I think I can do so without seeming to be engaged in any undue exploitation of my position in India or my past association with the President.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you resign from your ambassadorial post?

[A] Galbraith: President Kennedy asked me to go there initially for two years, in the hope that this would give some impression of the aims and goals of the Kennedy Administration to the people in that part of the world. Then we'd extended it, after the Chinese attack on India; this was a period of uncertainty, so I stayed on. When calm returned after the war, I came home. I certainly didn't consider myself a professional diplomat—a point of view that was shared in some degree by the State Department. I had The New Industrial State hanging over my head and I was very anxious to finish it.

[Q] Playboy: Did you find you could live comfortably on an ambassadorial salary?

[A] Galbraith: Handsomely. Over the years, the financial difficulties of ambassadors have been somewhat exaggerated. I'm not speaking of Paris or London, but there's no doubt that my financial situation in New Delhi was infinitely easier than that of my Harvard colleagues who went to Washington. I had a salary of some $27,000 a year; transportation was paid for me and my family; there was a house, a staff, an automobile and an educational allowance for my children; and a very substantial entertainment allowance, certainly sufficient for the entertainment we did. We could have done less without any damage to the United States. But everytime I returned to Washington, my friends looked at me in the gloomiest fashion and asked: "Ken, are you going broke out there?" My answer always was: "Don't talk to me, talk to Archibald Cox or Arthur Schlesinger or Abe Chayes, the other Harvard people who came to Washington. They're the ones who are in danger of going broke."

[Q] Playboy: The comment has been made—most recently, in an amiable way, by David Halberstam in an article about you in Harper's—that the Kennedy people were disturbed at the ease with which you made the transition from J. F. K. to Johnson after the President was assassinated. Is this so?

[A] Galbraith: I've been asked about this before. Actually, I was the source of the remark myself, because I kept very careful notes about that whole weekend. Right after the assassination, President Johnson asked me to help with the message that he was about to give to Congress. He had just taken over and had no available staff. Also, as the new President, he was under terrible pressure. So he asked Ted Sorensen and me to give him a hand. We did. And I must say, in the jarring disorientation of that weekend, I found it therapeutic to have something to do. I reported, in the diary that I kept over that weekend, that I'd heard someone remark: "Well, that was certainly a rapid change in Ken," or something to that effect. Subsequently, I loaned the diary to William Manchester, who was writing The Death of a President. I asked him to check back on any use he made of it. But in the great confusion that surrounded publication of his book, as he later explained to me, he was unable to do so. So some of the material he published caused me a degree of embarrassment. The comment was a frivolous one that I certainly would never have published myself. But I don't think many people took it seriously. I never did. As a matter of fact, I doubt that over the weekend I did any more to ease the transition than, say, Robert Kennedy himself.

[Q] Playboy: Were you otherwise involved in the controversy over Manchester's book?

[A] Galbraith: No. I had earlier looked over, for Senator Robert Kennedy and Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy, a couple of the other Kennedy books, which made some small use of private papers: a book by Pierre Salinger and a book by the former Undersecretary of the Navy, Paul Fay. But I don't think I qualified myself as a particularly meticulous reviewer. At any rate, I had no role in the Manchester book, though I did come to Mrs. Kennedy's defense when I thought she was somewhat unfairly accused of censorship.

[Q] Playboy: You once observed that censorship reflects "the deep conviction of people who do not read concerning the persuasive power of books on those who do." Do you think any form of censorship is justified in the U.S. today?

[A] Galbraith: I oppose all censorship. I am, of course, especially suspicious of censorship having to do with public affairs. I know from my own experience as a public official, particularly during the years when I was running price controls, that every time I made a mistake, I immediately yearned for secrecy. No doubt there are some things that have to be kept secret, in the operation of the Government, but this is better done by instilling confidence in public employees than by censorship.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of books and their effect on others, we recently saw you quoted as saying that the writings of the late Ian Fleming had an important influence on American foreign policy. Were you speaking facetiously?

[A] Galbraith: Yes, in a way, but there has always been a Bond mystique within the CIA: the notion of the highly organized, highly masculine adventurer who can bring off perfectly fabulous coups. These people must be watched 24 hours a day. Indeed, if at all possible, they shouldn't be hired. It's undoubtedly unfair, though, to attribute their inclinations to too many James Bond novels. It's perhaps more plausible to say that Fleming modeled some of Bond's more outrageous operations on the things these self-styled super-agents imagine—in their wilder fantasies—that they're accomplishing.

[Q] Playboy: Your new novel, The Triumph, skewered the State Department mercilessly, but it was surprisingly benign toward the CIA. Does this reflect your own views?

[A] Galbraith: One must bear in mind that my novel concerns a small South. American country with an unattractive climate and a poor ambiance. It's less attractive to the Bond type than, say, Laos or South Vietnam, or some of the other exotic parts of the world. And since The Triumph aims in all particulars to be true fiction, it was natural that I should play down the role of the CIA. I did point to one feature of the CIA, however: its ability, when asked to estimate the outcome of a particular suggestion, to get on both sides of the question and then cloak its ambiguities in secrecy. But I must say one other thing: The CIA, on the whole, has had an unfair billing. There have been some impossible people working for it; but in the main, it has been composed of careful, diligent, hardworking men. My own experience with the CIA is that, given strong leadership, it is responsive, loyal and responsible.

[Q] Playboy: What about the charges we sometimes hear—of CIA subversion, something revolutions, sabotage, even assassination? Do these things go on?

[A] Galbraith: They never went on within my area of responsibility. My feeling is that the CIA has been in some degree a scapegoat for weak ambassadors. A lot of ambassadors who have the orthodox and old-fashioned view of their trade like not to know that there are any intelligence activities going on in their country. When something goes wrong, they can say: "Oh, that's the Agency boys, messing things up as usual." They use the CIA as an excuse for their own indifference. But any Chief of Mission who wants to take full responsibility for what is going on in his area can do so. It would be a good practice, in general, when things go wrong, to blame the ambassador more frequently and less frequently to blame the CIA. The ambassador has all the authority he needs—if he chooses to exercise it.

[Q] Playboy: If you were Secretary of State, what would you do to rid the Department of the rigor mortis that you depicted in The Triumph?

[A] Galbraith: This is a long story. To begin with, it would be very useful to lower the retirement age. In general, a live-lier, more eclectic and more knowledgeable group of people has come into the State Department since World War Two. The Pethwicks [Pethwick is a fossilized State Department obstructionist in Galbraith's novel] of the State Department are the people from good families who were looking for a gentlemanly career in government and set great store in having the manners of diplomacy. But they never armed themselves to understand the political problems of their task. They tend to regard all popular movements as Communist inspired. And they have the disposition to believe that people should accept any right-wing government, however despotic or noxious it may be. While there are young fogies in the State Department, there's a much larger number of old fogies. We would all profit from their retirement. But the State Department also suffers from the myth of American omnipotence. We have too many people assuming responsibility for too many things. If one imagines, for instance, that somehow or other the United States can affect all developments in Burma, then one is going to have a large number of Burmese specialists. But if one assumes that our relationship to Burma is marginal, that we can have only a very modest role there, then we're going to have only one man part time on Burma. I'm using Burma as an improbable example here; but during the years when we exaggerated our capacity to guide political and social change, we naturally expanded the number of State Department personnel. The result is a very slow and tedious process of decision-making, leading to the rigor mortis you mentioned. We're not going to fire those people; this is something that as a plain political matter never happens. If, implausibly, I were Secretary of State, I would divide the State Department into two parts. I would isolate in one part all the intelligence activities and all of the scholarly pursuits of the Department. The other part would be a relatively simple field staff drawing on the expertise of that large, scholarly apparatus. I'd hope that the field staff could then be accommodated to a more limited view of American foreign policy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the U.S. should have any role as what is commonly called a world policeman?

[A] Galbraith: I've never been guilty of using the phrase "world policeman." To think that it is our function to preserve world law and order, or to prevent communism around the world, is fantastic. There's a certain range of matters—economic support, educational assistance, a back of the hand to dictators—where we can exercise a beneficial role. No question about that. But to the total role that is implied in the notion of being a world policeman, to assume we can put down disorders, stop revolutions, arrest communism wherever it breaks out, is exactly the frame of mind that got us into the current tragedy in Southeast Asia.

[Q] Playboy: President Kennedy visited Southeast Asia in 1951. According to Schlesinger's A Thousand Days, Kennedy was very much aware of the extent to which French policy had alienated the Vietnamese nationalists. Schlesinger's observed that Kennedy was "always concerned not to enlarge our commitment to such an extent as to change the character of the war." If Kennedy had lived, do you think the situation in Vietnam would be substantially different than it is?

[A] Galbraith: There are always some questions in an interview that one should be reluctant to answer. That shows a decent reserve. I think possibly this is one of them. In discussing this whole difficult problem, it's obvious that I'm in substantial disagreement with the President and with the Secretary of State. But I've also tried to be fair. I think it's somewhat unfair, for anyone who was not privy to President Kennedy's thoughts, to compare what he thinks Kennedy would have done with what President Johnson has, in fact, done. It's unfair to measure President Johnson's record against the assumed record of a man who is now dead. Professor Schlesinger's was closer to President Kennedy than I was in these matters, and so was Robert Kennedy. It's quite possible that they could speak with more authority. I've been asked this question many times and I've always been reluctant to answer. I remain reluctant.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have an answer that satisfies you personally, even if you're unwilling to state it?

[A] Galbraith: No, I honestly don't have an answer. It seems just idle speculation. There are so many objective grounds for being critical of the President and the Secretary of State. There's the over-whelming fact that a large part of our reason for being in Vietnam is that we are now concerned with saving reputations. Military reputations, diplomatic reputations, the reputation of the Administration—all these have become committed in this enterprise. We're not trying to save the Vietnamese; we're trying to save Americans. There are so many honest grounds for criticizing the Administration, on evidence that is available to everybody, that I am very reluctant to resort to anything subjective. Perhaps, if one had a weak case, one might be struggling for some such support as this. But when one has an overpoweringly strong case, one doesn't need it.

[Q] Playboy: You've made that case ever more vocally in recent months. What was your role in the A.D.A.'s rejection of Johnson and its endorsement of Senator McCarthy?

[A] Galbraith: I'm chairman, and I tried to be reasonably impartial as regards the conflicting points of view within the A.D.A. This extends from John Roche, who was one of my predecessors as chairman and who is now intellectual-in-residence in the Johnson Administration and a firm supporter of the President, all the way to Al Lowenstein, who is a vice-chairman of A.D.A. and has been one of the most effective organizers of the opposition to President Johnson.

[Q] Playboy: Did you support the A.D.A. endorsement of McCarthy?

[A] Galbraith: Yes. You support the man you think is right.

[Q] Playboy: And you continued your support after Kennedy entered the race?

[A] Galbraith: Oh, yes. But I am far less interested in the choice between McCarthy and Kennedy than in having a strong alternative contender for the nomination. I would be eminently happy with either as a candidate.

[Q] Playboy: What practical contribution can the A.D.A. make to the Democratic Party in an election year? Is it confined to attempts to influence the Democratic platform, or does it go beyond this?

[A] Galbraith: Far beyond. The A.D.A. is the holding company for the liberals who are closely associated with the political process—the liberals who run for office, who speak and are heard and who have been the hard fiber of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Virtually all the liberals who came to Washington in the Kennedy Administration came in from the A.D.A.: Schlesinger; James Loeb, Jr., who was ambassador to Peru and later in Africa; and Hubert Humphrey, who was one of my predecessors as chairman. The A.D.A. has provided the liberal muscle of the Democratic Party.

[Q] Playboy: Many of your A.D.A. colleagues have run for public office. Have you ever considered this yourself?

[A] Galbraith: No, not very seriously. I toyed with the idea a couple of years ago, when a number of Massachusetts Democrats raised the possibility of my running for governor. I hasten to say it was something less than a mass movement. And since I live a good part of the year in Vermont, some of my friends up there once urged me to run for the Senate. On both of these occasions, I allowed myself to reflect on the idea and then I discarded it. First, because of the usual uncertainty of all sensible people as to whether they would stir the enthusiasm of the voters to the extent that, in the secrecy of their souls, they are likely to imagine. The other reason is that politics is a full-time activity; I have always sought an existence where I could do several things that interest me and, in particular, where I could protect a goodly amount of my time for writing.

[Q] Playboy: Your past and present successes as a writer must have rewarded you handsomely. Aren't you well on your way to becoming a millionaire?

[A] Galbraith: I wouldn't think so. The income tax provides good protection against that disaster for anyone who receives his income—as I do—in current form. But that's not very important, because all my life I've had enough income. The difference between too little and enough is much greater than the difference between enough and more than enough. The added advantage of having more than enough is relatively marginal. I'm quite happy as a professor.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any intention of leaving Harvard?

[A] Galbraith: No. I've had the usual suggestions from time to time. Mostly, however, these have been offers of administrative positions, to head academic institutions. I'm not engulfed with them, because I think people rightly guess that I'm not a natural-born administrator. And I've always turned them down, because I consider teaching the price I have to pay for the freedom to write—the time to write and the research support one gets in an academic community. I've never had even the slightest intention of losing that freedom by becoming a bad administrator.

[Q] Playboy: While you play down your own role as a Presidential advisor, there's no doubt that intellectuals like yourself do have the chance to counsel the President officially. To what extent can such advisors really influence Government policy?

[A] Galbraith: Well, I'm quite impressed by a comment President Truman once made about Bernard Baruch. Truman said, approximately: "I've never been quite certain why Mr. Baruch describes himself as an advisor to Presidents. That isn't a very important job. All Presidents have a lot more advice than they're able to use." But there's another side to your question: the pivotal role in the United States of the person with some knowledge of a particular subject and, even more specifically, the person with some capacity for social innovation. This ability, to figure out how social change can be engineered, is very rare—the capacity to decide how prices are to be regulated in wartime, the capacity to design a new system of social insurance, to figure out how Medicare should be set up to do the most good, or to puzzle out what can be done about the tedious state of American television. In the United States, the business community, the trade unions and even the unattached community of lawyers, writers, and so on, is not socially innovative. The capacity to innovate is confined largely to the scientific and educational communities and to the Federal bureaucracy.

[Q] Playboy: Yet the scientific and educational communities seem singularly alienated from the political process today. How do you explain this?

[A] Galbraith: This group is currently frustrated because it is not enjoying its customary power. In recent years, when the scientists and the liberal academic community have pretty well agreed on a proposition, there's been a very strong tendency for the Government to go along. But the scientific and educational estate today is overwhelmingly opposed to the Vietnam war. There's been some disposition to question this in Washington, but the polls all show it. One cannot live in the educational community and be in any doubt about the size of the opposition. Yet the Administration and the military have—at least until now—shown a high level of indifference to these attitudes. So the alienation you mentioned is the result, on this issue, anyway, of not having the accustomed influence.

[Q] Playboy: Then from whom does the President seek advice? Does he look to what you've somewhat facetiously called the American establishment?

[A] Galbraith: Well, the establishment doesn't really give advice; it usually just confirms the status quo. The establishment is the group of people whose ideas, at any given time, are eminently respectable. In language I have otherwise used, they are the people who can be counted on to articulate the conventional wisdom of the moment. When appointed to high office—either by Republicans or, more significantly, by Democrats—they confer an aura of stability and respectability on the community. The establishment, for instance, can be relied on to support the Administration's policies in Vietnam long after sensible men have condemned these policies. Meaningful advice, of course, will come from the socially innovative community that I mentioned, from men like Wilbur Cohen, who is now Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and was Assistant Secretary for many years. Wilbur was the man who invented, in a way—or who at least developed—most of the ideas associated with Medicare. He combined that with the political skill that enabled him to get it through Congress. When the history of this period is written, if it's written with any accuracy, Wilbur Cohen will be credited with a lot more power to change things than, say, John J. McCloy. McCloy was former Assistant Secretary of War, former head of the World Bank, former American High Commissioner in Germany, major archon on the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Warren Commission. He has shown great distinction in making the case for the status quo. A few years ago, he was undeniably chairman of the establishment. But even in this role, he wasn't as significant a figure as Cohen, who is associated with change.

[Q] Playboy: McCloy is getting on in years. Who would you put at the head of the American establishment today? McGeorge Bundy?

[A] Galbraith: A good choice. Mac Bundy is certainly the most prominent contender. However, he is not a completely reliable establishment figure. He has all the qualifications: as head of the Ford Foundation, former Harvard dean, former National Security Advisor to the President, member of a family that has had a very distinguished record of public service. His father, as you know, was the great lieutenant of Henry Stimson, Hoover's Secretary of State. And when he watches himself, Mac shows a certain capacity for the reputable platitudes. But then every once in a while he comes up with an idea of disturbing originality, or he endorses ideas that the community at large is not quite ready to accept, or he stops too long on the wrong policy. This is a mistake. A good establishment man never makes mistakes. Bundy got well out in front on the whole issue of public television. And on Vietnam, he has lagged badly. So he is regarded with some slight trepidation by the true establishment figures.

[Q] Playboy: If Bundy is disqualified, then who really heads the establishment?

[A] Galbraith: Some people believe that I am studying up hard for the job. I imagine that a lot of this interview will have a very statesmanlike sound.

[Q] Playboy: You apparently believe the establishment's influence is minor. But among those who are influential, do you think that power corrupts?

[A] Galbraith: By no means. I think power has a very different effect on different people. For instance, I wouldn't think for a moment that power corrupted President Kennedy. I think he carried it with a great deal of pleasure and a good deal of grace. My impression is that most people react rather responsibly to power; it often brings out a side to their character, a depth of concern, that they hadn't previously displayed. The second part of Lord Acton's famous dictum, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, may be true. But that the mere possession of power corrupts, I think, is only infrequently the case.

[Q] Playboy: There's also the power that accrues to the economist. Keynes once suggested that we're all "the slaves of some defunct economist." As an economist, do you think our everyday lives are profoundly influenced by economic theory?

[A] Galbraith: Well, something broader than economic theory. There is no question that our lives and our thinking are profoundly influenced by organized social theory. To take one example: People who believe that they have an original commitment to free enterprise and to individualism are almost invariably citing, at second or third remove, the ideas of Jeremy Bentham or Herbert Spencer, in many cases without ever having heard of those two distinguished gentlemen. It's also true that the ideas of economists have become part of the blood stream of our life. Things that we take as original truth are, in fact, the formulations of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think your own works would fit in here?

[A] Galbraith: I've never been disposed to sacrifice truth to modesty. I think that there are certain ideas from my own books that slightly modify the way people think about economic life.

[Q] Playboy: For instance?

[A] Galbraith: At the end of World War Two, partly as a reaction to the restrictions and controls of the War, partly as a defensive mechanism against another resurgence of New Deal regulation—which was very much feared by business—we had a great revival of the liturgy of free enterprise. People read F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and similar rescripts against the state. It became a part of popular thinking that there was a conflict between individual liberty and the function of the state, that the state was a menace to liberty. The result was that people thought they were defending freedom when they kept down taxes and when they limited government spending. Well, I set out quite deliberately, in The Affluent Society, to do what I could to (continued on page 138) Playboy Interview (continued from page 78) reverse that train of thought. My point—which was not an original one—was that you do not have liberty in the absence of law and order or in the absence of a good educational system, which liberates the mind; that there isn't much advantage in having freedom if you can't breathe the air; that there isn't much advantage in the liberty to go swimming if the water is lethal. In other words, liberty requires that there be a balance between public services and private services, between what is done collectively and what is done individually. Many of these observations now sound rather like cliches—but that's partly because they have become the conventional wisdom since I published the book.

[Q] Playboy: Have you made any other significant contributions to the accepted sense of our time?

[A] Galbraith: Yes, there are some other things. But nobody should ever ask an author what his original contributions are, because this could precipitate quite a long lecture. I wrote a little book right after World War Two, called A Theory of Price Control, which I believe to be one of the most careful and original books ever written on the problem of the mobilized economy—the best interpretation of a wartime economy. I think this view was shared by other economists who read it. But the most singular aspect of that experience was that only three or four people ever read the book. It was at this point that I decided that in my future writing, I would seek to involve some part of the lay public. This way, my economic colleagues find themselves in the position of being asked by reporters and students, "Well, what do you think about Galbraith?" At this time, I discovered one other thing: There are very few ideas in economics that cannot be expressed in clear English. If you force yourself to state your ideas simply, you can be damn certain you'll think them out clearly in the process.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think your popularization of economics has made you less respected among your colleagues?

[A] Galbraith: I've never thought for a moment that I had popularized economics. I've always rejected that suggestion. All I've done is sought to write economics, however difficult, in clear English.

[Q] Playboy: Well, do you think your having written economics in clear English has lessened your stature among your colleagues?

[A] Galbraith: Not with anybody whose opinion I would respect. Economics, like all sciences, has its crotchets, its petty jealousies and its minor feuds. I have no doubt that a certain number of people have said from time to time, "Galbraith is unfair by not making use of the normal tendencies to obscurity; he's as guilty as a doctor who writes prescriptions in clear English instead of illegible Latin." But these are the attitudes of inconsequential people, and I've always successfully ignored them.

[Q] Playboy: Some of your other critics, particularly on the political right, have accused you of everything from indiscriminate iconoclasm to near treason. And a New Leftist, reviewing The New Industrial State, observed that you are actually a subtle and very powerful defender of the status quo. Do you think any of these charges has merit?

[A] Galbraith: I'm not aware that I was ever quite dignified by a charge of near treason, but I have certainly been on the receiving end of a formidable range of criticism. In the case of The New Industrial State, there was nothing for which I was more braced, and nothing I more expected. As a matter of fact, I would have been disturbed, and deeply disappointed only if the book had been overlooked. As for the charge of being a defender of the status quo, I suspect in some large sense that it's true. I've always been a reformer. I've never had any instinct for revolution. There are countries where I think revolution is therapeutic, where there may be no alternative to revolution. But the history of the United States is mainly one of successful reform. This being so, I have an unabashed commitment to reform. If reform works, revolution becomes unnecessary. So the reformer is in some measure a defender of the status quo.

[Q] Playboy: One of the fundamental premises of many defenders of the economic status quo is that the Government must balance its budget—just as a household does. But the new economics denies this. Would you explain why deficit spending on the part of the Government is less reprehensible than an individual spending more than he earns?

[A] Galbraith: Well, that is a good question, because the oldest of economic errors is the assumption that a state must be in its fiscal arrangements exactly like a household. In fact, the state should be the reverse of a household. An individual or a family can go into debt in the short run, but there are definite limits to what it can spend beyond what it actually has. The state, by contrast, can easily increase the supply of available wealth by offsetting the vagaries of household spending. To be very specific about it: If individuals and corporations spend less and invest less than their income, then this means that the total income in the economy will fall. When total income—aggregate income—starts to fall, there is a recession, or a depression. The meaning of a recession or a depression is that the community is not producing everything it could. Now, if the state comes in and offsets the private reduction in expenditure, by compensating with its own expenditures and doing useful things—public works, schools, and so forth—this brings the economy back up closer to its potential. It increases the volume of wealth being produced. That's why I say that the state's fiscal operations ideally are the mirror image—or the offset—for the aggregate of what households do. One should never reason that what is right for a household, or what is right for a business enterprise, or what is right even for a city, is therefore the proper course of action for the national Government.

[Q] Playboy: Columnist Henry Hazlitt recently wrote in Newsweek that any increases in productivity spurred by deficit spending are actually increases in paper dollars only. They don't add to the real value of our national wealth, he argued, because they produce a correspondingly lower purchasing power. What's your answer to that thinking?

[A] Galbraith: Henry Hazlitt is an estimable man but a very poor guide to economics. If any country had attempted to follow Mr. Hazlitt's prescriptions over the past 30 years, that country would have been in a state of permanent depression. If one has idle capacity and idle manpower, which are the conditions under which you bring the remedies I mentioned into action, the effect of expanding demand is not to raise prices, though it may raise prices somewhat. The primary effect will be to increase the use of productive capacity and to increase the use of manpower. This is the very elementary point that Henry Hazlitt overlooks. He is, however, an excellent representative of a much earlier era of economics.

[Q] Playboy: But the remedies you've just described apply to a situation of idle capacity. How does the new economics work when the economy is not in recession—when things are running close to capacity, as they are today?

[A] Galbraith: It's good to keep this aspect in mind. In the past five or ten years, the past five years certainly, the other side of the problem has been presenting itself. For one reason or another, quite a few countries—most notably, the United Kingdom, but the U. S. also—have been spending beyond our current factory capacity and beyond our readily available labor supply. We have unemployment, but the unemployment involves people who are out of location, or have the wrong skills, or who are insufficiently educated for modern industrial tasks, or who are the subject of racial discrimination, or who are otherwise not readily employable. In this circumstance, there's no question that the remedies I described have to work the other way around. Just as one should be able to (continued on page 164) Playboy Interview (continued from page 138) spur productivity by increasing the deficit, one should be able to dampen a booming economy by reducing the deficit. And this should be done primarily by taxation. Taxation is by far the most equitable device for limiting purchasing power, limiting income, thereby limiting demand for goods.

[Q] Playboy: Are you in favor of the President's proposed tax surcharge, which is supposedly an inflation remedy?

[A] Galbraith: As a purely technical matter, it's certain that taxes should be increased, for we're in grave danger of inflation if the war continues at its present level. Yet anybody who takes a sensible view of the Vietnam problem is always forced back to the obvious alternative, which is to cut back on the useless and wasteful expenditures of that conflict, which would probably make a tax increase unnecessary.

[Q] Playboy: Does your endorsement of the tax surcharge imply that you think we have a good tax system?

[A] Galbraith: Certainly not. We have a very bad tax system; there's no question about that. It's not the worst in the world; there are many that are worse; but it's far inferior to what it should be. The ideal tax system would be one in which, as the first requirement, any two individuals who have the same increase in wealth in the course of a year pay the same taxes. By this test, we fall far short. It has come to be assumed that anybody who gets an income in the form of a capital gain should have a lower rate of taxation than somebody who gets his income, as you do, in the form of a salary. You are paid in the form of a salary, aren't you?

[Q] Playboy: Yes.

[A] Galbraith: My condolences. Other people, who aren't paid salaries—the oil people, for instance—have come to assume that tax exemption is a human right. For them it takes the form of depletion allowances. And it has come to be assumed that people who do a great deal of traveling can live partly on tax-free expense accounts, as against more sedentary people, who stay home and pay taxes. And it has come to be assumed that the very rich should have a partial tax shelter in the form of tax-exempt bonds. The consequence of all this is that people with the same income rarely pay the same taxes. It depends on whether you are one of the favored groups. The first and most important tax reform, as I've said, is for everyone to pay the same taxes on the same annual increase in wealth. I would then rely perhaps a bit more than we do on the income tax and the corporation tax. These are very good taxes. If everyone paid the same tax on the same income, we could get a much larger yield of revenue from much lower tax rates. The reason the income tax is high for some people is that it's so low for others.

[Q] Playboy: How would you counter the argument that there should be some tax incentive to encourage people to take risks, as the oil-depletion provisions supposedly do?

[A] Galbraith: The depletion allowance, for instance, is not for a particularly risky industry. There was a time when it possibly rewarded the small wildcatter who found a well and pumped away at it. Perhaps he deserved something for all the capital lie had invested in dry wells. But now, to provide this kind of tax loophole for huge companies, which can spread their risk over a large number of operations, is outrageous. The way in which the big oil companies proceed to get oil is no more risky than the way in which big auto companies proceed to get customers. The tax exemption of the oil industry is associated not with the need of the industry but with the fact that Texas is a very large state and that the Texas Congressional delegation has always stood stalwartly behind the depletion allowance. The defense of depletion is, in Texas history, second only to the defense of the Alamo.

[Q] Playboy: How optimistically would you regard the prospect for tax reform?

[A] Galbraith: This is hard to say. It's something Americans should keep talking about. As more and more people become aware of the great inequities of the present tax system, then there will be more and more pressure to do something about it, and sooner or later one of the political parties will get hold of this as part of its program and some legislation will be introduced. There will be a drawn-out fight, but finally something will be done. It's a long, slow process.

[Q] Playboy: Do you favor the sales tax?

[A] Galbraith: I think that for cities and states, the sales tax is a very valuable adjunct to the revenue system.

[Q] Playboy: But don't many liberals think sales taxes fall most heavily on those least able to pay?

[A] Galbraith: Liberals take a very simplistic view of the sales tax. Take my own state of Massachusetts, where we recently voted a sales tax. It turned out to be a very popular tax. Massachusetts was for many years 48th among all states in the per-capita public revenue it devoted to higher education. Then Alaska and Hawaii came into the Union and we became 50th. One reason is that Massachusetts has quite a number of private institutions, such as Harvard, the one by which I'm employed. But they are also very expensive; so that a Massachusetts boy or girl from a poor family has had a real problem getting a university education. The University of Massachusetts has been able to accommodate only a fraction of the youngsters seeking education there. With the sales tax, we have the hope of considerable expansion both in the quantity and in the quality of public education. Now, while the sales tax falls more heavily on the lower income groups—as regressive taxes do—the rewards from the sales tax, in the form of greater access to higher education, become overwhelmingly available to the people within the lower income groups. And when anybody in this day and age goes looking for a better job, looking for a way to increase his income, the first requirement is that he get into a college. So while the sales tax is regressive in its tax effect, it is highly progressive in its expenditure effect—under the best circumstances, at least.

[Q] Playboy: Of course, this assumes that all the money raised by sales taxes goes to education or to other areas that directly benefit the less fortunate. Is this ususally the case?

[A] Galbraith: Yes. Generally speaking, the sales tax is used by city and state governments, mostly by state governments; and, generally speaking, the services of state governments are most used by people in the lower income brackets. Education, welfare, hospitals, law enforcement, recreation—all these are very large items in local and state budgets. And they are proportionately more important to the poor than to the rich. After all, the well to do can find their own forms of recreation. Less-well-to-do people have to rely on public recreation. Mass transportation is also increasingly important as you go down the income scale. Some things, such as air terminals, are, of course, for the comparatively well to do.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of the well to do, you've often asserted that one of the great threats to our economy is the possibility that one day, given continued prosperity, Americans will conclude that our economy is depressionproof, that corporate earnings must rise year after year. This assumption, you've said, might produce a speculative upsurge in the stock market that would inevitably end in collapse. After 80-odd months of prosperity, do you see any signs of that?

[A] Galbraith: Yes. I wouldn't want to predict when it will happen, but I think this remains one of the real dangers of our time. One has to say a word or two about the speculative dynamic here. Speculation has a life of its own. If people once get the impression that they can get rich sitting down, that all they have to do is to buy stock and watch it go up, then we will have a great rush of money into the stock market. And this creates its own reality, because one of the consequences of it is that with more buyers, stocks do go up. And the fact that they go up brings other people in and so stocks go up even more. Presently, the value of securities becomes unrealated to any future earning power; stocks are valued only by the expectation that they will keep going up. This is an inherently unstable situation, because, increasingly, people will conclude that since stocks are still going up, they'll stay in for the time being; but if anything happens, they'll get out before the others. So you have a large number of people who are in the market but watching for any indication that they should pull out. And, of course, when the supply of new gulls dries up, as one day it will, the market wavers, starts down, and then you have an enormous number of people dumping their stocks in the hope that they can beat the other fellows out. This occurred in 1929. It occurred in almost classic form not with securities but with land in Florida in the early Twenties. The real danger is that the resulting collapse, with its massive effect on private business investment and consumer spending, might be so serious that it would not be possible for Government policy to stop it. We would have a very rapid reduction in private spending and private investment and a very great increase in unemployment. If and when we do have another bad depression, I think this will be the way it will occur.

[Q] Playboy: In The Great Crash, you outlined a number of speculative phenomena that led up to the 1929 crash and seem to be recurring today: the proliferating corporate urge to merge, the popularity of semispeculative mutual funds, the near-limitless market valuation of a few largely unproved glamor corporations. Is this only coincidental?

[A] Galbraith: No. I would say that many things in the stock market today grow from the same factors that were at work in 1929. For a long while after 1929, we were protected from a recurrence by memory. People remembered what happened in 1929 and acted with consequent caution. Now it's going on 40 years and memories have dimmed. Those who were burned in 1929 are mostly broken old men, either senile or soon to be dead. We have a new generation of innocents, who think there's a fortune to be made in a mutual fund that advertises the peculiar and unique genius of its management, or who think there is some magic associated with an arcane electronic stock, or who believe there is something about computers that's certain to make them rich. These are people who believe they have an original vision; whereas, in fact, memory has run out on them. People had the same belief in 1929 about radio.

[Q] Playboy: Do you invest in stocks yourself?

[A] Galbraith: Yes, I do, but I never trust my own judgment about an individual company. Whenever I have any money to invest, I very cautiously give the job to a bank. I hope that it is in touch with the behavior of individual companies, as I am not. More important, I'd be bored if I had to find out what is happening to the management of General Electric or General Dynamics or General Alert. It's not a subject I want to investigate or something that I want particularly to think about. So I generally indicate to the bank what I would like to have them buy—the general areas that seem to me to be good—but I leave the selection of individual companies exclusively to them.

[Q] Playboy: Many investors nowadays are worried about the soundness of the dollar itself. Do you think the devaluation of the dollar is on the horizon—either immediately or in the long run?

[A] Galbraith: I've never thought so. Certainly if we can be sensible in our foreign policy—and this gets back to Vietnam again—devaluation is not necessary. In any case, the devaluation of the dollar would make much less difference than most people imagine, because if the dollar were devalued tomorrow, it's so uniquely important in the world that all other currencies would go down at the same time. We're talking here in Switzerland. Suppose the dollar were devalued by 25 percent and the Swiss franc were not. This would mean immediately that Swiss watches would go up about 25 percent in the United States. It would mean that Swiss precision machinery sold in the U. S. would go up 25 percent. It would mean that Americans coming to Switzerland would find everything 25 percent more expensive. This is a strain the Swiss couldn't stand. So they would take steps to get the Swiss franc back in its old relation to the dollar. Well, we've picked out the Swiss franc, which is usually counted the most stable currency in the world. If it had to adjust, surely the lesser currencies would, too.

[Q] Playboy: Some of those who might be most affected by devaluation, or by inflation generally, are people who must live on fixed incomes—notably pensioners and recipients of Social Security payments. Recently, our whole Social Security system has come under increased criticism from the Left as well as from the Right. Do you think the program is basically sound?

[A] Galbraith: There's always a danger in an interview like this that the subject will assume he's an all-purpose philosopher. Social Security is not something on which I speak with any great competence. I think it's served very well up until now.

[Q] Playboy: Can you speak with more competence about the welfare system?

[A] Galbraith: Yes, I can. I think the welfare system is in very poor condition. Its woeful state leads us to the fascinating alternative of guaranteed incomes as a substitute for the present welfare system. Our current welfare system has, among other things, the worst incentive structure imaginable. To speak technically, it taxes marginal income at 100 percent. If an individual is getting $2500 a year on welfare and then gets a $2500-a-year job, he loses the $2500 welfare. So it's a tax of 100 percent on the increment of income. That kind of tax system gives a strong incentive not to work for extra income. If that tax system were applied to corporate executives in the $50,000 bracket, they would scream that the Government is destroying incentives. Indeed, they're already saying this, though they're taxed at a much more tolerable rate, and the argument has less effect coming from a man making $50,000 a year, because he can very rarely confess to working less than at his peak, no matter what the incentives. But a 100percent tax rate certainly has an adverse effect on the motivation of welfare recipients. For this reason, we have the curious spectacle of both liberal and conservative economists uniting to discuss the possibility of a guaranteed minimum income, the so-called negative income tax.

[Q] Playboy: Do you favor the negative income tax?

[A] Galbraith: Yes, I do. I favor a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans.

[Q] Playboy: Some critics of the guaranteed minimum income have said it will lead to a society in which many people choose not to work, and you yourself have often indicated that there's more to life than just working. On this subject, Keynes wrote, in 1930, that "it will be those peoples who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself, and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy abundance when it comes." Do you agree?

[A] Galbraith: Yes. I would say this was a very succinct statement of the case I was making in The Affluent Society.

[Q] Playboy: The only large-scale manifestation we've yet seen of any group attempting to achieve Keynes' dream is the hippie movement. How do you feel about it?

[A] Galbraith: Not particularly censorious. For years, I've imagined that something like this might happen—that a growing number of people would not be susceptible to the desire for more wealth and more goods, who would say, "Well, we can get along with very little and have leisure time to cultivate our garden." So the advent of the hippies doesn't surprise me. It seems to be a rather natural concomitant of wealth. But I confess to some considerable misgivings about the association of this movement with drugs. I would be more reassured if I were certain the hippie interests were literary, aesthetic and experimental, rather than involving what seems to me, in my Calvinist way, to be rather contrived and inadequate forms of experience. But this may be a somewhat limited view. I never really get very much pleasure out of alcohol, and I don't smoke, so I undoubtedly speak from a very parochial point of view.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever smoked marijuana?

[A] Galbraith: No, I never have.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't they smoke it in Berkeley when you went to the University of California in the Thirties?

[A] Galbraith: We had never heard of marijuana then. Social experiment, sex and alcohol seemed much more plausible forms of excitement in those days, and much more popular. The counterpart of the hippies when I was at Berkeley were the Communists.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever have anything to do with them?

[A] Galbraith: I was always too shy. I had just come down from Canada, I felt rather provincial and I was afraid the Communists wouldn't have me.

[Q] Playboy: The hippie love ethic embraces a joyful and unconfined view of human sexuality. How do you feel about this aspect of what's popularly called the Sexual Revolution?

[A] Galbraith: I take a rather relaxed view of these matters. Sex is here to stay. Each generation seems to make up its own rules and abides by its own code of behavior. It's hard to go back to the 19th Century novels, of which I'm extremely fond, without feeling that there was a certain artificiality and stuffiness about the formal relations between the sexes at that time. Certainly, what would look to the Victorians like the enormous revolution that has occurred since has been an improvement. And if further improvement involves further changes, well, I'm still in a highly permissive mood. But you must relate my views to the fact that I've been married only once and happily for 30 years.

[Q] Playboy: The only youth phenomenon that's been as highly publicized as the hippie movement is the growing dissatisfaction with and resistance to the Selective Service System. What do you think of the draft?

[A] Galbraith: This is something I dealt with briefly in The New Industrial State. The draft is archaic, there is no question about it. It's based on two assumptions. There's the archaic conviction that there is something morally good about compelling people to serve their country. And there's the very practical belief—shared by most of the well to do—that by drafting people to serve at less than the going wage, you shift some of the cost of defending the country from the well to do to the much poorer draftee. But neither of these is a very good reason to support the draft. The moral value of compulsion is dubious and the argument that the costs of defending the country should be borne by those least able to pay is questionable, at least to the less able. Also, no matter what the wealthy might think, it's doubtful if the draft does save money for the well-to-do taxpayer, because a draft Army is a short-term service, and, with the technology of modern war, you spend most of your time training people. A large part of the Army at any given time is in training; and about the time the people acquire the necessary skills and competence, their term of service is over and away they go. Also, the esprit of a volunteer Army has always been better. The Marine Corps, for example, likes volunteers, for the reason that their morale is better.

[Q] Playboy: But it's frequently asserted there wouldn't be many Marine Corps volunteers without the threat of the draft.

[A] Galbraith: Perhaps there wouldn't. But if you raise wages for military service to the point where you make it attractive, then it would still be possible for the Marine Corps to skim off, as they like to do, the better material. You would then have a long-service Army of trained professional people, and the lower training costs would go a long way to offset the higher wages. The savings might even offset the higher wages completely. There once was a time when people could argue that you had to have the draft because the danger that was associated with serving in the Army was such that the supply of men was inelastic; you couldn't pay people enough, no matter what you paid. Now, at least for peacetime service, there would be no problem. So what remains the case against this proposal? The fear of the Armed Forces that the volunteer Army would be insufficiently white.

[Q] Playboy: We were about to ask you just that. The current re-enlistment rate for Negroes is about three times that for whites. Doesn't this point to the probability that a volunteer Army would be largely a Negro Army?

[A] Galbraith: It would be disproportionately Negro, but I don't see any great difficulty in this. If the Negroes respond first to higher wages, it's an indication that this is an opportunity that has previously been denied them, and therefore you're not doing them any damage. But if the Army wants a balance between the races, then it has a very easy recourse: Make the pay attractive to whites, too. Raise the standards—educational and otherwise—and you could easily get a balance.

[Q] Playboy: But with a volunteer Army—black or white—don't you lose a very vital link between the civilian sector and the Armed Forces? For instance, if we decide to send mercenary troops to a brush war in Southeast Asia, relatives back home could hardly protest. Whoever is sent would simply be doing his job, for which he is paid handsomely. Do you think there is any validity to this argument?

[A] Galbraith: It would seem to me that if there is a crisis sufficiently urgent to call for the dispatch of troops, it's better to have troops that go willingly and without the complaint of their parents than otherwise. The Pentagon would, I think, welcome this. There is another argument that one often hears today: that the professional Army is undemocratic, that it tends to have its own parochial values, whereas a draft Army more precisely reflects the democratic ethos of the community. This, also, I think is nonsense, the reason being that if there are any dangers of a military mentality developing, it will develop not in the rank and file but in the officer corps. And we already have a professional officer corps.

[Q] Playboy: Do you detect this military mentality within our officer corps?

[A] Galbraith: Well, I have seen in many military men the capacity to think the unthinkable—and even to make it commonplace. I'm always struck, when I go to the Pentagon, by how casually the Air Force generals talk about the possible use of nuclear weapons and how casually they have reduced such weapons to slang. The generals say, "Let's 'nuke' them." I've sat, as many civilians have, in conferences where somebody has pointed to a general and asked, "Well, General, can you guarantee success if we have to move in there?" The general will say, "Well, of course, if we're not restrained from using nuclear weapons, I can." This has always astonished me: the capacity to take massive destruction and make it into a commonplace of everyday life. Incidentally, it's of some importance to distinguish among the Armed Services in this respect. The Air Force is subject to special criticism here.

[Q] Playboy: Why the Air Force?

[A] Galbraith: The Army and the Navy tend to have rather more stable and sensitive reactions to problems. The Air Force is a younger service, with less stable traditions. The accident of personalities also has something to do with it. The Air Force had a succession of leaders like Curtis LeMay and Nat Twining who, to say the least, had a very limited view of the problem of mankind.

[Q] Playboy: But some observers have said that the Army and the other services are trying to pattern themselves on the Air Force success. Is this so?

[A] Galbraith: I hope not, and I don't think so. One must bear in mind that the Army, over the years, has had a considerable capacity to produce people capable of taking leading positions in civilian life. General Brehon Somervell, for example, organized the Work Projects Administration in New York under Franklin Roosevelt. This was one of the most difficult jobs of that period. And there was General Hugh Johnson, who organized the National Recovery Administration for F.D.R.; and General Lucius Clay, who, after completing his career in Europe, had a successful life as an industrialist and was also an effective politician.

[Q] Playboy: Did you neglect General Eisenhower intentionally?

[A] Galbraith: No, I didn't neglect General Eisenhower intentionally; he's an obvious example. However one might criticize General Eisenhower, no one doubts that he's a man with a strongly civilian mentality. I could be even more criticized for overlooking General Marshall. But one of the problems of the Air Force is that being a young service, it has had to make its way against the other services and it has made its way by persistently overstating the effectiveness of the weapon it has. I'm not suggesting that air power is an insignificant weapon, but in all military operations—I'll leave nuclear operations aside—air power is wholly supplementary to ground operations. It was very important in Europe in World War Two that we had control of the air over the battlefields. But the real battles were still fought on the ground. On the whole, Air Force claims about the success of strategic air attacks—strategic bombing, in particular—have been vastly exaggerated. I was one of the group set up by Secretary Stimson to appraise the accomplishments of the Air Force after World War Two. The strategic air attacks, we learned, were far, far less than expectations. This was especially true in Germany. For example, we attacked all the German airframe plants in late February 1944. The plants were all hit, but German aircraft production actually increased that February—the very month of the bombing—by a substantial percentage.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Galbraith: There were several reasons. Most of this manufacturing was done with machine tools. It's quite difficult to destroy a self-contained piece of such machinery. Short of a direct hit, it won't be damaged, or at least it will be repairable. The Germans simply dug out the machines, where necessary, moved them to other locations—churches and farm buildings, for instance—and resumed business. More important, they threw extra energy into what until then had been a relatively inefficient industry. They put it under better management, cut down on the number of models they were manufacturing and tooled up to make planes that were more immediately relevant to their defense needs. You'll recall that they were fighting a defensive war by then; but until we bombed the plants, they'd been manufacturing bombers, which were relatively useless to them. So, as a consequence of all this, during the very month following the attack, they actually increased their airframe output. This discovery, I may say, proved a shocking disappointment to the Air Force.

[Q] Playboy: Was the case for strategic air attacks overstated in Korea?

[A] Galbraith: Yes, it was. Our first reaction when the North Koreans invaded South Korea was that we would send in the Air Force and stop the invasion that way. But within a few days, we found that the Air Force was wholly ineffective for this purpose. As the conflict extended itself, although we had total control of the air over North Korea, full freedom to fly planes wherever and whenever we wanted, we were never able to keep the North Koreans and the Chinese from supplying their front lines. This is very interesting in light of the more recent Air Force claims that they are able to prevent infiltration or movement from North Vietnam into South Vietnam. Repeatedly, the Air Force has made these claims: "Let us bomb this pass and we will stop all movement down to South Vietnam." "We're interdicting the movement along the Ho Chi Minh trail." "The air attacks are all-important for stopping the movement of men and supplies out of North Vietnam into South Vietnam." "Let us add a few more targets around Hanoi or Haiphong." "Let us bomb the harbor at Haiphong and we'll bring the enemy to its knees." We've had dozens of these promises, all of them ending in failure. Those of us, however, who have studied this matter have been totally unsurprised, because we've been accustomed to this overclaiming by the Air Force and because we've always known that there is no use of air power—with conventional weapons—that will keep people from marching across the countryside. Nothing. The shocking thing about the Vietnamese war is the way the Air Force continues to make these claims.

[Q] Playboy: Your reasons for opposing the war, and the solution you've proposed to get us out of it, have been widely publicized. You stated your position at some length, in fact, in a speech last summer that became the basis for an article in Playboy last December. Has your thinking changed since then?

[A] Galbraith: Not really. I've been concerned to find a solution that relates politically not only to the problems of Vietnam but also to the problems of the United States. One could make a very good case for saying the war was simply a great mistake and that we should pull out altogether. I think I can make that case better than most people, because I've felt that it was a mistake from the beginning. I kept copies of the series of letters I mentioned earlier, 15 or 20 letters that I sent to President Kennedy during 1961 and 1962. A lot of them concern Vietnam. As early as 1961, I thought we were getting deeper and deeper into something that would eventually turn out to be one of the great tragedies of American history. So, as I say, the case could be made for just pulling out altogether.

[Q] Playboy: But you haven't made this case, have you?

[A] Galbraith: No, because it's not one that is going to appeal to the largest number of Americans. We need a Vietnam position that will be politically more attractive—a solution that won't encounter the American uneasiness about, in GI language, "bugging out." There's also one other problem that I think some of my liberal colleagues have not sufficiently considered. A very large number of people in South Vietnam, some hundreds of thousands, have rallied to our side in the South Vietnamese army, in the Saigon government or in the simple pursuit of profits. There's also a number of people, the Catholics in particular, who would feel endangered if there were a take-over by the Viet Cong. We can't simply write those people off. These are considerations one has to keep in mind. Now, the other consideration, which is extremely important, has to do with our changing view of the conflict. When we launched this enterprise back in the early Sixties, those who were urging the commitment of troops were preoccupied with international communism. The Secretary of State said many times during that period that our ultimate enemy was the Soviet Union; that China was a puppet at the bidding of Moscow; that Hanoi represented merely an ultimate extremity; and that we were concerned with a probe that, if not resisted in Vietnam, would be exercised someplace else. The vision that existed at that time—a point I've stressed throughout this interview because it's so important—was the vision of a unified international Communist conspiracy. If we didn't meet it in Vietnam, we would meet it in Berlin or someplace else. Since that time, of course, this rationale has dissolved. We've also seen that North Vietnam has a stubborn desire to remain independent of both Russia and China—particularly China. The South Vietnamese have welcomed—or at least accepted—American troops; but the North Vietnamese, in spite of great military pressures from us, have not admitted Chinese troops. Increasingly, also, we have learned that what we are concerned with in South Vietnam is an indigenous nationalist movement. The Communists are important in this movement, certainly; they are even paramount; but the movement has strong nationalist roots. If this were just an external probe, something inspired purely by Peking or Moscow or Hanoi, it wouldn't be giving us anything like the trouble we've faced. It's giving us trouble because the Viet Cong has managed to associate itself with the patriotic and national sentiment of a very large proportion of the people there. All this comes down to the fact that we are concerned not with international communism; we are concerned instead with national communism—communism with strong nationalist roots. I don't think even the more passionate State Department defenders of our enterprise in Vietnam now entirely deny this. As committed a hawk as Professor Walt Rostow agrees on this point. But elsewhere in the world, in Yugoslavia, we not only tolerate but affirmatively assist national communism. It has also been our policy—and I think a very wise one—to encourage it in countries such as Poland and Romania. Why, then, should we fight it in South Vietnam? This leads to the obvious conclusion that we must work out some kind of compromise that gives security to those in Saigon and elsewhere who would feel threatened by national communism but that allows us to tolerate it as we do in Yugoslavia or Poland or Romania. I don't know what kind of bargain we can strike on behalf of our friends. Our bargaining position has become much weaker in recent months. The important thing is to stop the bombing and ascertain the terms on which Hanoi will negotiate. If we can't strike a bargain, then I would de-escalate the war and confine operations to protecting the urban population centers, until we can strike a bargain.

[Q] Playboy: But the Viet Cong momentarily captured much of Saigon—and most of Hué—in the recent Tet attacks. Isn't it possible that guerrilla warfare can be effective even in cities?

[A] Galbraith: Well, we have a lot of men in Vietnam. If we once thought of redeeming the whole country, we can now surely think of protecting a few urban areas as a refuge for our friends. The military will argue against it, but everyone knows that the military argues against any solution that it doesn't particularly like.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't withdrawal to the urban areas in South Vietnam preclude rural social reform, which many critics of our current policy, Senator Robert Kennedy among them, have deemed very important?

[A] Galbraith: Pacification is already at a standstill and, frankly, I have very little confidence in our capacity to reform South Vietnam. The government in Saigon is a government with a commitment to the status quo—except that there seems to be a general interest in increasing the graft. Among the government's commitments are those to the old, traditional system of landholding. When villages have been pacified in the past, the landlords have returned to collect the rent. Despite many opportunities, there has been no effective land reform. We have even seen land reform in reverse as the landlords came back. This is not because our people there have not seen the importance of social reform or the importance of getting away from the old colonial system. It is because the capacity of the United States to press such reforms, in any country, is very limited. One of the mistakes that my liberal friends have made, one of the mistakes with which I've been associated in the past, has been to imagine that the capacity of the United States to effect social change in other countries is very much greater than it is. As I mentioned earlier, in the years following World War Two, American liberals had a vision of the revolutionary impact the United States could have on other countries. If American idealism were combined with American energy and a good deal of American money, almost any social change could be brought off. This social change was seen as the great antidote to communism. We can press for social improvement. But we can never force social change on a recalcitrant government. Even with all of our power in South Vietnam, we haven't been able to do so, and we won't.

[Q] Playboy: Professor Thomas Thorson, of the University of Toronto, has charged that your Vietnam solution overlooks a very basic point. He says that "the overriding reasons communism is no longer monolithic is American pressure and resistance." "The Chinese," he says, "see the Russians as sell-outs to American power. The Russians see the Chinese as reckless in the face of American power." And he suggests that a victory for non-monolithic communism in Vietnam would engender new Communist unity.

[A] Galbraith: I don't know Professor Thorson. I'm a graduate of the University of Toronto, so I'm naturally a little sorry to see a professor at my old university talking egregious nonsense. The reason Moscow and Peking fell out is that they were both pursuing their own national goals. The national goals of a comparatively developed and industrially advanced country such as the Soviet Union, a country much less wealthy than the United States but certainly one of the "have" nations of the world, are very different from those of a poor and densely populated country such as China. And to suppose that Tito broke away from the Soviet Union because of a different interpretation of American power is equally nonsensical.

[Q] Playboy: Another criticism of your moderate solution was raised by several Playboy readers after the publication of your article in December. They argued that your proposed strategy plays directly into the hands of Mao Tse-tung. Mao won the Chinese mainland by establishing bases in rural areas, eventually encircling—and then conquering—the cities. Mao has predicted that the same strategy will eventually produce Communist victories throughout rural Asia, Africa and Latin America. Do you think your strategy plays into Mao's hands?

[A] Galbraith: I'm not as close a student of the works of Mao as some of your readers seem to be, but I wouldn't consider this a serious objection. If we have to accept the reality that the countryside is going to continue to be under nationalist and Communist control, that reality isn't lessened by the fact that Mao sees the countryside as the best place for revolutionary action.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think—as Arthur Schlesinger does—that the Russians are actually quite grateful for our continuing presence in Asia, in that we're helping them restrain the Chinese?

[A] Galbraith: I think that's an interesting hypothesis. There must be some Russians who are sufficiently sadistic to take pleasure in the enormous drain of manpower and treasure that we're investing in that part of the world for no good purpose. They must also derive a certain pleasure out of the ill will the U.S. is generating all through Europe. I noticed in the paper the other day that our ambassador to Portugal had to cancel a speech because of an anti-Vietnam demonstration—in Portugal, of all places. That's like an Israeli ambassador getting hooted out of the Bronx by anti-Zionists. One major consequence of our enterprise in Vietnam is that not since the Russian Revolution has Soviet policy in Europe looked so good in comparison with that of the Western powers. There must be some Russians grateful for that, too. But I have the impression—and I've talked at length about it with quite responsible Soviet authorities—that they would like to see this war ended. Not so much because we're containing the Chinese but, rather, because they worry, as I do, that the war might get out of hand and that the Russians themselves might somehow get involved.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that if the war continues to escalate, the Chinese, rather than the Russians, might be drawn in?

[A] Galbraith: The State Department assures us that this danger doesn't exist. But the Far Eastern section of the State Department was equally convinced that the Chinese would not intervene in Korea. This view was expressed at that time—not publicly but certainly privately—by the then-Assistant Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. But the Chinese did intervene in Korea. I think that we should always work on the hypothesis that this danger exists. It's the safest hypothesis. When any military leader, or any State Department leader, tells you it's "a calculated risk" that the Chinese will not intervene, you should interpret that to mean that he doesn't know; he hopes they won't. The phrase calculated risk is the military synonym for total ignorance.

[Q] Playboy: Some economists have suggested that U. S. withdrawal from Vietnam might have grave effects on the American economy. Do you agree?

[A] Galbraith: No, I don't think so. I think the economic consequences of peace would be almost completely favorable. In the first place, the budget would be freed very quickly from the 25 or 30 billions of dollars that the war is costing. This would remove an important pressure on spending in the economy. It would, in fact, remove most of the inflationary pressure we're now facing. It wouldn't remove that part of the inflation problem that is associated with the wage-price spiral, but that's another matter. And on the other side, one has to bear in mind that this is, fortunately, a rather old-fashioned war, in which much of the expenditure is on simple things: on pay for soldiers, on clothing, equipment, small arms, ammunition. There isn't even much use of armored vehicles in this war. The most sophisticated weapon we employ, I suppose, is the helicopter. So the claims of this particular conflict are all for things that can very easily be used in the civilian economy. For this reason, I wouldn't think the conversion problem from war to peace would be very serious. If we had a conversion problem that involved, for instance, disestablishing our missile system, the economic effects would be much more serious.

[Q] Playboy: If you were the economic czar of the United States and faced all of the problems that the country faces now—the gold drain, the persistent balance-of-payments problem, the real prospect of inflation—what fiscal or monetary measures would you take?

[A] Galbraith: I don't need to put this strictly in terms of hypothesis. Between 1941 and 1943, I was very close to being in that position. I had ultimate charge of all prices in the United States. My basic lesson from that experience was to learn how rapidly you can lose all of your friends and how extremely unpopular an economic czar is in the United States. It is not a career that I recommend to any of your readers. On the larger issue of economic policy, we return again to a single point: We must stop the Vietnam war. We are wasting a large share of our resources and a large part of our budget on this manifestly unnecessary enterprise, and we are not matching the cost of what we're spending in Vietnam against what we are doing to our balance of payments, against what we're doing to our economic position in Europe, against what we're doing to people who need to travel, against what we're doing to the reputation of America in other parts of the world. We've gotten hooked, almost in the manner of a narcotic, by this war, and it has somehow established a priority on all our resources. If we were to de-escalate the war and recover our perspective, we would very quickly find—as I just mentioned—that we have no uncontrollable inflation problem at all. We would quickly discover that the dollar is buoyant and that we have no serious balance-of-payments problem. That's why I have been strongly urging businessmen, and all Americans who have the interests of the country at heart, to make themselves heard—not against wage-and-price controls, not against curbs on overseas investments, not against travel restrictions but against the Vietnam war, which in a most unnecessary way is making all these things necessary.

[Q] Playboy: James Reston wrote recently that you're "just old enough and big enough and Scotch enough to turn the peace movement into a political movement" if that's what you decide to do. Do you think you have the power to transform the peace movement into an effective political organization?

[A] Galbraith: No. Modesty here is not in conflict with the truth. I have never devoted myself to any subject so much as I have to this. I have traveled and spoken to the point of being tired of my own voice—which is remarkable—and I've been closely in touch with all the opponents of the conflict. I've helped organize, written ads and been a source of a certain amount of ammunition for the Members of Congress who have been fighting the battle there. I have put a good deal of effort and thought into crystallizing the alternatives. And I have urged a certain amount of discipline on my friends who oppose the war. But I certainly wouldn't claim to have succeeded in bringing the anti-Vietnam forces into any sort of discipline. Nor do I think that anybody will do so. This great upsurge of opposition really comes out of individual convictions. Never has there been a cause—I hate to use the word cause—that has inspired so many people to individual action.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you own entreaties have helped spur this action?

[A] Galbraith: Well, I have absolutely no doubt that the processes of persuasion here have been enormously influential. I've added my voice to that of many others. And there's no doubt that the tide for months and years has been moving in this direction. Three years ago, when questions started to be asked about the Vietnam war, there were only two Senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, who were really willing to speak out. Now we have—publicly or privately—a clear majority of the Senate and almost all whose I. Q. is clearly positive. Similarly, three years ago, the opposition outside of politics was confined to a relatively small number of people in the universities. Now, of course, the university community is overwhelmingly opposed to the war; there's a very large organization of businessmen who are opposed; and there's a large group of Army people who are speaking out. General Shoup, who was President Kennedy's head of the Marine Corps, who holds the Congressional Medal of Honor, has called the whole justification of the war "unadulterated poppycock." And the polls, week by week, month by month, show a general increase in the opposition. It's always possible for the Administration to drag back General Westmoreland, to call on Ambassador Bunker and to enlist a few senior citizens who support its policies, in order to reassure us—or themselves—that everything is going well. But, of course, when the American people discover once again that we're still not accomplishing anything in Vietnam, that all the reassurances have been so much guff, then the opposition to the war increases all the more. I have no doubt as to the trend.

[Q] Playboy: Would you hazard a guess as to how long the war will continue?

[A] Galbraith: No, but I'll say it's unlikely that we'll continue to fight a war in opposition to a majority of the American people. Once we have a clear majority, we'll see light on this matter—and the war will not last very long after that.

[Q] Playboy: And when the war ends, what will you do?

[A] Galbraith: Oh, just what I'm doing already, though perhaps I'll have a bit more time—and a bit pleasanter a world—in which to write.

[Q] Playboy: Do you get your greatest satisfaction from writing?

[A] Galbraith: Yes, I do. I've found that writing—all writing—is a continuous process of self-liberation. For many years—when I was in my 20s and 30s, perhaps even later than that—I didn't have this sense of liberation, because I didn't fully express myself. Perhaps I was overly cautious, or commendably modest. But if I were living my life over again, I think the only thing I would change would be to exploit this sense of liberation—the pleasure of writing a book like The Affluent Society or The New Industrial State or a novel like The Triumph—at an earlier age. Nothing else but that.