HARPER'S

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70-00058R000300010058-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 13, 2000
• Sequence Number: 58
• Publication Date: July 1, 1966
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Approved For Release 2001/08/20: CIA-RDFP96@RO
July 1966 FOIAB3B
CPYRGHT
CP RGHT Galbraith Almost Doe
Professor Kenneth Galbraith of Har-
vard is a wise and witty man. He not
only thinks he knows everything, he
almost does. After all, he is one of the
most original and creative economists
of our times; he writes so well you'd
never guess he was a scholar; he was
the managing editor of Fortune; he
has been our Ambassador to India;
he has written some of the best
speeches Stevenson, Kennedy, and
Johnson ever gave. But not even Gal-
braith can disentangle Johnson from
the Vietnam war, although he has
certainly been trying.
Galbraith came all the way down to
Washington to tell his liberal friends
that the Vietnam policy is horrid, but
Johnson is not to blame for it. The
villain, we learn, is the "Establish-
ment," which, in the rather special-
ized world of diplomacy, is thought of
as a relatively small number of promi-
nent Wall Street lawyers and bankers,
and their influential satellites.
President Johnson, Galbraith dis-
closed, is really "a force for restraint
and against the old foreign policy."
This wicked old policy, which appar-
ently is the cause of our current Asian
woes, seems to be the product of "the
foreign-policy syndicate of New York
-the Dulles, McCloy, Lovett commu-
nion, with which I am sure Secretary
Rusk would wish to be associated, and
of which Dean Acheson is a latter-day
associate."
Spelled out, this means the late
John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's
Secretary of State, and his brother,
Allen, former head of the CfA: Both
were ti a I` tree awyet also
means John McCloy,_ another dis-
tinguished lawyer, former head of
the~has IVat~onal Bankj ormer head
of the World Bank, former High
Commissioner to West Germany.
Lovett is Robert-Lovett, Wall Street
partner of Averel1 Harriman and for-
mer Secretary of Defense.
Other great names associated with
the Establishment are Arthur Dean,
former law partner of Dulles and U. S.
disarmament adviser; Douglas Dillon,
former Ambassador to France and
'former Secretary of the Treasury;
General Lucius Clay; and the late
Henry Stimson, former Secretary of
War and patron of McGeorge Bundy,
UTAOE Uard o ~ie rtbp( ni~'a-10
So there they are, running our fo
helplessly by-everybody knows ho
LBJ likes to sit helplessly by and le
others run the country. Anyhow
Professor Galbraith's advice to hi
liberal colleagues was to stop criticize
ing the President, and help him get
rid of the bad influences around him:
disestablish the Establishment.
The funny thing about all this is
that nobody laughed, maybe because
this old wives' tale has a certain plaus-
ibility, and has been long bruited
about in liberal circles.
It is true that these Establishment-
arians carry weight and are taken
seriously, but if they really are calling
the turn, Professor Galbraith was a ?
long time discovering it, for they
were even more prominent and influ-
ential under Kennedy than they are
now under Johnson. Kennedy made
Dillon the head of the Treasury; he
offered both Defense and State to
Lovett; he brought Rusk in as foreign,
secretary; he relied on General Clay
in the Berlin crisis; he used Arthur
Dean on disarmament; he turned con-
stantly to Acheson for advice.
Actually these men and others men-
tioned here have been serving both
Democratic and Republican Adminis-
trations for twenty years or more,
beginning with Roosevelt's appoint-
ment of Stimson and Forrestal at the
beginning of the war. Truman also
ailed on them; he even drafted John
Oster Dulles to negotiate the peace
reaty with Japan.
All in all, the Establishment Kier
rchy has served the country well and
aithfully for over a generation, but,
ith the possible exception of the
isenhower-regime, they did not make
he big decisions or try to usurp the
residential role. And even the unas-
ertive Eisenhower, in crises like
ndochina and Suez and the Congo,
pally made up his own mind.
Roosevelt was his own Secretary of
tate as well as Commander-in-Chief.
ruman made all the key decisions,'
Nether it was Korea or dropping the
tom bomb. Kennedy, as we know, did
of consult the Establishment on thei
ay of Pigs or the Cuban missile,
risis or on Laos. And there is no rec-
rd, either, of Johnson substituting
5
'-~"$ eOWBRADAftO t
ha wi be the day.