OPINION THE PLAIN LESSONS OF A BAD DECADE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000100020076-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 14, 2003
• Sequence Number: 76
• Publication Date: January 1, 1971
• Content Type: NSPR

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by John'Kenneth Galbraith
The decade of the sixties, in the absence of of a
massively successful revisionist exercise, will be
counted a very dismal period in American foreign
policy. Indeed, next only to the cities, it will be
considered the prime disaster area of the American
polity and it will be accorded much of the blame
for the misuse of energies and resources that caused
the trouble in urban ghettos and the alienation and
eruption in the universities. The result was in very
dim contrast wits the promise.
The promise teas bright-`'`Let the word go
forth ... tilt friend and foe alike," President Ken-
nedy' said in his inaugural address, and no one
doubted the power and not manly the wisdom of
the word. The prestige of foreign policy in 1961
was enormous: IN'o one much cared about who
was to run the 'Fycasury. It mattered greatly who.
was to be the SecrcItdry or Under Secretary or even
an Assistant_ Secretary of State, although there
were enough of the latter to form a small union.
!In the early months of the new Administration,
numerous quite mart'elotus ideas were spawned for
(strengthening-or improving or revising our overseas
:affairs. There was to be an expanded and reorga-
nized aid program, a Grand Design for Europe
(subject to some uncertainty as to what that design
might be), the Alliance for Progress, the "Kennedy
Round," a Multilateral Force, the Peace Corps,
counterinsurgency, an expanded recognition of the
role of the new Africa, a dozen other enterprises
which did not achieve the dignity of a decently
notorlotts rejection.
*Each issue of FOREIGN POLICY will carry a guest edi-
torial by a distinguished contributor. The editors are
pleased to conin once this series with Mr. Galbraith's
So it seems in retros ect. And at least one of the
successes of these Fears seems a good deal less
compelling when one looks back on it. In the
Cuban missile crisis President Kennedy had to
balance 'the danger of blo:'ving up the planet
against the risk of political attack at home for
appeasing the Comm-mists. This was not an
irresponsible choice: to ignore the domestic oppo-
sitiorl was to risk losing, initiative or office to men
who wanted an' even more dangerous policy. There
is something more t rtt a little wrong with a
system that poses a choice between survival and
domestic political coi;.pttlsion. The missile crisis
did not show the stPennth of our policy; it showed
the catastrophicvisio.rss and resulting pressures to
.which it wvas subject. Ve,were in luck, but success
in a lottery is no. argot ent for lotteries,
Now ten years htter.orle looks back on--seem-
higly--an uninterrupted series of disasters. The
comic-opera affair at the Bay of Pigs; the invasion-
of the`DonlinicanRepublic to abort a Communist
revolution that had to be invented after the fact;
severe alienation throughout Latin America;
broken windows, burned libraries and more or
less virulent anti-Americanism elsewhere in the
world; over ever r 1 1'nrl nit
'gyp sOtlt oh~~ ije 66/12/02
ing, endlessly bloody, injiruteIy expensive and now
widely rejected involvement in Indochina.
Yet not everything i. these' years went wrong.
Our relations with Western Europe and Japan
caused no particular ,lain; ' these had been the
theaters of ultimate Riifortune in the twentieth
century, always assim-ti g; tear to be such. And,
over the 1960's, relations with the Communist
countries improved both is the vision and in the
reality.
When the decade begin, the official vision of
the Communist world tins still that of a political
monolith, (tire word tt' ssstill much used) relent-
lessly bent on the destr