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The loneliest man in Time's man-of-the-week club of 1962 must be George F. Kennan, U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia. Kennan is featured in this week's issue together with Edwin O. Reischauer and John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard professors who are currently on leave as ambassadors, and are the third and fourth Harvard men to appear on the magazine's cover in two weeks.
Under the title "The Natural Americans," a five-page story describes Kennan, Reischauer (Japan), and Galbraith (India), as "three of the liveliest choices --and likeliest successes" among President Kennedy's 63 new ambassadors. "Their joint characteristics are frankness, sensitiveness to the nerves and taboos of their host countries, an eagerness to listen...and ill-concealed dislike of Embassy Row cocktail parties."
With a background of 13 years in Japan, the former Director of Harvard's Center for East Asian Studies is "an honorable cousin" to the Japanese, who are seeing the first U.S. ambassador who speaks, reads, and writes their language. Reischauer is said to have begun his preparation 30 years ago as the only student taking Harvard's Chinese classics course in 1931.
"Probably the most independent ambassador in the field," Galbraith in New Delhi stays close to Nehru; according to the article, he has been responsible for the three-day postponement of the Goan invasion and for a statement from Nehru modifying the Prime Minister's controversial remarks on Berlin last August.
One of the lesser-known works of his first year was supplying Indians with American books, obtained with a Ford Foundation grant. The Last Hurrah pleased Nehru but "the book that influential Indians seem to want most" is Galbraith's own The Affluent Society.
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