Galbraith Seeks New Generation To Manage U.S. Foreign Policy

John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, predicted yesterday that the "old syndicate" of American foreign policy -- the Dulleses, Achesons and Rusks--would soon be replaced by a generation with "an adequately sophisticated view of Communism."

Speaking at the annual convention of the Americans for Democratic Action. Galbraith said Vietnam would be "the graveyard of the old policy" and added that "it is worth hoping the policy is all that gets buried."

"Vietnam is not important to us," he said. "Nor is it a bastion of freedom. Nor is it a testing place of democracy. Had it been lost in 1954 no one would now be thinking of it."

But Galbraith asked liberals to remember that "the jungle of Vietnam must not be allowed to obscure the merits of far more liberal and astute achievements here at home."

"The test of policy henceforth," he said, "must be not the negative one of what fights Communism but the affirmative one of what serves the interests of the United States -- and the survival and well-being of all people."

Galbraith acknowledged that the State Department occasionally "responds to suggestions for keeping peace with cautious aproval. But not for years has it been imagined that a Secretary of State could be that source of any such suggestion."

He also evaluated domestic policy, saying that liberals had shown conservatives "who most of us had thought safely immune to any modern ideas, how they can have Keynes without liberalism and full employment without Shriver."