Kissinger Skips Dinner

Henry A. Kissinger '50 will be having dinner in Washington tonight, instead of enjoying the cuisine at the Francis Avenue home of John Kenneth Galbraith. The National Security Advisor has Indefinitely postponed a get-together with prominent Faculty members scheduled for this evening.

According to a column by Mary McGrory in Tuesday's Washington Evening Star, Galbraith, the Warburg Professor of Economics, had planned the dinner as "a wide-ranging discussion, which would also informally signal the end of the academy's antagonism over Asia policies."

The dinner was cancelled, according to Catherine Galbraith, the professor's wife, because "Kissinger was tied up with whatever's going on." An aide to Kissinger at the White house confirmed this, saying. "This Pakistani-India dispute's got everybody so busy around here." Galbraith himself was out of town and unavailable for comment.

The dinner had been planned several weeks ago, before the eruption of the fighting between India and Pakistan. Galbraith, who was American Ambassador to India under President John F. Kennedy '40, has criticized the Nixon administration's handling of the current crisis. "For the Administration to accuse India of being an aggressor is outrageous," he told McGrory. "Nobody here agrees with what we're doing, I happen to think it is wicked."

Several of the Faculty members invited to the dinner disagreed with McGrory's assessment that "they were looking forward to patting Henry on the back for his part in arranging 'the hopeful turn' in China."

"I had no intention of patting him on the back for going to Peking," said Stanley Hoffman, professor of Government. "I have no fences to mend." Hoffmann added that he had hoped to be able to express his views on America's balance-of-power foreign policy to Kissinger.

Dorothy Zinberg, research sociologist to the University Health Services, agreed that fence-mending was not the purpose of the dinner. "I don't think it would have been a dinner of reconciliation," she said. "I think everyone's appalled by the foreign policy in the India-Pakistan dispute."

Other faculty members on the guest list for the dinner included Paul Dot. Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry, Samuel Huntington, Thomson Professor of Government, and Don K. Price, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. The dinner has not yet been rescheduled