Galbraith went to New Delhi with several advantages: an acquaintance with Nehru, his own prestige as an economic and social philosopher, and the President's strong belief in increased economic assistance to India -- this last quickly resulting in a $500 million appropriation for Indian development. But he also had the disadvantage of the Dulles legacy and especially of the policy of American military aid to Pakistan. Soon after his arrival, for example, he learned that Washington was planning a delivery of F-104 airplanes to Karachi -- planes which the Indian, assumed could only be used against themselves. When Galbraith proposed that he inform the Indian government that there were only twelve planes involved the State Department refused. Finally -- "more or less by physical violence," he later said -- he was able to extract permission from Washington to communicate the number of planes to Nehru. "Parliament assembled a week or two ago," he wrote me toward the end of August, "and during the recess two things had happened: We had committed a half billion in aid to India and the twelve F-104 planes to Pakistan. The ratio of questions, words, comments and emotion has been not less than ten to one in favor of the planes. Such is the current yield of the Dulles policy."

Charles River Economists

In the meantime, a new analysis of the aid problem was emerging from the universities and the foundations... As in the case of military strategy, the new approach was most fully explored along the banks of the Charles River. Here a group of economists at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were evolving a comprehensive view, shaped in great part by their own experience, of the development process. They all, for example, had been exposed to Keynesianism in New Deal days. While Keynes himself had written about mature economics his analysis supplied a framework for an approach to underdevelopment, because it identified strategic relationships within the economy, as between savings and investment and between the national budget and the level of economic activity. Another common experience was war-time work in such agencies as the Office of Strategic Services (Edward S. Mason, Walt Rostow, Carl Kaysen) or the Strategic Bombing Survey (J.K. Galbraith), where economists, whether in order to pick out bombing targets or to assess the significance of the damage wrought, had to think in terms of leverage points within the economic system. Both depression and war thus forced attention on the dynamics of whole economies. Some of the Cambridge group later worked in the Marshall Plan (Lincoln Gordon); others took part in Ford Foundation and other development missions in the fifties (Mason, Galbraith, David Bell). By the late fifties the study of development economics centered in the seminar organized at Harvard by Galbraith, with the later collaboration of Mason and Bell, and in the work carried on by Max Millikan, Rostow, P.N. Rosenstein-Rodan and others at the MIT Center for International Studies.

Out of this came the argument that the true role of foreign aid was neither military nor technical assistance but the organized promotion of national development. Millikan and Rostow made an early statement of this viewpoint in a book of 1957, A Proposal -- Key to a More Ef- fective Foreign Policy; and Rostow gave the idea its historical rationale three years later in The Stages of Economic Development. The Charles River analysis made several contributions of great significance. First of all, it offered the aid program what it had long lacked -- specific criteria for assistance. The goal, the Charles River economists said, was to enable underdeveloped nations, in Rostow's phrase, to "take off" into self-sustaining economic growth. This they believed, was feasible for most countries; and when it was reached, the need for special external assistance would end. Next they pointed out that non-economic factors determine growth. Thus, in addition to the familiar range of economic issues -- industrialization, agricultural methods, sources of energy, the internal market, inflation, balance of payments and soon -- they brought in structural change, land reform, the roles of the public sector and of private entrepreneurship, political development and other social and cultural adjustments required, as Millikan put it, "to reduce the explosiveness of the modernization process." Both economic and non-economic factors were to be subsumed under national development plans. The emphasis on national development was not intended to divorce foreign aid from the political interests of the United States. But it looked to long-term rather than short-term political effects. In this view, foreign aid, instead of being a State Department slush fund to influence tactical situations, should aim at the strategic goals of a stronger national independence, an increased concentration on domestic affairs, greater democracy and a long-run association with the west.

H. Stuart Hughes

Where the utopian left felt more than a generalized mistrust of power, it objected to both the foreign and domestic policies of the administration. In foreign affairs, some regarded the cold war as the invention of the military-industrial complex and supposed that, if only Washington changed its course, Moscow and Peking would gladly collaborate in building a peaceful world.

Thus Professor Stuart Hughes, the Harvard historian, advised the United States in his book An Approach to Peace to seek "a new model for foreign policy in the experience of Sweden or of Switzerland or even India." He added that he had "toyed" with the idea that the United States should unilaterally declare itself first among the neutrals; but "in reality we do not need to go that far. The events of the next generation will doubtless do it for us." The mission of the American intellectual, as Hughes saw it, was to do what the Asians and Africans had thus far failed to do and define neutralism "as a faith and a way of life." In the meantime, the United States should renounce nuclear weapons (by stages), close down most overseas military bases and rest national safety on "a territorial-militia or guerilla-resistance type of defense." . . .

Stuart Hughes, announcing his candidacy for the Senate in Massachusetts in 1962, attacked "the deadening similarity of the two major parties" and declared it time for "a new kind of politics in America." When I talked with him on the Cape that summer, he said he expected this would be the beginning of a nationwide third party dedicated to peace. The apparent response to his candidacy and, to similar candidacies in other states gave the radical left a few moments of genuine hope