(John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, delivered his first major address on the war in Vietnam last week at "Negotiations Now: A National Citizens Campaign to End the War in Vietnam," in Washington, D.C.

The June 28 speech has prompted columnists to proclaim Galbraith as the new leading spokesman for the critics of the war. In his speech, entitled "Vietnam: The Moderate Solution," the former Ambassador to India and National Chairman of Americans for Democratic Action called for an end of the bombing of North Vietnam as a prelude to negotiations.)

I: View of War

A singular and well-observed feature of war is for the view in retrospect to depart radically from that which attended the beginning. Dangers which at the outset of hostilities seemed to justify the most sanguinary steps in the perspective of years seem slight, sometimes frivolous. And prospects which at the beginning of conflict seemed easy and brilliant come to measure only the depth of the miscalculation. The case of men who in the last 30 years have planned expeditions against Moscow, Pearl Harbor and Pusan--not to mention Jerusalem and Tel Aviv--sufficiently establishes the point.

At the same time war turns reason into stereotype. Acceptance of what in the beginning is an estimate of national interest becomes an article of faith, a test of constancy, a measure of patriotism. At least while it lasts, war has a way of freezing all participants in their original error.

March of History

The war in Vietnam, by various calculations, has now gone on for more than half a decade and with mounting intensity for three years. It has shown these classical tendencies. The march of history has massively undermined the assumptions which attended and justified our original involvement. No part of the original justification--I do not exaggerate--remains intact. More remarkable, perhaps, very few of the assumptions that supported our involvement are any longer asserted by those who defend the conflict. Yet the congealing intellectual processes of war have worked to the full. Action which is not defended is still adhered to as a dogged manifestation of faith.

Let me also be fair. Those who are committed not to support of this venture but to opposition have also shown a tendency to become frozen in fixed positions. For the first time since 1815 we are engaged in a conflict to which a very large part of the population is opposed. The unanimity rule which has previously characterized our national conflicts does not exist. Those who defend and those who attack both lost some of their capacity to accommodate their thoughts to new evidence.

My purpose here is to see if, however slightly, one can rise above these rigidities. I do not wish to pretend to view our situation in Vietnam with any special insight or wisdom. These I do not claim, and even if I did so, I would be cautiously aware of our well-recognized and exceedingly valuable tendency to greet such pretension with something between skepticism and outright vulgarity. I would like merely to inquire how this conflict will look when minds, those of supporters and adversaries alike, are no longer subject to the congealing influences of war. And I would like then to propose the course of action--I venture even to call it the solution--that emerges from such a view.

Many will think that in labeling this a "Moderate Solution" I have made an unhappy choice of words. Moderation in these days is not in high repute. The term itself, in some degree, has come to imply pompous and comfortable and well-padded in-action. Thus, it rightly arouses suspicion. And increasingly men are divided between those who want the catharsis of total violence and those who want the comforts of total escape.

Yet if our national mood opposes moderation, history favors it. It does not vouchsafe us sharp, well-chiselled solutions. It gives us blurrer edges and dull lines. Whatever the ultimate bang or whimper, we can be sure that in between there will be only compromises. Let me begin with the terrible treatment that history has accorded our original justification for this conflict.

II: View of Vietnam as Part of World Struggle

No one can completely rationalize our involvement in Vietnam. We are there partly as a result of a long series of seemingly minor steps. Each of these steps, at the time, seemed more attractive -- less pregnant with domestic political controversy and criticism -- than the alternative which was to call a firm halt on our involvement. The aggregate of these individual steps -- more weapons, more advisers, a combat role for our men, progressive increases in our troop strength, bombing of North Vietnam, a widening choice of targets -- is larger by far than the sum of the individual parts. The resulting involvement of the Asian mainland is not a development that all who asked or acquiesced in the individual actions wished to see or even foresaw.

No Justification

But back of these individual steps, and especially the earlier ones, was a political and military justification that once seemed compelling. And it is a justification which has since dissolved before our eyes. The justification was the assumed existence of a united, homogeneous and militantly evangelical Communism which had chosen South Vietnam as the weak point for a probe. Speaking to the National Press Club some six months after he assumed office, the Secretary of State gave an explicit formulation of the view of the world crisis in which Vietnam played a part. He said: