JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

October 19, 1965

Professor Henry Kissinger
6 Divinity Avenue

Dear Henry:

On December 7, I am asking a small group of Harvard and M.I.T. faculty members to come and have dinner with Mayor John Collins. The purpose is partly social, partly to allow members of the academic community interested in public affairs to become better acquainted with the Mayor and in turn to help Mayor Collins to increase his knowledge of the academic resources of the community. The discussion will not be confined or even principally concerned with municipal affairs; we would like to have it range widely over national and international affairs as well.

I do hope you can join us that evening. It will be informal, at 7:00 p.m., at 30 Francis Avenue and, I hope, will be a good chance to get better acquainted with a worthy public servant who retains an old-fashioned instinct for getting things done. I am attaching a list of those we are hoping to have on hand.

JKG/adw
Enc.

January 13, 1969

PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL

The Honorable William Rogers
Secretary of State-Designate
U.S. Department of State
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I am sure you will consider me one of the more improbable advisers of the new Administration. Let me hasten to say that I write this on the eve of departing for several months to work on a new book. It is the result of a long discussion session among several establishment liberals -- Arthur Schlesinger, William vanden Heuvel, Carl Kaysen and others -- last Friday night in New York.

It reflects our incredulity and dismay over the effort of the military and their State Department friends (plus of course Joe Alsop) to persuade the new Administration that they have won the war in Vietnam -- that a little more military pressure mostly through air power will allow us to depart with victory. It seems incredible that this argument should be heard again -- after being heard in 1962, 1964 (as part of the case for bombing) and every year since. Never in history surely has the moral posture of error been so strong. And now, after it has destroyed Lyndon Johnson (as it might well have destroyed John F. Kennedy), it is being brought to bear on the Nixon Administration. The elements of the argument when one breaks them down verge on fantasy. They are:

(1) That the intelligence shows that the opposition in South Vietnam is exhausted. Yet the wishfully interpreted intelligence has shown this every year since 1964 -- and never so clearly as just before the Tet offensive a year ago.

(2) That Hanoi will yield to a renewal of bombing. Yet this bombing was tried for four long years -- with disastrous results for our position in the world -- and she did not yield.

(3) That the South Vietnam government gains in vitality -- at a time when much of its moderate opposition is in jail or otherwise contained and its army is deserting (as was true last year) in unprecedented numbers.

-2-

(4) That a settlement which reflects, as any settlement must, the political vitality of Hanoi and the Viet Cong is somehow disastrous for the United States although they have shown that they are at least as passionate in their nationalism and desire for independence as (say) Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia.

(5) That doubts about the war in the United States, or the evidence that we are winning it, are confined to a "few left-wing professors" at a time when the election has just shown that there are massive doubts and especially among the well-informed.

As I say, the men who harbor these fantasies destroyed Lyndon Johnson. I have never supported Mr. Nixon. But even those of us who are among his oldest opponents do not wish -- and specifically cannot afford to wish -- to have him so destroyed.

JKG /ma