L'affaire Galbraith.

L'AFFAIRE GALBRAITH

MALCOLM TOON is a professional diplomat, formerly the ambassador to the Soviet Union, a very able man who however rides a hobbyhorse or two, least surprising of which is that nonprofessional diplomats aren't very useful. Last week someone in the State Department quoted Mr. Toon in connection with the affair in Paris involving Ambassador Evan Galbraith, indisputably a nonprofessional. What happened?

On a radio program in Paris, conducted in French, five journalists were having at Mr. Galbraith, who has made himself enormously accessible in Paris during his two years there. He has been the source of some commotion because when he arrived in France, where he had lived for many years as a young banker-lawyer, he made it plain that he was unapologetically enthusiastic about the political philosophy of Ronald Reagan. The notion that Ronald Reagan should send a Reaganite to Paris shook the establishment in France, which, for a while at least, nursed the consoling illusion that America had sleepily elected a simpleton to the White House who, nonetheless, would never be so simple as to send to Paree someone who shared his antediluvian views. However, Galbraith having arrived, it proved difficult to cope with him, in part because he was resolute in expressing his own and the President's opinions, in part because his wit, charm, and intelligence tend to disarm.

And so, on this interview program, they got on to the French Communist Party. And Ambassador Galbraith said of it: "One knows very well that the French Communist Party has a special relation with the Soviet world. Everybody knows very well that the Soviet foreign policy is followed by the French Communist Party. Thus, one mistrusts people who are linked with the Communist Party.'

There followed in rapid sequence two questions. The first was: Did Ambassador Galbraith imply that a French Communist was less than 100 per cent a Frenchman? Before Galbraith could answer, the second question rang out: Did that mean that Ambassador Galbraith thought that President Mitterrand's transport minister, Charles Fiterman, was less than 100 per cent a Frenchman?

Mr. Galbraith, replying to the first question, said that French Communists were "poor Frenchmen gone awry.' Well, the press relayed this as Galbraith having said that Mr. Fiterman was a poor Frenchman gone awry. Now although the rules of logic are pretty unyielding on the ruthless application of the syllogism (All Athenians are sophists. Pythagoras is an Athenian. Therefore, Pythagoras is a sophist.), in fact, Mr. Galbraith didn't by name depreciate the Frenchhood of Mr. Fiterman.

And this was a technically important point. Because after the newspapers had misreported the exchange, Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy called in our ambassador to reproach him for violating a protocol. That protocol is to the effect that no foreign ambassador can criticize personal appointments of the president of the host country. Mr. Galbraith trotted out the transcript and Mr. Mauroy was instantly appeased, and Galbraith exited on splendid terms with him.

But a great furor has arisen. Because now all of France is revisiting the touchy subject of what on earth are four Communists doing in Mitterrand's government, given that their loyalty is so plainly to Moscow, as has been the case since the Party's founding. Poor Mr. Fiterman put his foot in it by calling Galbraith "a crude and stupid personality,' and Georges Marchais, the chief French comrade, exclaimed, "Where does he think he is, this American ambassador? In Grenada? One assumes that the transport minister laments the interruption of the building of the Soviet airfield on Grenada.

But soon these gentlemen came to regret that they had publicized Mr. Galbraith's statement about the loyalty of French Communists, even as Oscar Wilde came to regret that he had publicized the accusations against his manhood. Mr. Fiterman has now addressed an urbane open letter to Galbraith, widely viewed as conciliatory, the purport of which is, Can't we just forget the whole thing?

Back to Mr. Toon. What Mr. Galbraith did is precisely what a professional diplomat would tend not to do, because professional diplomats, usually for good reason, simply do not like to stir things up. But to stir things up when there is virtue in stirring things up is the job of all good men bent on aiding their country, as the Wall Street Journal correctly observes. Even Galbraith has reminded the French people that there is an aberrant minority in France that year after year, generation after generation, defends Stalin, Gulag, Budapest, Prague, Afghanistan. Okay, it's a free country. But Communists should occasionally be reminded that in fact they behave like cretins, and it is usually amateurs who get around to doing this.