Galbraith was fascinated with India; he had spent a year here in 1956 advising its government and was eager to return. He spent 27 months as ambassador, clashed with the State Department and was more favorably regarded as a diplomat by those outside the government.

He fought for increased American military and economic aid for India and acted as a sort of informal adviser to the Indian government on economic policy. Known by his staff as “The Great Mogul,” he achieved an excellent rapport with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other senior officials in the government. During the border war with China in 1962, Ambassador Galbraith effectively took charge of both the American military and the diplomatic response. He saw to it that India received restrained American help and took it upon himself to announce that the US recognized India’s disputed northern borders. The reason he had so much control over the American response, he said, was that the border fighting occurred during the far more consequential Cuban missile crisis, and no one at the highest levels at the White House, the State Department or the Pentagon was readily responding to his cables.

Galbraith published Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years, a book based on the diary he kept during his time in India, in 1969. A year earlier he published Indian Painting: The Scenes, Themes and Legends, which he wrote with Mohinder Singh Randhawa. An avid champion of Indian art, he donated much of his collection to the Harvard University Art Museums.

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