Catherine Merriam Atwater was a graduate student at Radcliffe in the 1930s when she first met a young research fellow named John Kenneth Galbraith at a popular Cambridge café.
         
She looked up "and up and up," she would later say of her introduction to the 6-foot-8 man who became her husband and a legendary liberal
intellectual.

Mrs. Galbraith, who was barely 5-foot-4, declined his first marriage
proposal but later accepted in 1937, discovering her perfect match in the
influential economist who served four presidents and relied on his wife to soften his rough Canadian farm boy edges.

She showed him Europe, minded the indexes for his famous books, and hosted heads of state. She once organized a lunch for a dozen generals when her husband was ambassador to India.

"There's just no doubt that without her he would not have accomplished what he accomplished," said son Peter of Cambridge. Mrs. Galbraith, who was known as Kitty, died Wednesday of a heart attack at Mount Auburn Hospital. She was 95 and lived in Cambridge.

Her husband died of natural causes in 2006 at age 97. They were married 68 years. In his memoir, "A Life in Our Times," Mr. Galbraith wrote about meeting his wife. "She is a wise and affectionate woman of singular beauty.

Intensely loyal to family and friends, a superb manager of our personal affairs, a brilliant linguist and student of comparative literature with no known enemy anywhere in the world. And we lived happy ever after," he said.

Mrs. Galbraith was born in Plandome, N.Y. She was the granddaughter of scientist Wilbur Olin Atwater, a pioneer in human nutrition and metabolism who invented the calorimeter.

She earned her undergraduate degree in Romance languages from Smith College and studied German as a graduate student in Munich. She told her sons she lived in a rooming house with Unity Mitford, one of Adolf Hitler's girlfriends.

"Occasionally, Hitler would come calling on the dorm, and when that
happened, there was an enormous amount of perfume from Unity," Peter said, recounting his mother's story.

Mrs. Galbraith later worked for the Library of Congress and the Justice
Department as a researcher before the start of World War II. After marrying, the couple set off for Europe, where Mr. Galbraith was to complete a fellowship under British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes suffered a heart attack, however, and the Galbraiths spent much of their time traveling around Europe in a roadster, according to his biographer, Richard Parker.

"It was she who really introduced him to Europe," said Parker, author of
"John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics."
They drove through the countryside with Mrs. Galbraith checking off towns and cathedrals.

|