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John
Kenneth Galbraith, writer, economist, dies.
Giant in politics, academia was
97
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John Kenneth Galbraith
(1908-2006) |
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John Kenneth Galbraith, a towering figure in American
intellectual life whose astringent wit and elegant iconoclasm
graced the academic and political scene for seven decades,
died yesterday at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.
He was 97. His son, Alan Galbraith, told the Associated
Press his father died of natural causes.
''He had a wonderful and full life," his son said.
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''This is terribly sad news," his neighbor author
Anne Bernays said last night. ''He was an incredibly
smart man. He knew everything, he remembered everything,
and he got you on everything. He always had the last
word, but in a wonderful way."
Though he called his autobiography ''A Life in Our Times"
(1981), another Galbraith title better encapsulated
his politics: ''Annals of an Abiding Liberal" (1979).
''I hear that in your country you are considered a man
of the left," Leonid Brezhnev once said to him.
''I invite you to the Soviet Union so you will have
the experience of being a reactionary."
That would have been a novel experience for Dr. Galbraith.
He worked in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations,
wrote speeches for Adlai Stevenson, served as ambassador
to India during the Kennedy administration, turned down
Lyndon B. Johnson's offer of the directorship of the
Peace Corps, and as a self-described ''independent operator
at the guerrilla level of American politics" played
notable roles in the presidential campaigns of Eugene
McCarthy and George McGovern. He was also one of the
first and most vocal opponents of US involvement in
Vietnam.
Dr. Galbraith enjoyed a lasting association with the
Kennedy family. He was a pillar of the New Frontier,
and his presence did much to lend it its academic cachet.
The president, Dr. Galbraith once recalled, ''was pleased
to have me in his administration but at a suitable distance
such as in India."
The Harvard economist, who said he revised each of his
books at least five times, was as much man of letters
as social scientist. Writing in a rigorously burnished
style reminiscent of the 18th century, he resembled
a latter-day Enlightenment philosophe, a thinker as
devoted to crafting pellucid prose as shaping public
policy.
Political appointments and pronouncements notwithstanding,
Dr. Galbraith's 30-some books were what made him internationally
famous. Further enhancing his academic superstardom
were a 6-foot-8-inch frame and what he once described
as a ''long, liturgical face" that could have been
hewn from stone. On page or stage, John Kenneth Galbraith
was a formidable figure.
His worldliness and wide-ranging interests put him at
odds with the ever-increasing specialization of contemporary
economics. He received his colleagues' highest honor
in 1971, being named president of the American Economics
Association, but Dr. Galbraith's fondness for the generalizing
epigram and distaste for quantification meant his greatest
following was among lay readers rather than fellow economists.
Even more than John Maynard Keynes (and Dr. Galbraith
was one of the first US disciples of Keynesian economics),
it was Thorstein Veblen, the author of ''The Theory
of the Leisure Class," a classic amalgam of social
science and mockery, who provided Dr. Galbraith with
his model: the economist as social critic.
''I never imagined that there was any point to being
an economist if no one was aware of what you were thinking,"
he once said. ''Nothing so protects error as an absence
of readers or understanding." Indeed, two of Dr.
Galbraith's favorite novelists, Anthony Trollope and
Evelyn Waugh, had a more discernible effect on his work
than any economist did. Their wit, clarity, and keen
eye were qualities he prized highly -- and consistently
demonstrated throughout his own work.
Dr. Galbraith was born in the rural Ontario town of
Iona Station on Oct. 15, 1908, the fourth child of Scottish
immigrants William A. and Catherine (Kendall). In his
book, ''The Scotch" (1964), Dr. Galbraith memorably
evoked the Scottish-Canadian culture he grew up in.
It was one in which ''to call a son something other
than John was to combine mild eccentricity with unusual
imagination." As it happened, Dr. Galbraith disdained
use of his first name; to friends, he was ''Ken."
Harvard president Nathan Marsh Pusey once made the mistake
of calling him ''John"; Dr. Galbraith thereafter
greeted him as ''Marsh."
He attended Ontario Agricultural College (now the University
of Guelph), which he once described as ''not only the
cheapest but probably the worst college in the English-speaking
world." A fellowship to do work in agricultural
economics, his undergraduate field, took him to the
University of California at Berkeley. After earning
his master's and doctoral degrees there, Dr. Galbraith
came east in 1934 to spend the summer working in Washington
for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and then
assume an instructorship in economics at Harvard.
On Sept. 17, 1937, Dr. Galbraith married Catherine Merriam
Atwater. Three days earlier he had become a US citizen.
During the academic year 1937-38, he was a Social Science
Research Council Fellow at Cambridge University, England.
In 1939, he became an assistant professor of economics
at Princeton. He returned to government service a year
later, first as an adviser to the National Defense Advisory
Committee and then as deputy administrator of the Office
of Price Administration. Enjoying ''considerable and
welcome power" at OPA, Dr. Galbraith soon ''reached
the point that all price fixers reach -- my enemies
outnumbered my friends."
He left government to join the board of editors at Fortune
magazine and in 1946 directed the State Department's
Office of Economic Security Policy. In between, he headed
the US Strategic Bombing Survey. ''At the end of 1945,"
Dr. Galbraith later wrote, ''it is possible that I knew
more about the drained and shattered economies of both
Germany and Japan than anyone alive."
That remark exemplifies Dr. Galbraith's legendary self-assurance.
A 1955 FBI security check summed up its subject thusly:
''Investigation favorable except conceited, egotistical,
and snobbish." President Kennedy once asked Dr.
Galbraith his opinion of an article that profiled the
economist in The New York Times. He had liked it well
enough, Dr. Galbraith said, but wondered why it had
had to call him arrogant. ''I don't see why not,"
the president said, ''everybody else does."
Dr. Galbraith returned to Harvard in 1948 as lecturer,
became a full professor the next year, and Paul M. Warburg
professor of economics in 1959. He retired from teaching
in 1975.
During the '50s he published a number of books: ''American
Capitalism" and ''A Theory of Price Control"
(both 1952), ''The Great Crash" (1955), which one
reviewer called the ''wittiest book ever written by
a professional economist," and ''The Affluent Society"
(1958). The latter, with its critique of a consumer-driven
economy of excess, made him a celebrity. It was translated
into a dozen languages and went on to sell some 1.5
million copies. It also added a new phrase to the language,
''the conventional wisdom," which its creator spent
the rest of his life subverting.
Dr. Galbraith remained politically active throughout
this time. He was a founder of Americans for Democratic
Action in 1947, later serving as its chairman from 1967-68,
and advised Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee
in 1952 and '56. ''I want you to write the speeches
about Nixon, Ken," the candidate said, ''because
you have no tendency to be fair."
After 1956, Dr. Galbraith transferred his allegiance
to the junior senator from Massachusetts. At the '56
convention, Kennedy had narrowly lost the vice-presidential
nomination, a loss owing to a stand on agricultural
price supports Dr. Galbraith had warned against. Afterward,
Kennedy told him, ''I don't want to hear about agriculture
from anyone but you, Ken. And I don't want much to hear
about it from you either."
As a reward for his work during the 1960 campaign, Dr.
Galbraith was sent to New Delhi. ''The job of an American
ambassador," he later explained, ''is to maintain
civil communication with the government to which he
is accredited and, to the extent that personality allows,
to personify the majesty and dignity of the United States.
No one should suppose that this is either intellectually
or physically taxing."
Indeed, Dr. Galbraith managed to write no fewer than
four books while in India: ''The Scotch," ''Economic
Development" (1962), ''Ambassador's Journal"
(1969), and the first of his three novels, ''The McLandress
Dimension" (1963), which he published under the
pseudonym Mark Epernay. The other novels are ''The Triumph"
(1968) and ''A Tenured Professor" (1990). He also
began work on ''Indian Painting" (1968). ''It is
my only writing to which, to my knowledge, no one has
ever taken serious exception."
Dr. Galbraith returned from India in 1963. That spring
he and his wife began what became a celebrated Cambridge
tradition: the annual Harvard commencement party at
their Francis Avenue home. ''We don't send out invitations,"
Dr. Galbraith explained at the 25th-anniversary edition
of the event, ''just reminders to our friends."
Those friends would usually number in the vicinity of
300, with a sprinkling of heads of state and Nobel Prize
laureates.
In 1967, Dr. Galbraith published what he considered
to be his most important book, ''The New Industrial
State" (1967). It, too, was an international bestseller,
with its examination of ''the economic, political, and
social theory of that part of the economy by now preempted
by the large corporations." Along with ''The Affluent
Society," it formed a trilogy completed in 1973
with publication of ''Economics and the Public Purpose."
''The Age of Uncertainty," a multipart television
series on the history of economics that Dr. Galbraith
did for the BBC, brought him a new audience when it
was broadcast in 1977. It also led to two more books:
one bearing the same name as the series and ''Money:
Whence It Came, Where It Went" (1975).
Dr. Galbraith received honorary degrees from numerous
institutions. ''My only rule in the matter," Dr.
Galbraith liked to say, ''is to have more honorary degrees
than Arthur Schlesinger," his longtime friend and
Kennedy administration colleague.
He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, and its president from 1984-87; a fellow of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a member
of the American Agricultural Economics Association,
the Saturday Club, the Century Club of New York and
the Federal City Club of Washington, D.C.
President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in
2000.
Along with his Francis Avenue home, Dr. Galbraith had
a 247-acre farm near Newfane, Vt., and a chalet in Gstaad,
Switzerland, where he was an active downhill skier.
He noted that he brought to the sport ''enthusiasm,
considerable awkwardness and some slight danger to anyone
in the vicinity."
In addition to his wife and son, Alan, Dr. Galbraith
leaves two sons, Peter and James Kenneth. Another son,
Douglas, died of childhood leukemia.
May 9, 2006.
Source: Boston
Globe, April 30, 2006. |
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