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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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