 |
He lived the good life, was the friend to great men, and affected the Democratic
Party for decades, economics forever. The article in the New
York Times about Mr. Galbraith's life is wonderful. Take the time to read
it. It honors an important man's life. Since I'm a student of John F. Kennedy
and have been my whole life, I culled snippets that have to do with that time
period. It's a beginning of the history of Galbraith's life, which lasted almost
a century. Of course, there's much more. I'll leave the historians to the rest.
Nearly 40 years after writing “The Affluent Society,” Mr. Galbraith
updated it in 1996 as “The Good Society.” In it, he said that his
earlier concerns had only worsened: that if anything, America had become even
more a “democracy of the fortunate,” with the poor increasingly
excluded from a fair place at the table.(snip)
One of his early readers was Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois, who
twice ran unsuccessfully for president against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mr. Galbraith
often wrote to Mr. Stevenson, introducing him to Keynesian taxation and unemployment
policies. In 1953, Mr. Galbraith and Thomas K. Finletter, the former secretary
of the Air Force and later ambassador to NATO, formed a sort of brain trust
for Mr. Stevenson that included Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, the historian
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the foreign policy specialist George W. Ball.Although Mr. Galbraith did not at first regard Kennedy, a former student
of his at Harvard, as a serious member of Congress, he began to change his
view after Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1952 and began calling him
for advice. The senator's conversations became increasingly wide-ranging and
well informed, Mr. Galbraith said, and his respect and affection grew.After Mr. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he appointed Mr. Galbraith
the United States ambassador to India. There were those, Mr. Galbraith among
them, who believed that the president had done this to get a potential loose
cannon out of Washington.He said in his memoir: “Kennedy, I always believed, was pleased to have
me in his administration, but at a suitable distance such as in India.”
Mr. Galbraith was fascinated with India; he had spent a year there in 1956
advising its government and was eager to return.(snip)
After Kennedy was assassinated, Mr. Galbraith served as an adviser to President
Johnson, meeting with him often at the White House or on trips to the president's
ranch in Texas to talk about what could be accomplished with the Great Society
programs. Mr. Galbraith said that Johnson had summoned him to write the final
draft of his speech outlining the purposes of the Great Society, and that
when the writing was done, said: “I'm not going to change a word. That's
great.”The relationship between the two men soon broke apart over their differences
over the war in Vietnam.(snip)
There always seemed to be one more book. One, “The Essential Galbraith”
(2001), was a collection of essays and excerpts that a reviewer in Business
Week said remained very timely. Another, “Name-Dropping from F.D.R. On”
(1999), recounted encounters with the powerful, including President Kennedy's
response when Mr. Galbraith complained that an article in The New York Times
had described him as arrogant.Kennedy retorted that he didn't see why it shouldn't: “Everybody else
does.”In 2004, Mr. Galbraith, who was then 95, published “The Economics of
Innocent Fraud,” a short book that questioned much of the standard economic
wisdom by questioning the ability of markets to regulate themselves, the usefulness
of monetary policy and the effectiveness of corporate governance.He remained optimistic about the ability of government to improve the lot
of the less fortunate. “Let there be a coalition of the concerned,”
he urged. “The affluent would still be affluent, the comfortable still
comfortable, but the poor would be part of the political system.”John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society
By Holcomb B. Noble and Doublas Martin
Comments are closed.