RUFFLING THE STATUS QUO
Galbraith, John Kenneth
BOOKS RUFFLING THE STATUS QUO A LIFE IN OUR TIMES by John Kenneth Galbraith Houghton Mifflin. 563 pp. $16.95. For visibility in public life, few can match the prodigious presence of John Kenneth...
...He has written elsewhere of the importance of "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable...
...On the latter, no one in the Twentieth Century, with the possible ex-ception of his intellectual forbear Thorstein Vehlen, has so ruffled the Status quo and bruised the conscience, if not the ego, of the upper crust as Galbraith...
...Others wallowed in it...
...It is difficult to imagine the void in the social sciences and in the public sphere had fate consigned Galbraith to other pur-suits—say, as an unfulfilled'farmer in the Ottawa of his childhood...
...Formerly, no one wondered whether a potential faculty appointee would decide to come, but whether he "should be called...
...Who, for instance, was the duller of the Dulles brothers, John Foster or Allen...
...Al-ways have the President on your side, use the press forthrightly, adopt a modest as-pect of menace, pursue ambiguity in foreign policy matters since wisdom lies in never being too sure of yourself, and be ready to catch a plane out of Washington any day of the week...
...His il-luminating friendship with Nehm is only mildly compensating...
...Nixon, of course, and so, too, Dean Rusk, whose "drawbacks were, in fact, great...
...Vidal: "Oh, Buckley...
...On Richard Nixon, Galbraith has never been in doubt: He writes that Adlai Stevenson "once paid me a notable compliment: 'Ken, I want you to write the Speeches against Nixon...
...That he had thought years earlier about an am-bassadorship on the subcontinent is made clear...
...The argument would come in chords of moving plaint from mainstream economists, slouching toward Chicago and the Milton Friedman faith...
...Galbraith is a publicist of the first rank...
...These assessments are, by a wide margin, the most interesting portions of the book...
...The void would have been deep...
...Predictably, John F. Kennedy appears here as a politician who was completely de-void of pretense...
...Galbraith: "Mr...
...Galbraith notes: "Nothing so weakens the position of a senior public official as the knowledge that he so loves or is otherwise committed to his job that he will always, in the end, come to terms...
...Its undergraduates in the 1930s were anti-intellectual but not as will-fully so as those at Princeton, where Galbraith taught for a time...
...For a Kennedy man, he developed for Lyndon Johnson an uncommon fondness, which included speech-writing...
...But none of this can detract appreciably from Galbraith's achievements...
...Anecdotes sparkle on the page...
...In A Life in Our Times he writes with the confidence and sweep of one who knows this as well as anyone...
...The presence, despite his de-mur, has not been thrust upon him but sought and won even in circles—the corporate board rooms and sundry neoconser-vative haunts—where his ideas are a source of discomfort...
...Patrick Lewis, an economist, is an associate professor in the department of integra-tive studies at Otterbein College in Ohio...
...Instructive, too, are Galbraith's remem-brances of things academic...
...He is also one of contemporary America's most gifted observers, whose prolific legacy will include some two dozen books...
...President John F. Kennedy wondered what his new ambassador thought of the article...
...Against this in-difference, he "in time, learned to recipro-cate...
...It is as if he had been dispatched, in the manner of an emissary of the British raj, and then looked for ways to avoid official duties that would otherwise intrude on his extended sabbati-cal leave of travel and writing...
...For visibility in public life, few can match the prodigious presence of John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, former ambassador to India, and premier price Controller in World War II...
...It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone eise...
...He can be effusive in praise of friends (some of whose faults are glossed) and devastating in his attacks on the worthy...
...Ambassador...
...For surviving the leaden life in the Secu-lar Priesthood of the State Department, a tried and tired ambassador's list of quasiMachiavellian rules must be obeyed...
...In his altogether fascinat-ing memoirs, the sum of whose parts is curi-ously greater than the whole, he will not let us forget it...
...Buckley...
...Where eise but in the economics profession, he might well ask, could one have found so many Willing straw men...
...Engagingly written, it goes beyond the predictable pith and puffery to take the measure of a broad r?nge of individuals, both public and private...
...Rusk seemed to be "relentlessly on guard," owing perhaps to "his excessive respect for military men and military power [that] made him dangerously sanguine about military accomplishment...
...Johnson was later to tempt Galbraith unsuccessfully with jobs as Peace Corps head and U.N...
...Galbraith must frequently pinch himself...
...Professional economists, so certain of their Nineteenth Century theology that exalts individual de-cision-making and ignores political and economic power, are always astonished that so few people take them seriously...
...Thus inured to Student apathy, he leaves the inescapable impression that he made only a modest and increasingly casual commitment to College teaching...
...It does not strain credulity to imagine that, should reading come back in vogue, his work will serve as the Standard of both substance and form in the social sciences...
...Patrick Lewis (J...
...Last year in these pages I remarked that Robert Heilbroner, almost alone in economics, wrote with grace and style...
...Some observations confirm, others reverse the conventional view...
...Frozen in their own prose and envious of his, they think of Galbraith as something of a charla-tan...
...Little of a private nature in-forms this memoir because, the author notes somewhat disingenuously, "there isn't much on which to grieve...
...Their typical standup routine included William F. Buckley as foil...
...Vidal, where is your friend Mr...
...I don't see why not," said Kennedy, "everybody eise does...
...The Affluent Society (1958) and The New Industrial State (1967) are arguably two of the most important documents produced in this Century on the structure of society and economic institutions...
...Each spring," he recalls with unpleasantness, "all academic work . .. however frivolous, came to a complete halt while the precise social rank of each member of the freshman class was appraised and established...
...There is irony in this...
...Stumping State caucuses for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Galbraith would take Gore Vidal along for color...
...He's over at the Wallace headquarters stitching hoods...
...It is in India where we run into the heavy weather of Galbraith's condescension...
...You have no tendency to be fair.' " His particular ad-miration for Stevenson aside, Galbraith doubts that this widely regarded "intellec-tual" ever read a serious book after he became governor of Illinois...
...Before his Indian tour in 1961, Galbraith was the subject of a New York Times profile...
...Galbraith was pleased but didn't see why he had been called arrogant...
...Did y'ever think, Ken," Johnson once asked, "that making a speech on ee-conomics is a lot like pissing down your leg...
...His memoirs re-call, if only in summary terms, the ideas for which he has become famous, and these will be remembered long after the hot little ideological tempests whirling about Washington have blown away...
...But there is an imperious strain that Alters through his recollections...
...The qualifier was meant to allow, of course, for Galbraith...
...Modern Harvard is starkly different in style from the prewar days...
...A Life in Our Times is vintage Galbraith as public figure...
Vol. 45 • September 1981 • No. 9
