John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith, who died on April 29 at 97, was physically (at 6' 8") and intellectually imposing. Surveying his lengthy life, one comes upon facts that seem fresh discoveries only to realize they were famous achievements stored in the boxes of other eras.

Some things you may have forgotten or never known about Ken Galbraith: This humane, civilized, witty man was the nation's price czar during World War II and then a journalist with Henry Luce's Fortune. With the State Department he directed the postwar US Strategic Bombing Survey, which concluded that the Allied saturation-bombing campaign had negligible success. He was a power player in Democratic politics who had the ear of John Kennedy in the heady days of the New Frontier. As Kennedy's Ambassador to India he played a major role in cooling the war between India and China. He helped formulate LBJ's Great Society programs. He wrote an amazing oeuvre of forty-eight books, some of them bestsellers.

His biographer, Richard Parker, a member of our editorial board, insists Galbraith might best be remembered not as a New Dealer or an old-line liberal or a leading Keynesian but as a "contrarian," an independent thinker. He had, Parker points out, more arguments with other Keynesians than he ever did with his real nemesis, Milton Friedman. He complained that liberals had no new ideas; they just filed away the old ones and resorted to "emptying out the drawers" on demand.

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