Free Republic

John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who died last week in his 98th year, has been justly celebrated for his wit, fluency, public-spiritedness and public service, which extended from New Deal Washington to India, where he served as U.S. ambassador. Like two Harvard colleagues -- historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sen. Pat Moynihan, another ambassador to India -- Galbraith was among liberalism's leading public intellectuals, yet he was a friend and skiing partner of William F. Buckley. After one slalom down a Swiss mountain, inelegantly executed by the 6-foot-8-inch Galbraith, Buckley asked how long Galbraith had been skiing. Thirty years,...

The public Galbraith I knew and contended with for many years is captured in the opening paragraphs of my review of his last book, "The Culture of Contentment." I wrote then: ` "It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn't used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking ships. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his anti-historical exertions, and wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed, his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember...

At the same time, 1984, as the eminent Harvard professor of economics, J. K. Galbraith was discovering the multitudinous benefits of socialist productive capacity in the USSR, any schoolkid in that evil empire could have told him that had the Soviets taken over the Sahara, in two years there would be a shortage of sand. If Galbraith had spoken with Soviet factory workers out of sight of their overseers, he would have heard them say, "Yes, we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." But double-domed Lefty Galbraith was immune to facts of everyday existence in the workers'...