We had Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clintoon.
Surely no one could ask for more, unless one would be thinking Alger Hiss could have done us in more quickly.
Posted on 05/02/2006 4:23:36 PM PDT by SJackson
Had it not been for the accident of his birth in Iona Station, Ontario, John Kenneth Galbraith, the greatest public intellectual of the second half of the American 20th century, would surely have been considered presidential timber.
As it was, the man whose Canadian birth barred him from seeking the nation's highest office had to settle for shaping every presidency since that of Franklin Roosevelt either as a trusted counselor to the occupant of the Oval Office, a wise critic or, as was frequently the case, both.
One of the last veterans of the Roosevelt epic's first term during which he worked with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration Galbraith would go on to advise FDR's National Defense Advisory Committee and then to serve as an administrator of the Office of Price Administration. The man who was as quick with a quip as he was with economic charts and tables noted that he "reached the point that all price fixers reach my enemies outnumbered my friends."
It will be his epigrams, his one-liners and his sharp asides that his many friends in Madison and around the world will miss most about Ken Galbraith, who has died at age 97.
AP Photo/Charles Krupa John Kenneth Galbraith in 1998. The genius of the economics professor so long associated with Harvard and with most of the good or at least tolerable presidencies of the 20th century was that he was never so impressed by his immense knowledge or his powerful positions that he could not find a humorous, and sometimes cutting, phrase with which to note the obvious.
When he was serving as John Kennedy's ambassador to India, Galbraith was sent to survey Vietnam, where Kennedy was being advised to dispatch military forces. Galbraith, who tried harder than just about anyone else to avert the turn toward quagmire, sent back a memo to Kennedy in which he reflected on the difficulty of distinguishing "friendly jungle" from "Vietcong jungle." He asked, "(Who) is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to ... ask him what is so important about this real estate in the Space Age."
The wittiest and wisest of "the best and brightest," Galbraith broke early and publicly with President Lyndon Johnson over what had become the Vietnam War. He helped the influential liberal group he had co-founded decades earlier, Americans for Democratic Action, move toward an opposition stance that confirmed that even Cold War liberals recognized the madness of engaging in a long-term ground war in southeast Asia.
Galbraith would serve as a distinguished father figure for the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, lending his towering presence to student protests and the campaigns of insurgent Democratic presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972. Over the ensuing years, he would remain a steady critic of imperial endeavors that would rob the U.S. treasury of the resources that could have built the great society.
Several years ago in a valedictory essay that drew together the vital themes of his long career as both an economist and as the Cassandra who warned of the overwhelming costs of misguided foreign policy, Galbraith observed, "We cherish the progress in civilization since biblical times and long before. But there is a needed and, indeed, accepted qualification. The U.S. and Britain are in the bitter aftermath of a war in Iraq. We are accepting programmed death for the young and random slaughter for men and women of all ages.
"So it was in the first and second world wars, and is still so in Iraq. Civilized life, as it is called, is a great white tower celebrating human achievements, but at the top there is permanently a large black cloud. Human progress dominated by unimaginable cruelty and death. Civilization has made great strides over the centuries in science, health care, the arts and most, if not all, economic well-being. But it has also given a privileged position to the development of weapons and the threat and reality of war. Mass slaughter has become the ultimate civilized achievement.
"The facts of war are inescapable death and random cruelty, suspension of civilized values, a disordered aftermath," Galbraith continued. "Thus the human condition and prospect as now supremely evident. The economic and social problems here described can, with thought and action, be addressed. So they have already been. War remains the decisive human failure."
The clarity of his vision led several generations of insurgent political strategists to imagine a "Galbraith for President" candidacy, only to be jarred back to reality by the fact that, while Galbraith had been a U.S. citizen since the 1930s, the constitutional bar on foreign-born candidates disqualified the most attractive contender from consideration.
Galbraith professed to be amused by the presidential talk, as he was by Canadian suggestions that he might want to come back and serve as that country's prime minister. But he did, with tongue planted only slightly in cheek, imply an interest in presidential politics that was more than merely academic. When the 200th anniversary of the Constitution was celebrated in 1987, American Heritage magazine asked prominent Americans to suggest how they would amend the founding document.
Galbraith's reply: "My answer is obvious: That clause that excludes Canadians and others of foreign birth from the presidency and, possibly, from the vice presidency as well. My whole life was altered, as also, quite clearly, was the history of the republic. Henry Kissinger, I cannot doubt, vociferously agrees."
When Austrian-born actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California in 2003, there was a flurry of talk about amending the Constitution to allow Americans who had been born beyond the nation's borders to seek the presidency. It seemed at the time that the best argument for the measure was the fact that Galbraith, at 94, was still physically fit, intellectually exceptional and as committed as ever to the liberal ideals that had powered the most successful Democratic presidencies a combination that made him far more qualified not only than the current occupant of the Oval Office but than most of the Democrats who aspired to it.
With Galbraith's passing, we are left with one less counter to his observation, "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
Thankfully, we are left, as well, with John Kenneth Galbraith's wisest piece of political advice, his suggestion that "in all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."
We had Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clintoon.
Surely no one could ask for more, unless one would be thinking Alger Hiss could have done us in more quickly.
The poster child of America's decline into statism. Good riddance.
Only an idiot could have thought Vietnam was about the "real estate".
All that Galbraith did after 1945 was to throw sand in the gears of the entire anticommunist movement. He always believed that American society needed to be nudged toward some form of socialism, and was muted in any criticism of the Soviet Union. During the 1987 stock market crash, Dr. Galbraith noisily exulted that America's socialist moment was at hand.
A typical anti-American Canadian-born intellectual with a powerful contempt for those who disagreed.
He will not be missed.
Democrats still believe his economics.
The left never gave up on Hiss. He even got his law license back in Mass. F------ TRAITOR
LOL.
""Had it not been for the accident of his birth in Iona Station, Ontario, John Kenneth Galbraith, the greatest public intellectual of the second half of the American 20th century, would surely have been considered presidential timber.""
Yeah just like Adali Stevenson....American dont vote for pin heads....they vote for bubbas
This is the real reason why the left hates america so much, why Krugman hates american society and why they love europe.
In Europe politicians are groomed for public service from the time they are in high school. The best and brightest go into public service. Afterall it takes brains to run a socialist society.
In America, people laugh at intellectuals. Intellectuals dont form public policy. They sit in small rooms at universities seething with hate because the american people are too stupid to appreciate all that the elite could be doing for them. They teach classes and theories or write for obscure newspapers like the NYT. But they never get to put their ideas into reality, unlike in europe where the masses worship the intelligensia and end up suffering from when theirsocial and economic theories see the light of day.
Instead americans elect Harry Truman, who didnt even have a college degree, or LBJ who went to west texas teachers college. If they were bad enough, imagine the horror of Roanld Reagan or GW Bush. The irony of GHW Bush is he was exactly what liberals look for in a President. His resume was impecable. ditto Nixon.
After the disaster the DEMS faced in 1994, Clinton brought in james carville who purged the elites from Clinton's administration. Laura Tyson, Ira Magaziner etc.
JFK remains popular, almost godlike to liberals, because his was the only administration where the best and brightest got to test their classroom theories...ie like Vietnam
The perfect liberal icon. Looked like a professor. Master of the put-down. Wrong about every issue of his time.
one moment of honesty in his life; saw him on McNeill-Lehrer as Berlin wall pulled down: "We didn't think freedom would motivate people the way it has."
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Oh, my bad...we were talking about Galbraith, right??? |
Just couldn't get past this horsecrap.
Galbraith was wrong so often about so many things, but he's still an icon of the Harvard - NY Times axis of pretentious pseudo-intellectuals. The prohibition against a foreign-born president has saved us from possible presidential candidacies of Galbraith, Kissinger, and Ah-nold so maybe it is a good thing!!!
Any liberal should know there was no oil there of any consequence.
He should have takern better care of himself.
One of the last veterans of the Roosevelt epic's first term during which he worked with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration Galbraith would go on to advise FDR's National Defense Advisory Committee and then to serve as an administrator of the Office of Price Administration.
Although Herbert Hoover started our slide into socialism with his farm bills, Roosevelt refined and extended them and added others. Galbraith was probably a key strategist of that.
He couldn't carry Milton Friedman's jockstrap.
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