Life in Our Times

Perhaps economist Galbraith--the epitome of the public intellectual--was always the amused observer, even of himself, that his memoirs would have us think. Perhaps his private life was so placid that there is nothing to tell. But the book is pinched: fascinating for all that he did & perceived, consistently entertaining because he's a witty, sardonic raconteur, tantalizing because you haven't heard all those stories of famous people before. Why dither? It's History. What it isn't, tho, is a drama of growth & change. By p.3, you know virtually everything you're ever going to know about him--the "inherent insecurity" of the Ontario farm-boy, the sense of intellectual superiority & compulsion to demonstrate same--except his strategems for success. The life can then be divided, as he very nearly does, into slightly overlapping circles. There's academe--an unloved ag-school alma mater; brief, happy sojourns at Berkeley & Cambridge; distasteful Princeton; "Harvard before democracy" &--very little improved--afterwards. There's economics--Veblen; Keynes; eminent, idiosyncratic contemporaries; his reconstruction of US economic life. There's government service in DC--preeminently as WWII price czar, surmounting the "disaster" of "my" design for price stabilization. There's government service abroad--surveying the meager economic effects of strategic bombing. There's a stint on Fortune--where he learns, from H. Luce, how to measure his words. Then he returns to Harvard, sets out "to repair my academic reputation," begins work on what will ultimately be The Affluent Society & signs on with Stevenson in 1952 to write speeches. There's a gathering sense, now, of engagement in great matters, along with sharp assessments of the greats. Adlai Stevenson "spent his adult life in a persuasive attempt to present himself"--erroneously--"as a harried, wavering intellectual lost in the harsh, demanding, dogmatic world of politics." JFK "was one of the few public men who was wholly satisfied with his own personality." (Why, he reflects, do we call one president by his initials, another by name?) Come Kennedy's election, he goes to India as ambassador--where (as he didn't tell in Ambassador's Journal) he aborts CIA activities & defuses the India-China border conflict. Finally, in 1967, he opts out--scoring, in one of the book's truly bitter, truly felt passages, "those who drew Lyndon Johnson away from these preoccupations"--the War on Poverty, civil rights--"into Vietnam." A little more such passion, a little more openness as per his encounter with psychiatry, would have given the book the breadth of the life.--Kirkus (edited)