Notes & asides

* Remarks by WFB at the memorial service for John Kenneth Galbraith, May 31, 2006

Mrs. Galbraith, ladies and gentlemen:

There was usually mischief there, or so it was with me. He had a fine poker face, and you would not know for sure from the study of it that he was engaged in teasing, a cherished mode. "Now sit down and listen. I think I told you this before, but you didn't listen. Not listening to me is a highly developed skill of yours.

"You have a great opportunity. You must denounce the Iraq War. Your credentials as a conservative will soar and your influence will be critical. I'm seldom wrong in these matters--

"When was I wrong, you ask?" Pause. "When I predicted George McGovern would be elected? I wasn't wrong. The voters were wrong.--Kitty? Kitty!" He lifts his finger and points it at me. "He pretends he can't hear me. He can hear me perfectly well."

It was very hard, those last few years, yet he spoke always those complete sentences. He said about himself once or twice that the reason his prose was so perfect was that he rewrote everything five times, injecting levity into the fourth draft. But his spoken sentences were syntactically pure, though his enunciation was interrupted by what the speech teachers single out as a "vocalized pause." In 1972 I passed through Hong Kong on a duty run for the USIA. I was introduced to a press clerk whose job it was to send out material through USIA wires--editorials from prominent newspapers, recorded speeches given by public figures. Past the routine briefing, the young man confessed that he had amused himself the week before by editing a recent speech by Professor Galbraith in which the USIA technician had eliminated almost all of the text, leaving in only what amounted to a long string of vocalized pauses, now connected with only three or four words of Galbraith at intervals.

Would I like to hear it? It's only five minutes, he said.

I got away with a copy of that tape, and at a dinner party in Gstaad advised the company that I would play for them the most recent speech by Professor Galbraith.

I thought it quite wonderful. My wife noisily disagreed. Kitty twinkled, but then she always twinkles.

A few years later, while recording for PBS in 13 episodes his paean to statist interventions in human life, Ken told me that he was startled to learn, at the great age of 70, how frequently he had had to repeat his lines in order to avoid the vocalized pause. One afternoon in Vermont he talked this matter over with Milton Friedman, who had done 13 episodes of his own show on the freedom to choose.

Friedman, like Galbraith a former president of the American Economic Association, had invited the Galbraiths to his house in Vermont for lunch. When the subject of the tapings came up, Friedman said that he had simply refused when the engineers asked him to repeat the text more than once.

There was a reason for that, Ken explained to me on the drive home. "Milton is more trenchant than I am, but he isn't as subtle." I was at the wheel for the return drive, Kitty and my wife in the back seat. We drove slowly because Ken was very solicitous for his beautiful new car, a Saab with lovely, simple lines, inside and outside. I had risen early that morning and assembled from a local store a menagerie of kiddy-zoo pieces--a teddy bear on a suction cup, parrots that sang out--converting his beautiful new Saab into the most lurid passage from his Affluent Society. But all that stuff was easily removed after he saw it, and we drove in his repristinated car to visit the Friedmans.

I asked whether he thought of bringing his car to Switzerland for the winter, or did he plan simply to use my car, as was his habit. He was in Gstaad every winter during that period. I mentioned this when, in 1972, we were pitted against each other at a huge affair for the benefit of the New York Public Library, he advancing the candidacy of George McGovern, I that of Richard Nixon. The master of ceremonies was Art Buchwald. It was a week or two after Senator McGovern had dismissed vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton. "The important question before the house," Buchwald began thunderously, evoking a public reaction to incumbent vice president Spiro Agnew, "is: Are we better off with a vice president who has been treated for mental illness or with one who hasn't?" Professor Galbraith was vivid that evening in berating me and my politics, and in turn I explained to the audience that during the winter Mr. Galbraith pursued the study of skiing and economics. "His ski teachers," I reported, "are cheered by the news that Mr. Galbraith also has difficulties in mastering his other line of activity." I started to say his "sedentary activity," but I wasn't sure that would successfully distinguish it from his activity as a skier. I add most belatedly that George McGovern is the only American who ran for president and actually called on the telephone last year to greet me on my 80th birthday.