This was a speech delivered at the eightieth birthday party of Professor Galbraith in the Century Club, New York, on 13 October 1988.
George Ball was ironically eloquent about Kenneth Galbraith’s humility. But I do not think that he has ever emulated the feat of an English friend of mine, an earl, a socialist, the father of a notable brood of writers, who produced a quasi-religious book which was actually entitled Humility, who walked down Piccadilly, looked at the display in Hatchard’s bookshop, went in, sent for the manager, and demanded, ‘Why have you not got my book on Humility in the window?’
Thirty-five years ago last month, on my first visit to the United States, I took a plane from Detroit to Newark. For the first hour it bumped a great deal as was frequent in those pre-jet days. When the bumping ceased my silent neighbours all suddenly became very loquacious. It turned out they were mostly economists, returning from some gathering of the American Economic Association. The chief among them, or at least the one I remember best, was Seymour Harris, I suppose the most devoted of Keynes’s United States disciples. He invited me to Cambridge for three days and installed me in the Dana-Palmer House. There he performed a function which for me was much more significant than his introduction of Keynes to the American public. He introduced me to Galbraith - and indeed to Schlesinger. Having performed this function, he then fell away rather like the first stage booster in a rocket launch. I am not sure I ever saw him again. But he had transformed my life, or at least its American dimension. For more than half of it John Kenneth Galbraith (and Arthur Schlesinger, his historical adviser and junior by nine years) has been an unfailing source of wit, friendship, vicarious repute, and hospitality to me. I count that 1953 Detroit flight the luckiest journey I have ever made.
At this stage of course Ken was only a semi-fledged sage of the Western world. He had published American Capitalism: the Concept of Countervailing Power, but I think nothing else - between hard backs at least. He was still half thought of as an agricultural economist. Although he might talk of the Office of Price Administration, I think that by far the most important thing that he had done until then was to marry Kitty, thereby demonstrating the concept of countervailing height as well as underpinning his life and enriching ours.
In 1955 came The Great Crash and I took Kitty on to the roof of Milan Cathedral where she was overcome with vertigo and I was very glad that it was her end of the theory of countervailing height and not Ken’s that I had to manoeuvre back between the minarets and gargoyles.
In 1960, soon after The Affluent Society, I took two friends to stay at the Galbraith house in New Fane, Vermont. ‘Well, we have certainly seen the public squalor on the way here,’ one of them said as we bounced up the rough and long dirt road. ‘I only hope we see the private affluence when we arrive.’ So, I suppose, we did, but only up to a point. For while Ken would never dream of not staying at the Carlyle in this city or the Ritz in London, neither he nor Kitty has ever believed in changing their domestic lifestyle to keep up with the royalties. That of course is a tribute to their supreme, unaffected and therefore wholly splendid self-confidence. Thirty Francis Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is fast qualifying as a house in a time warp. Happily, practically nothing changes. It ought to become a national shrine eventually acquired by Mrs Wrightsman, moved to a new extension of the Metropolitan Museum - and entitled New England Academic Interior, circa 1950.
From that New Fane visit I retain another memory of Ken’s imperturbable self-confidence. He took us to see the beaver dams about half a mile from the house. Suddenly there was a great clanging of wires overhead. ‘That’s my private telephone alarm,’ he said, adding, ‘It will be the Senator’ (and there was no doubt which Senator that meant in that autumn of the Kennedy election), before loping off through the undergrowth. When we got back we asked him what the Senator wanted. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it was the plumber from Brattleboro’, but the Senator will be through soon.’
However, my final proof of the indestructibility of Ken’s self-assurance came nearly a decade later, when he and I ran into a former British Prime Minister. It became apparent to me after about ten seconds of casual conversation that, unbelievable and discreditable though it was, the former Prime Minister did not really know who John Kenneth Galbraith was. It became apparent to Ken a moment or two later. He was in no way disconcerted. As soon as we separated he turned to me and said: ‘Who was that man? I thought he was Alec Home.’ The logic was impeccable. If he did not know Galbraith, he could not be an ex-Prime Minister. The dismissal was complete.
I have left myself no time to talk about the eighteen or so books I haven’t mentioned, including at least three major pieces of innovative socio-academic analysis, or the volumes of autobiography, or the travel books, or such reassuring titles as Annals of an Abiding Liberal, or Ken and Kitty in India, or Ken as an inimitable and iconoclastic lecturer, or Ken stealing the show at a Harvard Commencement Day, or Ken as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, the jewel in the crown of that junior university, or Ken the television presenter, or Ken the connoisseur of Indian art, or Ken the littérateur, the writer of reviews of Waugh and forewords to Trollope. I stop while my catalogue is still illustrative and not exhaustive: and merely ask you to drink to a man who has put more phrases into the language than the rest of us put together; whose great gifts have always been used in unselfish causes; whose friendship has given us all both pride and pleasure; and whose life if it exceeds the norm as much as do his other qualities, will, I calculate, extend to the age of ninety-seven (after which Kitty can be the Pamela Harriman of the 2008 campaign), so that we all look forward to meeting again for the ninetieth and the ninety-fifth birthdays. In the meantime I give you the toast of Kenneth and Kitty Galbraith.