MR. JOHN SHATTUCK, Speaker
Good afternoon and welcome to the John F. Kennedy Library. We put this screen here only to keep you from seeing this beautiful day you are coming in to escape. Thank you all for coming on such a glorious spring Sunday afternoon.
I'm John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and on behalf of myself and Deborah Leff, the Director of the Library and Museum, who is here with us today, we're just thrilled to be able to present to you this extraordinary forum, which is dedicated to and will celebrate one of the world's greatest public intellectuals of our time and of all time, John Kenneth Galbraith, whom I visited earlier this morning, who sends greetings to everyone and who will be sending further greetings and joining us in a moment by video.
I want to offer special thanks to the institutions that make these forums possible, Bank of America, Boston Capital, Corcoran Jennison, The Lowell Institute, The Boston Globe, Boston.com and 90.9 WBUR.
Ken Galbraith is a man of great wit and wisdom, deep principles, strong political views, all of which are on full display in his 42 books, countless other publications, and nearly three-quarters of a century in the public spotlight. When I checked Bartlett's Quotations to see which of Ken's enormous range of quotable views might have been selected, I was struck by the sixth entry, a short passage from a book entitled The Scotch, which was published in 1964. Let me read it to you.
"The superior confidence which people repose in the tall man is well merited. Being tall, he is more visible than other men and being more visible, he is much more closely watched."
With that in mind, I'd like us to watch a brief film clip that shows how Ken Galbraith came to be President Kennedy's Ambassador to India.
(VIDEO)
Well, as you can see, it's very hard to know where to begin to describe Ken Galbraith. That's certainly a very good start. He's not only grand in stature, but larger than life, and his wisdom is always matched by his wit. So I thought I would introduce you briefly at the start of this forum to a sampling of the Galbraithian wit, which gets quickly to the truth by skewering the false, the inflated, or the simply nonsensical.
One of the most original economists of the 20th century, here's what Professor Galbraith has to say about the science of economics. "Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists." (laughter)
One of the most influential advisers to presidents, here's what Ambassador Galbraith has to say about the notorious political inertia in Washington. "Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything." (laughter)
When he was asked in 1961 whether he might want to chair President Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisors, he politely declined with a pithy comment about Washington bureaucracy. "I didn't wish to come every day to the same discussion of the same questions around the same table mostly with the same people, not all of whom I wish to see." (laughter)
Now, throughout much of the 20th century and now in the 21st, Ken Galbraith has done more than perhaps anyone else to define the meaning of American liberalism and to act on his principles and its principles. Let me offer just one example, but I believe a very telling one.
In October 1961, Ambassador Galbraith sent a prophetic cable from India to President Kennedy warning of the dangers of US involvement in Vietnam. He contrasted Vietnam with the crisis over Berlin, which was, of course, preoccupying President Kennedy and the entire world at the time. The crisis in Vietnam he saw as "far more complex, far less controllable, far more varied in the factors involved, far more susceptible to misunderstanding." And for the next two years he hammered away at this point, apparently with considerable influence on the President, because the evidence shows that Kennedy was preparing to withdraw his advisors, military advisors, or some of them, from Vietnam at the time of his death.
Our distinguished panel, whom I will introduce in a moment, will speak much more about this remarkable man. But for now, I simply want to say that it is an enormous privilege to be here at the Kennedy Library and to be able to honor Ken Galbraith again from this stage. Ambassador Galbraith has already received the Kennedy Library's Distinguished American Award, and now we honor him with this special forum.
I would also like to honor and to welcome Kitty Galbraith, who is here with us today, and ask you, Kitty, please to stand so we can recognize you. (applause)
I can't think of a more daunting challenge than writing the biography of John Kenneth Galbraith. And we're fortunate this afternoon to have with us the person who has taken on that challenge and succeeded with flying colors by every critical account, including, most importantly, that of the subject himself. Richard Parker has written an extraordinary book John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. The New York Times hails it as both a brilliant biography and as a fine example, a fine history of economic thought in the 20th century, "which defines as well Galbraith's relationship to his profession, which, like so many other academic fields, insulated itself behind an impenetrable language, while Galbraith went in the opposite direction, becoming a public intellectual who spent his life advising politicians, integrating politics, power, ideology, and historical circ*mstance to explain the actually lived economic and political world."
Richard Parker, who is seated here in the middle, trained for his role as the star Galbraith biographer by teaching at the Kennedy School of Government, working as an economist for the UN Development Program, co-founding the magazine Mother Jones, advising liberal democratic senators and writing on economics, politics, and the media. And I know Richard will be very happy to sign copies of his book, which is now on sale at our bookstore after this forum.
Our second panelist, Robert Reich, needs almost no introduction in Massachusetts or elsewhere. He is a frequent speaker at the Kennedy Library and in virtually all ways, except perhaps the minor feature of his physical stature, is a modern day Ken Galbraith. He is a public intellectual, a liberal economist, and a leader in progressive American politics. Bob served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, ran for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, teaches at Brandeis University and now also at Berkeley. At Brandeis he holds the title of University Professor. He's the author of ten books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages, as well as the bestseller The Future of Success, most recently Reason, and he co-founded and served as National Editor of The American Prospect and, as we all know, is a regular commentator on National Public Radio and many other national media.
Our panel today will be moderated by James Carroll, Boston's finest novelist, poet, playwright, and commentator on religion and politics. Jim has twice won the National Book Award, first in 1996 for An American Requiem, his deeply moving autobiographical account of a father-son struggle over the Vietnam War. And then in 2001 for Constantine's Sword, an extraordinary history of the 2000-year battle of the Catholic Church against Judaism and the crisis of faith that it provoked, as he says in his book, in his own life as a Catholic. A former priest, Jim left the priesthood in 1974 and has been a civil rights worker, an anti-war activist, a community organizer, a prolific writer of novels, plays, poetry, and non-fiction and, of course, we all read his column regularly in The Boston Globe.
So, please join me in welcoming to the stage of the Kennedy Library by video John Kenneth Galbraith, who will join us in a moment, and Richard Parker, Bob Reich, and Jim Carroll. And now we will hear from John Kenneth Galbraith.
MR. JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
Ah, dear friends, alas, even a community and its associates as young as that of the Kennedys can age. Some aspects of life are, indeed, badly arranged. At the last moment, I have been prevented by medical constraints to be with you on this lovely April Sunday. I am sorry, indeed. My regret, however, is greatly mitigated by the prospect that Richard Parker is with you. As I have told friends, his book about my life and my work is so insightful, intelligent and well written that I have occasionally thought that I wrote it myself. I am no less pleased that you will be joined here today by two of my dearest friends.
Robert Reich, Professor Reich, is my close and most admired academic friend in all of Massachusetts, anywhere, in fact. And James Carroll is another treasured friend, who is, and here I speak of a common agreement not in my view alone but in the general view, the finest columnist in Boston and indeed in the nation.
I thank my longtime neighbor John Shattuck. John is a figure of singularly distinguished service at Harvard and the American government and today honored as the President of the Kennedy Library. I am most especially indebted to John and his staff for organizing these events.
Had I been able to be with you today, I would have noted my special pleasure that this is indeed a gathering at the Kennedy Library. As some of you know, I have maintained a certain identity with the Kennedy family since I first tutored Jack Kennedy and his older brother Joe in the more arcane aspects of economics when they were undergraduates at Harvard in the 1930s. Later it became my privilege and pleasure to serve John F. Kennedy during his senatorial years and then his presidency. It was then that I met and grew close to his brothers and sisters, the larger clan, and most memorably to his lovely wife, Jacqueline. The loss of the President and Jackie, Robert, and far too many of their generation is an enduring sore for me and for all of us. It is the ongoing service of his brother Ted and the new generation of this great family that remains one of abiding hope for tomorrow.
This afternoon the conversation on economics now begins. I leave you with one thought. Nothing has been shown more and more in our time than the relation of government to economic, social, and larger personal existence. Modern economics has too often preoccupied itself narrowly with market competition, and it has denigrated the role of government. And today's conservatives have too often worshiped the idea of markets and the universal answer to the great questions of our time, claiming the market's distribution of wealth and power as God's design. What they fail to admit is that great wealth and great intelligence are only rarely seen together. In the last few decades, too many Americans have lost sight of how economic markets and government can be balanced for the good of all. The understanding today is we have a lot of markets that assume power and prestige once more wisely distributed to many more institutions and individuals. And now more vital than ever it is for government and the public sector to serve as major protectors of civilized life and existence.
I deeply regret, as I said, that I will not be present at this discussion. Richard Parker has so adequately, indeed, relentlessly assembled my views in his remarkable book that I feel relieved that he is with you today. He will wisely serve hereafter as surrogate for my presence with you. I trust everything he will have to say. That is a comment that one makes about very few people.
MR. JAMES CARROLL, Moderator
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. What an honor and privilege it is to be with you here, especially in your presence, Mrs. Galbraith. In parenthesis, I feel obliged because of the reach of this great forum to make a minor correction of John's introduction of me. I was privileged to win the National Book Award for An American Requiem, but not for Constantine's Sword.
To be in this space, of course, especially for those of us of a certain age, is to remember the question that we all were shocked to find in our hearts in 1963 and again in 1968 as to whether the very powerful and precious legacy that we had all been invited to embrace by the great figures of the Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, whether that legacy would survive, how it would survive, how it would be carried forward.
We're here this afternoon, of course, to celebrate the man who has been the pillar of that legacy down through these decades. And what an honor it is to honor him in this way. Speaking quite personally, I would also like to acknowledge the pleasure and happiness and, one could say, deep satisfaction that it has been over the years to discover in my own generation a few people, a handful of people who carried that legacy on quite worthily. And what a privilege to be on the stage here with two of them. Robert Reich and Richard Parker as writers and as men of powerful political commitment have, with John Kenneth Galbraith, embodied so much that was open before us by the two towering figures of John and Robert Kennedy.
So I want to begin by acknowledging my honor in being with you, Bob and Richard. And as a way of introducing the discussion, I join my words to Professor Galbraith's in celebrating this amazing biography that Richard Parker has written, which is the occasion of our conversation. Whitman said great poets require great audiences. We use the word great too often. We should reserve it quite specially for a few, a handful of human beings, and surely John Kenneth Galbraith is one of them. And in Richard Parker's work he has a great biographer.
The great question of our time is whether intelligence and commitment and compassion worthy to the problems we face are with us in abundance. Richard Parker has identified intelligence, compassion, and commitment in full abundance in the life of John Kenneth Galbraith. He's put it on display for us to remember it and to reclaim it. But in a very powerful way, Richard has also, and maybe this is his great service, reminded us of what Galbraith's basic message has been all along, which is that compassion, intelligence, and commitment are available in abundance in the American people and in the democratic idea. And that affirmation comes ringing through on every page of the work that Richard has given us.
So it's a pleasure to begin our conversation by inviting Richard Parker to respond to Professor Galbraith and to put on the table before us the points that he thinks we should have most in mind as we gather today to honor Ken Galbraith. Richard.
MR. RICHARD PARKER, Speaker
First of all, thank you, Jim, for that introduction. And what a pleasure it is to be here with Bob Reich as well and with all of you. First of all, I'm so sorry that Professor Galbraith couldn't be here today. He hoped to up until the very last minute, but his health at 96 is not what he would like it to be. But, as you can see, he remains mentally alert. I took a reporter up to see him a few weeks ago, and about 15 minutes into the interview, Galbraith slowed down precipitously. And I thought this is a sign of something serious, until I realized that Galbraith had noticed that the 35-year-old reporter couldn't write fast enough to keep up with him at 96. (laughter) So he remains quite vital and with us in a number of ways.
This has been, as my wife who is with us today understands, has been an enormous piece of my life for the last eight years. We have two small children and much of the writing was done between 4:30 and 7:30 in the morning. And there were honestly several points at which I thought I wouldn't be able to complete this book. But I have. And what kept me going was always the sense that men like Ken Galbraith had preceded me and that, in a sense, morally as well as a writer I had an obligation to him to complete the telling of his story.
He's a man who was born in 1908 when Theodore Roosevelt was President. He's lived, obviously, through two world wars and the Vietnam War. He served four great American Presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson. He's still admired today by President Clinton, who, as Clinton left office, wrote Professor Galbraith proposing that the two men write together a book on the future of American government. And only because of Professor Galbraith's health did he decline to do this.
What is it about Ken Galbraith that attracts men like those presidents to a farm boy whose first eight years of education were in a one room schoolhouse and whose initial college education at Ontario Agriculture College caused him to remark many years later that he had attended perhaps the worst school in the English-speaking language, which, of course, set off the alumni administration of OAC quite terribly and caused Galbraith, in his own distinctive style, to recant when he told TIME Magazine that perhaps he'd been wrong to say what he had. Undoubtedly, Arkansas A&M was a worse college, but he hadn't been sure they spoke English at Arkansas A&M.
What Galbraith has, I think, that we have lost sight of, is the value of strong commitment. He tells the tale of being a young boy and his father, who was as tall as Ken is, was a major leader in southern rural Ontario of the Canadian Liberal Party. And Ken was taken out as a boy by his father shortly after World War I to see what political campaigning was all about. They went to a neighbor's barnyard and there were a dozen or so farmers gathered to hear Archie Galbraith talk about the candidates who were to be voted on in the following week. And Archie, surveying his audience, spotted a large manure pile in the middle of the barnyard, immediately strode over to it and stomped onto the top of it and sinking down into it began his speech by apologizing for speaking from the Tory platform. Galbraith said it taught him both the value of conviction and the uses of humor. He wasn't sure that it changed many votes. But he stuck with his father's style ever since.
So I think, again, what struck me about Ken Galbraith first of all was the extraordinary conviction that he brought with him, the humor. And then, most importantly, the consistency. Like Bob, I was trained in the kind of neoclassical economics that when I was an undergraduate and graduate student led me to think, as many of my colleagues did, that Galbraith was an interesting figure but fundamentally not to be reckoned as a major force in modern economics. Economics had gone far beyond the kinds of things that Galbraith did. And although John Maynard Keynes reasoned in the same non-mathematical ways that Galbraith did and eschewed the arcane mathematical modeling that Galbraith did, somehow by the 1960s his style of economic reasoning had gone out of fashion.
But about 1990 or so when I took up this book, I looked around the profession and I realized that it was a profession in crisis. The American Economics Association itself had conducted a survey of its members and asked, among other questions, do you believe that we have become over-mathematicized and too unrelated to the real world? And two-thirds of those surveyed agreed with the question.
There's a crisis in American intellectual life, there's a crisis in American liberal life, in American political life, in American cultural life, all simultaneous one with the other. And Galbraith, for me, offers at least a window into a way of existing and working in the world which overcomes those crises and, in a sense, offers us if not a perfect model, at least an exemplar, a model of what we should in our own generation, in our own way, become. What I valued always about him was not only his commitment to reasoning about economics in English, trying to identify not the most difficult mathematical problem to solve, but the most important problem of the generation. But it was also a commitment to doing economics in a way that understood that it was most fully a political project, because economics was, in some sense, politics being carried out through numbers.
And finally, that he understood that economics needed to be presented to the public in a manner that allowed the public to directly participate in the most important decisions over their economic and political lives simultaneously. Only by doing political economy, not by doing the recondite mathematical economics of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, could all of those goals be achieved.
Now, was Galbraith always right in his predictions? No. Has mathematical economics done better in its methodology? It's not at all clear to me that it has. And the cost of being esoteric, the cost of being over-abstracted, has been very painful across the planet as powerful nations and powerful intellectuals have used poor and oftentimes very vulnerable human beings as guinea pigs for their planned economic models and reform.
Galbraith always had a sense that the subjects of economic reasoning, the objects of economic reasoning were human subjects like himself. And it seems to me today that that compassion, as Jim speaks of it, is at the core of the right way to think about economics in a new century and why we owe so much to Ken Galbraith.
There's a second dimension to Ken's life, which is his firm commitment not merely to be a blackboard professor. He could have been, had the opportunity to be, but chose not to be. Always chose to live in the world, testing his ideas against the experiences that he found there and trying then to reconcile the world he discovered with the world that he and his colleagues debated in the seminar rooms and taught in the classrooms.
I don't think that you can understand Ken's view of economics without understanding what he learned as a young New Deal aide in the 1930s when in the middle of the Depression farm price supports were created in the New Deal Administration and were put in place for wheat farmers and corn farmers and were working very well. But as Ken started his career in the New Deal, the question of cotton arose. And the question was who would receive the payments? The handful of powerful white men who owned the plantations or the black and white men and women who picked and tended and carded the cotton? And one of Galbraith's colleagues, a young lawyer from AAA, was called up to the Congress and was taken into the office of Senator "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina. "Cotton Ed" was the chairman of the Agriculture Committee and happened also to be a cotton plantation owner himself. And he summarized the role of power in economic decision-making in a brief but compelling way that Galbraith never forgot. He told the young lawyer, “You take care of the payments, we'll take care of the nigg*rs.”
Galbraith's lesson was that power was always present in the significant economic decisions that we make in our lives. And that there are beneficiaries and there are victims and there can be bystanders, but morally someone such as himself could not be among the last.
In the Kennedy Administration, I was struck reading the correspondence that he and President Kennedy carried on over the three years of Kennedy's Administration. It includes not only the letter that John Shattuck read to you that was so prescient, given that it was written in 1961 before any significant American troop commitment had been made, but includes dozens of other letters in which he counseled President Kennedy wisely, courageously, repeatedly to stay out of Vietnam. Not only because it would be a foreign policy disaster, but because it would be a domestic disaster, a domestic economic disaster because it would set off inflation just as he had seen inflation start to explode in the second world war and had been brought under control only by his own work at the Office of Price Administration. And it would prove a disaster politically for the Democratic Party, for liberalism, and for liberal Keynesianism.
And to read those letters today is to realize how much has been lost and, yet, how right in his wisdom Ken Galbraith was about what was at stake. To watch him then work over the remaining 40 years in which he has continued to write and lecture and carry on what I consider a singular moral campaign about the highest values that the American people represent is to introduce all of us to what it means to be courageous and consistent throughout one's life. It was a privilege for me to work with Professor Galbraith. It was an education for me to interview him and the men and women who were so important in his life. And I hope for you who take the time to read this book or those of you who certainly, I hope, have read Professor Galbraith's many books, you can draw again in this shaded, dark, for many of us, time the life that his intelligence and his moral clarity and his wisdom bring to the great issues that are still before us.
Thank you.
ROBERT REICH, Speaker
First of all, let me add my thanks to John Shattuck for setting up this program and to James Carroll for being here. Also, my thanks to my old friend of 40 years, Richard Parker. 40 years?
MR. PARKER: Yes.
MR. REICH: For writing this extraordinary book. And Kitty, my love to you. And please extend it to Ken as well. I'm so glad you're here with us.
There is so much to say and really such a limited amount of time to say it. I want to say just a couple of things. First of all, to add to what Richard has said, Ken Galbraith to me represents an old and superior intellectual tradition. And that tradition is about not only political economy but moral philosophy. Adam Smith did not ever call himself an economist. Adam Smith called himself a moral philosopher. In fact, before 1890 when Alfred Marshall, the great economist, wrote his Principles of Economics there was not really a separate discipline called economics. It was all part of moral and political philosophy. And it would have seemed unthinkable for writers in the 18th or even most of the 19th century who were writing, in effect, about economics to separate economics from politics and from a view of what a just society is all about.
So Ken Galbraith, like Thorsten Veblen in the early years of the 19th century, like to some extent John Maynard Keynes, but certainly like those moral and political philosophers of the 18th and 19th century understood the relationships between economics, politics, and the good society in a way that is as important, if not more important, today for people to understand than it ever was before. We are as we sit here, we as a nation, making economic decisions that have enormous moral and political repercussions. And we're making political decisions that have enormous economic and moral consequences for this country. And unless those are seen in context, we're going to make some terrible errors, which we are doing. We, figuratively speaking, not anybody I hang around with -- I spend my time at Harvard and Brandeis and Berkeley; Everybody I speak with agrees with me. (laughter)
In 1958, I had my first contact with Ken Galbraith, who became very quickly something of a hero to me. And let me read to you the passage from The Affluent Society in 1958 that just struck me. I was only two years old at the time, but it struck me anyway. This is about private opulence and public squalor. You may remember this. It's a passage in which John Kenneth Galbraith talks about the family which takes its mauve and cerise air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour and passes through cities that are badly polluted, by a polluted stream and spending the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. It could have been written today, about today. And Galbraith understood something not only about the relationship between politics, economics, and morals but also about the public sector and the private sector -- that public investments in the environment, in public health, in public safety are no less important, in fact in many ways more important, than private investments in factories and equipment. That a good society not only has a balance, but a good society makes sure that the market and the large corporation does not tip that balance too strongly in favor of the private side, lest we all suffer, lest the common good suffers. Common good, public interest. Remember we used to use these terms? Ken Galbraith was read and revered in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s at a time in our life together when public leaders not only used him, utilized him, referred to him, but also made decisions that often, not always, not nearly enough, reflected the kinds of values and principles that Ken Galbraith brought to bear.
Now, I don't have to tell you what's happened since then. But I do want to say something about leadership. Leadership is the art of getting the public to pay attention to something that it often doesn't want to pay attention to. Leadership takes guts. Public leadership is the hardest of all. When the Kennedys and before them FDR paid attention and got the public to pay attention to what it needs to pay attention to, they did not rely on polls. You can't lead the public to where it already is because it's already there. That's what polls tell you. You can't educate the public about what it doesn't want to be educated if you are catering and pandering to a public that already has certain preconceptions.
Ken Galbraith opened our minds. He was a public intellectual. He affected our public life. And it was not always easy. In the 1950s he was accused of being a communist. In fact, Sinclair Weeks, Secretary of Commerce, made sure that J. Edgar Hoover did an investigation on John Kenneth Galbraith. I don't know whether you know about this investigation, but there was an investigation. Here's what they turned up. I looked it up in Richard's book. The Hoover report came back and the target of the investigation -- that is John Kenneth Galbraith -- was found to be okay, except "conceited, egotistical, and snobbish." (laughter) Apparently not grounds for further investigation.
In 1971, Ken Galbraith testified before Congress in favor of wage and price controls at a time when wage and price controls might mean fighting inflation without drafting into the inflation fight those who are least able to bear that burden. And those who are drafted first into the inflation fight as we do it now are the poor. They are the first ones to lose their jobs when we use unemployment as a vehicle to fight inflation. Well, wage and price controls, said Ken Galbraith in 1971, might be a way to deal with this problem without putting such a burden on the poor. Instantly, Richard Nixon denounced Ken Galbraith. He went to his staff and said do an investigation, try to smear this man. I learned this from Richard's book as well. But interestingly, three weeks later, three weeks after that, Richard Nixon announced that he was instituting wage and price controls, which prompted Ken Galbraith to say he felt like the streetwalker who had just learned that the profession was not only legal but the highest form of municipal service. (laughter)
Ken Galbraith brought wit to his wisdom. And one thing he also taught us, and we will talk much more about this, is that a spoonful of sugar in the form of a little humor helps a lot of medicine go down.
Thank you.
MR. CARROLL: Robert, you mentioned The Affluent Society. It's as a writer that Ken Galbraith had made his greatest public contribution over the recent decades. What one or two books should this audience and the people watching on television read of Ken Galbraith's this month? Pick out a couple of Galbraiths.
MR. REICH: Oh, well, one that I find particularly relevant, and I hope it doesn't become relevant this month, but it was certainly relevant in the year 2000, is actually Ken Galbraith's most popular book, a bestseller. It's called The Great Crash. Many of you have read it. It's about what happened to this country in 1929. But, please, I can't resist. Because you have to think about what happened in the year 2000, 2001. Think about people like, and I hope I'm not committing libel, but Ken Lay, maybe Tom Delay. You hear the connection. (laughter) This is from The Great Crash.
"To the economist, embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny, it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. This is a period incidentally when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth. At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in, or more precisely not in, the country's businesses and banks. This inventory, perhaps it should be called the bezzle, varies in size and the business cycle. In good times, people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circ*mstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression, all this is reversed. Audits are penetrating and meticulous, commercial morality is enormously improved, the bezzle shrinks."
So I would say, James, The Great Crash would be nominee for understanding at least the first half of this decade.
MR. CARROLL: What would you suggest, Richard?
MR. PARKER: I'd say probably The Affluent Society and American Capitalism are two places to start. Affluent Society because it's there that he introduces this idea of a social imbalance between the public and the private sectors. He has told how in the middle of the 1950s he set out to write a book called Why People are Poor. It was meant to look at the issue of poverty in general until it became absolutely clear to him that America in the 1950s had entered a new stage in human history, which was that we were a society in which now only a minority was poor. And that the terms of economics in such a society were quite different from the terms that might apply to a society in which scarcity was the governing rule. His point was that now, with affluence, there was no longer a concern about scarcity for the majority, at least when it came to private goods. That's the great passage about the mauve and cerise automobiles -- the SUVs I guess -- of the 1950s.
But he said at the same time the politics of the nation had starved the public sector with the schools and the good roads and the health care systems that worked for all. And in trying to get to that social balance lay the future of politics and economics alike. And, again, like so much of what Ken has written, it seems to me so extraordinarily pertinent to today. One of the researches that I did for the book included looking at the amount of money that had been spent on the military in the United States, the one part of the public sector that has never really been under-funded. Then Brookings in 1995 calculated that since the end of the Second World War in 1995 dollar terms the United States had spent $21 trillion on its military, $7 trillion of which it had spent alone on nuclear weapons, $7 trillion on nuclear weapons. And, of course, something like another $3 trillion has been added in the last ten years to that total military spending. And it was there that Ken saw the kernel of a kind of insanity in public sector spending. That was what needed to be addressed.
And so I recommend The Affluent Society first.
MR. REICH: I thought of another book that … Richard, I'm not sure everything is in your book. But I did not find a reference to this book and it may be there, and it's a little book that is as relevant today for at least part of the population as anything else that Ken Galbraith has written. And it's called Who Needs the Democrats and What It Takes to be Needed. It runs about 80 pages, and every page is as relevant today. It was written, I think, in 19 … what?
MR. PARKER: '67.
MR. REICH: And probably as relevant today as it was in '67. And in '67 the Democrats were a little bit more relevant. I can't believe I said that.
MR. CARROLL: Robert, elaborate the point. What would it take for the Democratic Party to more fully embody the tradition that Galbraith stands for?
MR. REICH: Ken was famous for saying at graduation, commencement addresses the most important thing for undergraduates or graduates to do when they went out into the world was to learn the importance of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. And I think that that pretty much summarizes what a Democratic Party should stand for. Not class warfare, but simply the realization that at least right now we have the widest disparity in wealth and income and opportunity, arguably, that we've had in this country in over a hundred years. And that there is only one group that is doing astoundingly well, people in the top one percent. They've never had as much wealth, they've never had as much income. I'm in danger of being called a class warrior, but I'm going to say it anyway. If we do not expect people who are richer than ever to pay at least something toward the possibility that everybody else can get ahead and have a good life, we cannot have a coherent society. And that's what Ken Galbraith would write if he were writing that book right now.
MR. CARROLL: We're going to invite members of the audience to join the conversation in a moment. But before doing so, I'd like to ask you both to turn your attention a bit to another major contribution, at least in my view, of Professor Galbraith's. And I'm thinking of his consistent skepticism about the use of military force. And in a particular way what his early experience was close up of strategic bombing in World War II and what that meant to him over the decades. Would you give us a summary of that experience of his and his positions, Richard?
MR. PARKER: Surely. In the closing months of the Second World War, Ken was made a director of the Strategic Bombing Survey, a commission that had been established by the Pentagon and the White House to investigate the success of US strategic bombing of Germany and Japan. Like so many Washington commissions, the conclusion desired was already known. The conclusion that was meant to come out of the commission was that strategic bombing had been overwhelmingly successful and that that success justified the creation of an independent United States Air Force. As many of you may remember, in the Second World War we were the only major power in which the Air Force was still part of the Army. And the airmen wanted desperately to be free of the ground soldiers with their own Air Force.
When Galbraith and his economists got to Germany and began digging through the records of the Third Reich and interviewing people like Albert Speer, they discovered that unlike the foreordained conclusion that was being sought, German military production had increased, not decreased, throughout the Second World War. At the end of 1944 the Germans were producing more fighter planes, more bombers, more tanks, more artillery, more arms that they had been in 1941. In short, the strategic bombing had not crippled the German's capacity to undertake war. It had, in fact, encouraged them to ingeniously disperse that production and increase that capacity.
And Galbraith decided, quite amazingly, that this was the truth and ought to be recorded as such. And this, of course, produced a harrowing set of weeks in which he and George Ball fought for this conclusion. It was reluctantly accepted by the people directing the survey and placed in the survey, but in a secondary section of the report. And a Pentagon press conference was called to announce the conclusions of the report, but a week before that happened Galbraith was immediately dispatched to Tokyo to investigate the situation in Japan. And so with Galbraith out of the country the Pentagon called the press conference, overlooked the section of the report which said strategic bombing had failed, and announced that strategic bombing had been an overwhelming success. The press dutifully reported it, and soon thereafter an independent United States Air Force was created, an Air Force that I should add has continued to practice the merits, the strategy of strategic bombing in Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, and most recently in Iraq, in large part to no greater success than they did in the Second World War.
MR. CARROLL: Do you have a thought?
MR. REICH: Only that -- and Richard's book makes this very clear -- Ken Galbraith was no dove. That is, he certainly understood the importance of the use of force strategically, but the use of force without diplomacy made absolutely no sense. When he was Ambassador to India and he saw just the beginning stirrings of United States involvement in Vietnam, he warned against it very clearly. He wrote to the President. And, Richard, help me with this because my memory from your book is that there was some discussion with the State Department as to whether an ambassador could write to the President directly. And the Secretary of State asked that from that point on that Ken Galbraith as Ambassador to India not send any telegrams to the White House but always go through the State Department, which invited Ken Galbraith's response, a memorable response, which because I don't remember exactly the words I'm going to defer to Richard who probably does remember.
MR. PARKER: I remember them. He wrote to President Kennedy that trying to communicate through the State Department was like fornicating through a mattress. (laughter)
MR. REICH: Thank you for that, Richard.
MR. PARKER: And excuse me, Mrs. Galbraith. (laughter)
MR. CARROLL: Ladies and gentleman, you're welcome to join the conversation. There's a microphone here and a microphone there. And I'll recognize you, sir.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. The tomes that you've recommended talk about events, The Great Crash, Affluent Society, New Industrial State. This is about the man himself. It's a 1981 memoir called A Life in our Times. There's a laugh on every page, sometimes at his expense.
MR. CARROLL: The gentleman is recommending Professor Galbraith's own memoir of 1981, A Life in our Times.
MR. PARKER: Terrific book.
MR. CARROLL: Yes, sir?
AUDIENCE: There's been a lot spoken here today about continuing this legacy of Galbraith and Kennedy. And I'm just wondering what you foresee for the next 5, 10, 15 years and also what can be done to continue this legacy in these times. I know I've read Reason, Professor Reich, and you give lots of great recommendations there. And I know, Professor Parker, you talk about not thinking so much in four-year presidential cycles but thinking in 20-year political cycles. I'm just wondering what needs to happen on the part of concerned citizens to uphold this legacy?
MR. REICH: Well, I would say the most important thing is for concerned citizens not to turn cynical but to get more involved than ever. In the wake of the past two elections, I come across a lot of people who say, look, I tried so hard, I've never worked so hard in my entire life, and I'm just sick of it and I'm afraid nothing is going to work. And that kind of attitude it seems to me is the most dangerous, because that seeds the grounds and concedes democracy to the other side. And, frankly, I don't think the other side is all that much interested in the kind of democracy we have right now. I am, frankly, worried that, for example, the wall between church and state is being systematically dismantled, or could be. People have got to get involved. There's no substitute for direct involvement. Politics is not something to hold your nose over. Politics is the applied form of democracy. And I say that to everybody in this room, most of whom have been involved before. But you've got to stay involved.
AUDIENCE: Are there particular institutions you think that are doing a good job now that are worthy of supporting, like Move On.org or things like that?
MR. REICH: Well, I think there are many good organizations, and you can find them on the Internet, the American Prospect, a little magazine that I helped found. But it's more than sending money. And I think that a lot of people confuse donating money with actually being politically active. One of the great casualties of our time is that people can so easily feel that they are fulfilling their social conscience by just writing a check. It takes more than that. It takes actually the hard work of grassroots politics. And it also takes people in states like this, blue states, calling up friends and relatives in so-called red states and talking to them respectfully but entering into a dialogue with them. We're not talking enough with each other in this country about what's important.
MR. PARKER: Can I just add on to that. One of the most interesting things about the book tour that I'm currently on is the number of rightwing talk shows that have been interested in talking to me about Galbraith. They're not, obviously, putting me on in order to spread the Galbraithian message, but they want to engage the Galbraithian message because they find contemporary liberal politics to be so anemic. What they find attractive about Ken Galbraith is that he was a vertebrate liberal. And I think we need to get back to encouraging vertebrate liberalism. And by that, I would suggest to you that a lot of these interviewers start by asking about whether or not Galbraithian liberalism has gone out of date and, after all, aren't we in a new period of fiscal responsibility and limited government. And it is impossible to allow those Republican frames of argument to stand. You need to simply stop the conversation and say to them, “But you must understand. Under George W. Bush the United States government is larger than it was under Lyndon Johnson, larger than it was under John F. Kennedy, larger than under Harry Truman, and larger than under Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression. The only time in American history that American government has been larger was under Franklin Roosevelt in the Second World War. What is this Republican Party of limited government?”
MR. REICH: At the risk of just overstating that point, it's very important that followers of Ken Galbraith's books and philosophy, Ken Galbraith who argued for a Keynesianism that was a responsible Keynesianism that called for public spending on schools and on health care and on parks and environment. Understand that we have since the early 1980s embarked on another very different Keynesian experiment. We might call it military Keynesianism. This is something that in the Cold War we didn't do very much until 1980, and that military Keynesianism has, to some extent, in a very limited way, kept the economy going but it has not helped much of the public lead better lives.
AUDIENCE: I've just finished reading a book called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by a fellow named John Perkins. And he describes his role in what he calls America's economic imperialism that rather than invading countries and taking them over by force – like Iraq, I guess -- that we were subjugating them. And he describes his personal role in that by economic means, by giving them so much money and lending that they can never repay and, therefore, we own them. So it's been a kind of way of taking over countries by subjecting them to unreasonable debt. What did John Galbraith, what were his thoughts on our role economically in the world in that way?
MR. PARKER: Galbraith was drawn to the problem of global development quite early. In fact, he began in the early 1950s to teach the very first course that Harvard ever offered on international development. He extended his practical knowledge in the 1950s through his work in India and then, of course, continued on as Indian Ambassador in the 1960s. You'll find Galbraith as early as the late 1950s emphasizing the role of education, particularly the role of the education of women, the central need to provide for sufficient domestic production of agricultural goods so that poor populations are not subject to the whims of global agricultural markets. And, finally, encouraging domestic development of industrial and urban sectors rather than relying on the importation of vast amounts of first world capital in order to follow a Western development model. So I think Galbraith has been quite consistent on this.
AUDIENCE: Okay. And on the World Bank, for example, did he have …
MR. PARKER: Oh, no. You can find him in the '80s and '90s consistently criticizing the behavior of the World Bank and the IMF under strategic adjustment terms. The record there is spotless.
MR. REICH: One of the best books coming out of the Indian experience for Ken Galbraith is called The Culture of Mass Poverty, which I think opened a lot of people's eyes to not only have the international economy, the international trade, international direct investment may inadvertently maintain mass poverty, but also what many countries need to do for themselves.
MR. CARROLL: Before coming to you, sir, I'd like to make just an observation. I think one of the keys to understanding this man's power is to see his national and international reach in the context of a profound commitment to a locality, to this place, actually, to Boston, Cambridge. This is, of course, symbolized powerfully not only by his major and adult lifelong commitment to Harvard University and its community, even as he was marginal to the tradition of academic appointment, his powerful commitment to the Kennedy political tradition that is so alive in this state, his faithful support of Senator Kennedy. And when Congressman Kennedy in Massachusetts was in office and Congressman Kennedy in Rhode Island, a proud, clear affirmation. But, also, how many books did Ken publish?
MR. PARKER: Well, 48, actually. There are 42 published by Houghton Mifflin, but there are half a dozen more. Now, you have to remember those sold eight million copies, and he didn't write his first book on his own until he was 44. So for those of you still thinking about becoming a writer, good luck.
MR. CARROLL: Well, it goes to my point. 42 of his books published by the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin Company. I'm sure that John Kenneth Galbraith understood the power of that Boston tradition. This is the week in which The Atlantic Monthly announced its move to Washington. Professor Galbraith, a major contributor over the decades to The Atlantic Monthly. This Boston tradition was precious to him, is precious to him. And it's important to claim him as someone whose greatness is in part because of the great soil that he sank his roots so deeply in. Yes, sir?
AUDIENCE: My name is (inaudible), and I'm Serbian. In Dostoyevsky's novel Brothers Karamazov, two characters engaged in conversation, and one told the other it is always very useful to hear intelligent men. We have to quote Dostoyevsky's character today in listening to you gentlemen. It is very useful to listen to intelligent men.
MR. PARKER: Thank you. That's very nice.
AUDIENCE: Not only us, but the leaders of our government would have liked, would be useful to hear what you said tonight. Unfortunately, as many of us who know, our government now is a much worse situation than it ever was since America began. Tonight there is going to be a documentary that Roosevelt and Churchill wanted World War II to take place. They wanted it. They told us that. Tonight you have to listen to that at 9:00. You know that the Second World War started when Adolf Hitler wanted to join Danzig, which had 400,000 Germans and 1,600 Poles. They said no to that. Churchill did not want anything to do with Hitler. At the end of the war, Hitler was dead but 50 million human beings died. Nowadays …
MR. CARROLL: Excuse me, sir. I appreciate very much your invoking this important piece of history that Professor Galbraith was present for. Would you conclude with a comment or a question and then I'll ask …
AUDIENCE: My question is going to relate to the short comment. If you did not intervene, it would be shorter.
MR. CARROLL: I'll welcome the shortness.
AUDIENCE: Okay. Incidentally, I like very much what you write but today's remark does not …
MR. CARROLL: That's another subject. Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Saddam Hussein wanted to join Kuwait because at one time that was one country during the Ottoman Empire. We told him we have nothing to do with that and then when he entered, again we invaded Iraq and the whole hell broke out. Now, in connection with that, this is my question. All three of you, if you don't mind answering, what is better for the world, peace at any price or victory at any price?
MR. CARROLL: What is better for the world, peace at any price or victory at any price? Was that the question?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
MR. CARROLL: Well, actually, either of you might jump off from that to reflect on Professor Galbraith's experience of …
MR. PARKER: I think particularly sitting here at the Kennedy Library, because I sat upstairs in the research library of this building for so many weeks and so many months and was so touched to handle documents from the Kennedy Administration. And, of course, one of them is Professor Galbraith's draft for President Kennedy's 1961 Inaugural Address. As you probably know, besides Ted Sorensen and the President himself, Professor Galbraith was one of those asked by the President to prepare a draft for that inaugural. And the line that I most remember from Ken's draft that survives in that inaugural of John F. Kennedy is, "We must never negotiate out of fear, but we must never fear to negotiate."
What this country has got to learn is how to strike a balance between the export of fear and its willingness to negotiate as much with its allies as with its enemies. That's how I would answer your question.
MR. CARROLL: Thank you. And over here?
AUDIENCE: No doubt analysis of what happened in the last election will go on for decades.
MR. CARROLL: A little closer to the microphone, please.
AUDIENCE: Did you hear the first part?
MR. CARROLL: No. Start over.
AUDIENCE: No doubt what happened in the last election will be analyzed for decades to come. How did the Bush gang get in? I can't imagine that Professor Galbraith with his astute wit did not comment on this to some of you, particularly you, Mr. Parker. And the more we understand about how they did that, I mean a lot of people feel that this is the beginnings of a fascist takeover. And there's a lot of resemblance to what went on in Germany in the '30s, I guess. You know, maybe that's stretching it a little, but I'm not so sure. Did Professor Galbraith say anything about this, express any of his own thinking about this to you? Because the more we understand it, the more I think we will be prepared to try to do something about it.
MR. CARROLL: Either one of you?
MR. PARKER: I can tell you what he told me on the phone the day after George Bush was re-elected. I called him up and I said, “So, Ken, what do you think?” There was a pause at the end of the line, and then rumbled the voice across those lines, “Richard, I never thought I'd long for the Reagan Administration.” (laughter)
AUDIENCE: But did he go any further?
MR. PARKER: I don't think he in any way sees us as on the verge of a fascist America. This is a man who survived Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, George Bush Senior and George W. So he thinks that the Republic and even he will survive for some time into the future. I think that what we need to remember is that in some sense it's what Bob has been saying earlier and what Ken has always said, which is that we must not lose sight of our determination to keep on working for the values and beliefs that matter.
The moment that I most enjoy recounting is that in the early 1970s, some of you may remember, there was a global food crisis. And the Soviets started buying grain from the United States secretly from the Nixon Administration, and there was talk of food problems around the world. And one theory was that meteorology was to blame, this thing called the El Nino had something to do with it and perhaps global warming and the like. And some young reporter went to Professor Galbraith and asked him, do you think that climate has something to do with the global food shortage? And he pulled himself up, looked down at the young reporter, and said, "Young man, never blame the Deity for anything as long as Richard Nixon is in the White House." (laughter)
I think we need to keep Ken Galbraith's sense of humor, pointed humor, alive today. If things are going wrong, we have plenty of people to blame and we know what their first and last names are. But I don't think we need to fear for fascism in the future.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. I feel better.
MR. REICH: If I may, let me add to that. One of the truly great aspects of this book that Richard Parker has written is its intellectual history of the 20th century. Not just a biography of Ken Galbraith, but because Ken Galbraith's life is so intertwined with the history of ideas and politics in the 20th century, at least from the '30s on, it's very much of an intellectual history of the 20th century. And one thing that we can see emanating, and it emanates from the book, is an optimism, an optimism about the forces of reform in this country.
Now, it is true that beginning in 1968 and certainly after Watergate, the public's confidence in government began to decline. Indeed, one could argue that Vietnam was the beginning -- Vietnam, then Watergate, Irangate and so forth. And if you asked people in 1960, do you believe that government does basically most of the time what it should do for the public interest, most people said yes. A majority in 1960 said yes. And then that majority steadily declined until there is a minority of around, last time I looked, around 32% who will agree with the statement that the government does most of the time what is in the public's interest.
Now, it's very difficult to sell the concepts of The Affluent Society that we need a vigorous public sector when the public is so distrustful. And, yet, there is something that Ken Galbraith has pointed to, a fundamental asymmetry between the administrations of those people who don't believe in government and the administrations of those people who do. And that asymmetry is that when you don't believe in government and you screw up, you are advancing your cause.
AUDIENCE: Jack Porter from Newton. I have a question. As I get older, I keep dusting off some of these books that I read in the '60s. And you mentioned intellectual history. And I'm very curious what his relationship was with intellectuals like C. Wright Mills on his left and A. A. Burley on his right. What was the relationship of Galbraith in the '50s and '60s to these men and some of his contemporaries? I'm very curious.
MR. PARKER: He wasn't acquainted with Mills. He certainly had read Burley's work in the 1930s, but it was not … I mean he encountered Burley a few times in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. The thing that always struck me was how much Ken Galbraith was a creation of Ken Galbraith. The intellectual figure that was most powerful in his life, without doubt, was John Maynard Keynes. And the other, I think, most influential man in his life was his father, Archie. Keynes because for Ken's generation he finally provided a theoretical structure that could both save capitalism and tame capitalism.
I had an Oxford tutor, I don't know if Bob had the same tutor -- Tommy Balog(?) -- famous English Laborite Keynesian. And he always loved to tell the story of sitting at high table years ago when a (inaudible) asked him, “Why is it that you economists always are at war with one another so vehemently?” And he said, “Well, you must understand that economics is much like modern religion.” He said, “Try to imagine Adam Smith as Abraham, the founder of the tribe, Alfred Marshall as Moses the lawgiver, but John Maynard Keynes as Jesus Christ, who had come to both save and redeem but transform the law.” And that moment that Keynes brought into Ken's generation transformed that entire generation of economists. And the figures that you mentioned, Burley and Mills, while significant as individual thinkers, were always footnotes for the Keynesians of Ken's generation.
AUDIENCE: I have a very quick question. In light of what you said about Professor Galbraith's failure of the strategic bombing. And as Oppenheimer said as the first rocket hit London, great success but wrong planet. But what were Professor Galbraith's thoughts of when the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What did he think of the American use of that force? And how did his relationship with JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis direct … How did his thinking … And is there any of that …
MR. PARKER: He was appalled by Hiroshima.
AUDIENCE: Pardon?
MR. PARKER: He was appalled by Hiroshima as a member of the Strategic Bombing Survey in Japan. And as for the use of strategic bombing in the Kennedy … I'm not quite sure of what the second part of the question was about Kennedy?
MR. CARROLL: What were his conclusions after whatever relationship he had with the missile crisis, what were his conclusions about the threat of nuclear war, I would assume?
MR. PARKER: His conclusions after the Cuban Missile Crisis were no different than President Kennedy's we now understand, which was that within 60 days after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy began in secret the preparation of the speech that became the famous American University address on containing the nuclear arms race. That both men had stared at death and seen that it was death for the planet as a whole, and that it was madness to continue down this road.
AUDIENCE: Well, the man …
MR. PARKER: It's important that you read that speech in light of Kennedy's experience in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And why he kept the drafting of that speech secret within the White House. He invited only a handful of aides, including Galbraith, to participate in or comment on the drafting of the speech and didn't even give a draft to his own State Department or Defense Department until 48 hours before he gave it, knowing full well what his aides and State and Defense would think of the speech he was about to give.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. As a man who lived through the trench warfare in World War I knew … (inaudible)
AUDIENCE: What was his viewpoint on entitlements. Professor Reich mentioned his concern about more medical care, more health care, rather. What is his viewpoint about the future of the entitlements, some of which are mandated and cannot be dealt with by Congress, which continue to go up? For instance, we just learned recently that I don't know how many billions of dollars will now be needed to support military retirees and their spouses. This is something that's relatively new, at least in terms of public knowledge. What about the future of entitlements, most of which are important? Can we afford them? What did he say and what would he say about the escalating amounts?
MR. REICH: I can answer the second part of your question, that is, what would he say. Richard can talk about what he did say. I think that Ken Galbraith would say and will say and probably has said that the problem of entitlements basically is a problem not of Social Security. Social Security is not a problem. I want to assure you that it is not in crisis. I was a trustee of the Social Security Trust Fund and I can tell you that if you simply assume economic growth that is normal, an average level of economic growth such as we've had over the past hundred years and project it into the future, the Social Security Trust Fund at worst has a little bit of a problem that can easily be remedied without any drastic fix. And, by the way, diverting trillions of dollars out of Social Security into private accounts is not a way to fix Social Security, number one.
Number two, the real problem with entitlements is Medicare and to a lesser extent Medicaid, but that's all really because we have a health care crisis in this country. And it's not Medicare's fault and it's not Medicaid's fault. The problem is we have the most expensive per capita health care system in the world, and yet it is also one of the least efficient. We are the only company … I was going to say “company” in the world. It feels like a company sometimes. We are the only country in the world where our health care system is designed to avoid sick people. And I mean that quite literally. Health care providers spend enormous amounts of money advertising and marketing, trying to avoid sick people and finding groups of people that are likely to have lower risk of ill health. This makes no sense. Administratively, it's very costly. And what we have to do … Unfortunately, Social Security is sort of preoccupying the public. And what we ought to be talking about, as we began to talk about in 1994, is how to fix a crazy, incredibly expensive, out-of-control, and very, very inefficient and inequitable health care system.
But what did he say?
MR. PARKER: Professor Reich does a terrific job of channeling Professor Galbraith. What I can tell you is that talking with him a few months ago about this Social Security crisis question, Galbraith predicted that the President was going to fail in his attempts to transform the Social Security system. Because he said this administration and this President think that what they're doing is carrying out political warfare against the liberals in attacking Social Security, when it was simply that the liberals had the common sense to recognize what the American people wanted. And what this administration, blinded by its own ideology, misunderstood was that it was standing against the ideas and interests and desires of most of the American people, not against American liberalism. And he predicted in November that this would not succeed.
AUDIENCE: Listening to you this afternoon, Mr. Parker, I think that Professor Galbraith's trust in you to represent his views adequately here this afternoon was well placed, indeed. I am interested in knowing when you first began thinking about writing a biography of Professor Galbraith and whether there was any one in your background that persuaded Professor Galbraith that you would be a worthy biographer or whether the two of you just hit it off and were very compatible.
MR. PARKER: I decided that I wanted to write this biography about midway through the Reagan Administration. I didn't actually get to work on it until the early 1990s, for a variety of reasons. But I did so because I was looking at the current debate over economics, not only in the public but in professional economics, and found both bankrupt quite frankly. I mean in the 1980s there was a conservative push within the profession for rational expectations and monetarism and supply side and for monetarism and supply side in the realm of policy as well. And it was fairly obvious to me that monetarism was not going to work as an intellectual exercise nor as a programmatic exercise, which, of course, turned out to be true. There is no country in the world today that actually uses Friedmanite monetarism to guide its monetary policy. Rational expectations thought it had put a dagger in the heart of Keynesianism in the late 1970s and instead found itself thrusting the dagger into its own heart in the early 1980s, so much so that the prominent figures who won Nobel laureates for their work in rational expectations no longer have anything to do with the field.
And as a consequence, seeing this kind of dead end in both contemporary theory and contemporary politics, I started to look around for what seemed to me to have made sense in the past. I wanted to understand why it had made sense in the past and to actually weigh whether elements of it might make sense in the future, and I found John Kenneth Galbraith.
As to how he and I hit it off, I certainly know that I hit it off with him. Kitty can speak for whether he hit it off with me. I have no doubt that for a man who can turn out 20 books in eight years, waiting eight years for me to finish one must have tried his patience. But he was in incredible subject. I can say this quite honestly; he never attempted to influence anything that I wrote. He said at the very beginning, "I don't want to read the manuscript." He said, "I would like the opportunity to look at it in galleys." And, in fact, I gave it to him in galleys last September and then spent, as my wife will tell you, a miserable ten days with my breath baited and my heart stopped waiting to hear from him.
And, of course, he then called and said, "We need to talk." And I went over and he said, "There are some problems." And he said, "Let's look here at page 17." And I opened to page 17, and he said, "Where you say I grew up in Iona Station, Canada, in a farm along a dirt road, Richard, it was a gravel road." (laughter) 95 years of age. And we did a dozen more of these. And then, to her credit, Mrs. Galbraith weighed in and explained to me that I got the sequence of cities which they had first visited in 1938 in Europe partly out of order, that they had gone to Vienna before Berlin, not Berlin before Vienna. So the book has been vetted.
AUDIENCE: I'm glad you brought up the subject of how Professor Galbraith felt and thought about the military budget as opposed to the domestic budget for a couple of reasons. One is, my name is Susan Shaere and I run an organization called WAND, Women's Actions for New Directions, and we do arms control and disarmament. We're doing a great job, don't you think? And our mission is to reduce the military budget and get money into human and environmental needs. And I spoke to Professor Galbraith a couple of years ago at a party. I told him what I did, which he knew; he's been involved with our organization for 20 years. And I asked him for advice, and he said, "Good luck." And I think it was because we were at a party and he really wanted to have a good time instead of giving me any advice.
But I'm wondering if in this climate if he said anything to you about what we could be doing, because I know he believed that putting money into the Pentagon was not productive and was, in fact, destructive. So he must have given you his thoughts.
MR. PARKER: I know that he believed that America deserved a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, which it hasn't gotten. And I know that he's greatly concerned about the ways in which this issue of global terrorism is being shaped into a war against global terrorism that requires a massive increase in spending for the Pentagon. He believes that, in fact, Europe's experience with terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s and a reliance on police and intelligence activities rather than a reliance on aircraft carriers, submarines, missiles, tanks and invasions probably will bear greater fruit for us. And, of course, he believes that we have missed an enormously important opportunity to drastically reduce the number of nuclear weapons on the planet today. I haven't asked him about specifics of Iran nuclear facilities or North Korea.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering if either one of you or both could briefly summarize the difference with Ken Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
MR. PARKER: Light and dark.
AUDIENCE: I'm sorry, what was that?
MR. PARKER: Light and dark. If you were a more religious audience, I'd say good and evil. We're trying to keep secular.
AUDIENCE: If I'm not mistaken …
MR. PARKER: Tall and short, right, Bob says.
AUDIENCE: Didn't Nixon pretty much take the advice of Milton Friedman, I'm not sure, but I vaguely remember something at that time.
MR. PARKER: Nixon didn't take much advice from Milton Friedman. And one index of Milton Friedman's relationship to the deeper currents of American life is that he accused Nixon of being the most socialist president in American history.
AUDIENCE: Could you also say who you think are the economic gurus of today, both right and left?
MR. PARKER: Well, I think Bob Reich is one of them and deserves to be. I think what makes Bob so important to our generation is that he combines Ken's sense of analytic ability with the political courage and vision that Ken also had. There are other economists -- Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and a more recent work that he's been doing on the so-called Millennium Development Goals -- all of whom are important. And yet in some funny way, the role that Ken Galbraith played as a public intellectual in the 1950s is a role being played in a peculiar way by Bono today of the rock group U2. I don't know whether this is the way in which serious culture has been denatured by television or not, but it seems to me that there is a generation that looks to rock stars for moral and political guidance, whether we like it or not. And so in that sense, perhaps if we could just get Bob and Bono playing together onstage as a benefit for liberal values, we might have the combination that we need.
MR. CARROLL: I'd note …
MR. PARKER: You on drums.
MR. CARROLL: I'd note, Richard, that the highest compliment that seemed to be able to be paid to His Holiness John Paul II last week was that he had achieved the status of a rock star. Robert, do you have a last remark?
MR. REICH: There's still so much to be said. I don't know how many of you saw the Gallup poll last week in which it was revealed that about 18% of Americans now believe that the earth will end in their lifetime. And approximately 17% of Americans consider themselves to be liberals. So more people believe the earth will end in their lifetime than describe themselves as being liberal.
The word liberal is obviously gone out of fashion. Ken Galbraith is and was perhaps the leading liberal in America. And as you look to the future, I think we need at least Ken to be with us for another 20 or 30 years, given how things are going.
But I want to especially thank John Shattuck and Debby Leff of the Kennedy Library for putting this on. And also, you, Jim, for hosting. But most especially my dear friend Richard Parker for dedicating the last eight or nine years of his life to a book that is so important and a fitting memorial to one who continues to live with us, who had and still towers over us all.
MR. CARROLL: He embodies the legacy of this place. We all know how pleased Professor Galbraith is by this gathering, and we can assume how precious it is to him that it is taking place at the Kennedy Library. Mrs. Galbraith, would you carry away from this place the love and profound respect from everyone gathered here. Please tell Ken how very much we thank him and how we wish him well and continue to depend on him to be with us and to be the ever unmatchable, unsurpassable John Kenneth Galbraith.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. (applause)
