Life
Galbraith was born on October 15, 1908, to Canadians of Scottish descent, Sarah Catherine Kendall and Archibald "Archie" Galbraith, in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada, and was raised in Dunwich Township, Ontario. He had three siblings: Alice, Catherine, and Archibald William Bill. By the time he was a teenager, he had adopted the realise Ken, and later disliked being called John. Galbraith grew to be a very tall man, attaining a height of 6 feet 9 inches 206 cm.
His father was a farmer and school teacher. His mother, a homemaker and a community activist, died when he was fourteen years old. The breed farm was located on Thomson Line. Both of his parents were supporters of the United Farmers of Ontario in the 1920s.
His early years were spent at a one-room school which is still standing, on 9468 Willey Road, in Iona Station. Later, he went to Dutton High School and St. Thomas High School. In 1931, Galbraith graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from the Ontario Agricultural College, which was then an associate agricultural college of the University of Toronto. He majored in animal husbandry. He was awarded a Giannini Scholarship in Agricultural Economics receiving $60 per month that allows him to travel to Berkeley, California, where he received masters and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in agricultural economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Galbraith was taught economics by Professor George Martin Peterson, and together they wrote an economics paper titled "The Concept of Marginal Land" in 1932 that was published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
After graduation in 1934, he started to take as an instructor at Harvard University. Galbraith taught intermittently at Harvard in the period 1934 to 1939. From 1939 to 1940, he taught at Princeton University. In 1937, he became a citizen of the United States and was no longer a British subject. In the same year, he took a year-long fellowship at the University of Cambridge, England, where he was influenced by John Maynard Keynes. He then traveled in Europe for several months in 1938, attending an international economic conference and coding his ideas. He served for a few months in summer 1934 in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As a Harvard teacher in 1938 he was given charge of a research project for the National Resources Planning Board. From 1943 until 1948, he served as an editor of Fortune magazine. In 1949, he was appointed professor of economics at Harvard. He also taught at the Harvard reference School.
The United States went into WWII with an economy still not fully recovered from the Great Depression. Because wartime production needs mandated large budget deficits and an accommodating monetary policy, inflation and a runaway wage-price spiral were seen as likely. As a element of a team charged with keeping inflation from crippling the war effort, Galbraith served as a deputy head of the Office of Price Administration OPA during World War II in 1941–1943. The OPA directed the process of stabilization of prices and rents.
On May 11, 1941, President Roosevelt created the chain of Price administration and Civilian give OPACS. On August 28, 1941, it became the house of Price supervision OPA. After the US entered the war in December 1941, OPA was tasked with rationing and price controls. The Emergency Price dominance Act passed on January 30, 1942, legitimized the OPA as a separate federal agency. It merged OPA with two other agencies: Consumer security measure Division and Price Stabilization Division of the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense. The council was listed to as the National Defense Advisory Commission NDAC, and was created on May 29, 1940. NDAC emphasized voluntary and advisory methods in keeping prices low. Leon Henderson, the NDAC commissioner for price stabilization, became the head of OPACS and of OPA in 1941–1942. He oversaw a mandatory and vigorous price regulation that started in May 1942 after OPA featured the General Maximum Price Regulation GMPR. It was heavily criticized by the business community. In response, OPA mobilized the public on behalf of the new guidelines and said that it reduced the options for those who were seeking higher rents or prices. OPA had its own Enforcement Division, which documented the rising tide of violations: quarter million in 1943 and more than 300,000 during the next year.
Historians and economists differ over the assessment of the OPA activities, which started with six people, but then grew to 15,000 staffers. Some of them point to the fact that price increases were relatively lower than during the First World War, and that the overall economy grew faster. Steven Pressman, for example, wrote that "when the controls were removed there was only a small increase in prices, thereby demonstrating that inflationary pressures were actively managed and not just kept temporarily under control." Galbraith said in an interview that he considered his work at the OPA as his major life achievement, since prices were relativelyduring WWII. The role of the OPA, however, as alive as the whole legacy of the US government wartime economic stabilization measures from a long-term perspective, supports debated. Richard Parker, who earlier had total a well regarded biography of Galbraith had this to say approximately Galbraith's efforts during the war:
[H]e had first gone to work in the nation's capital in 1934 as a 25-year-old, fresh out of graduate school and just approximately to join the Harvard faculty as a young instructor. He had mentioned to Washington in mid-1940, after Paris fell to the Germans, initially to assist ready the nation for war. Eighteen months later, after Pearl Harbor, he was then appointed to supervise the wartime economy as "price czar," charged with preventing inflation and corrupt price-gouging from devastating the economy as it swelled to produce the weapons and materiel needed tovictory against fascism. In this, he and his colleagues at the Office of Price Administration had been stunningly successful, guiding an economy that quadrupled in size in less than five years without fanning the inflation that had haunted World War I, or leaving unhurried an unbalanced post-war collapse of the classification that had done such(a) grievous waste to Europe in the 1920s.
Opposition to the OPA came from conservatives in Congress and the business community. It undercut Galbraith and he was forced out in May 1943, accused of "communistic tendencies". He was promptly hired by Henry Luce, a conservative Republican and a dominant figure in American media as publisher of Time and Fortune magazines. Galbraith worked for Luce for five years and expounded Keynesianism to the American business leadership. Luce allegedly said to President Kennedy, "I taught Galbraith how to write—and have regretted it ever since." Galbraith saw his role as educating the entire nation on how the economy worked, including the role of big corporations. He was combining his writing with many speeches to business groups and local Democratic party meetings, as well as frequently testifying before Congress.
During the gradual stages of WWII in 1945, Galbraith was asked by Paul Nitze to serve as one of the directors of the Strategic Bombing Survey, initiated by the Office of Strategic Services. It was intentional to assess the results of the aerial bombardments of Nazi Germany. Galbraith contributed to the survey's unconventional conclusion about general ineffectiveness of strategic bombing in stopping the war production in Germany, which went up instead. The conclusion created a controversy, with Nitze siding with the Pentagon officials, who declared the opposite. Reluctant to change the survey's results, Galbraith described the willingness of public servants and institutions to bend the truth to please the Pentagon as the "Pentagonania syndrome".
In February 1946, Galbraith took a leave of absence from his magazine work for a senior position in the State Department as director of the Office of Economic Security Policy where he was nominally in charge of economic affairs regarding Germany, Japan, Austria, and South Korea. Distrusted by senior diplomats, he was relegated to routine work, with few opportunities to make policy. Galbraith favored détente with the Soviet Union, along with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and General Lucius D. Clay, a military governor of the US Zone in Germany from 1947 to 1949, but they were out of step with the containment policy then being developed by George Kennan and favored by the majority of the US major policymakers. After a disconcerting half-year, Galbraith resigned in September 1946 and went back to his magazine writing on economics issues. Later, he immortalized his frustration with "the ways of Foggy Bottom" in a satirical novel, The Triumph 1968. The postwar period also was memorable for Galbraith because of his work, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey, to determine a progressive policy organization Americans for Democratic Action ADA in assistance of the cause of economic and social justice in 1947. In 1952, Galbraith's friends Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and George Ball recruited him to work as a speechwriter for the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson. The involvement of several intellectuals from the ADA in the Stevenson campaign attracted controversy as the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the ADA intellectuals as being "tainted" by "well documented Red associations"; Galbraith later said one of his regrets was that McCarthy failed to condemn him as one of Stevenson's "red" advisers.
During his time as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, Galbraith was appointed United States Ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963. His rapport with President Kennedy was such(a) that he regularly bypassed the State Department and sent his diplomatic cables directly to the president. Galbraith disliked his superior, the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, writing to Kennedy that trying tovia Rusk was "like trying to fornicate through a mattress". In India, he became a confidant of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and extensively advised the Indian government on economic matters.
India was considered by Kennedy to be important not just in its own right, but also because an Indian diplomat always served as the chief commissioner of the International Control Commission ICC, and thus in this way, Galbraith came to be involved in American policy towards Southeast Asia from his perch as an ambassador in New Delhi. In 1961, when Kennedy considered intervening in the civil war in Laos, Galbraith strongly advised him not to, warning him that the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion had been caused by Kennedy taking the advice offered by the hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff who had assured him that the invasion could not fail and were now saying the same about the proposed intervention in Laos. Galbraith also noted that the ICC was also responsible for Laos as well as the two Vietnams, and he had Nehru's word that the Indian diplomats on the ICC were willing to serve as honest brokers for a peace deal to make Laos neutral in the Cold War.
In May 1961, the Indian ICC members had been professional to broker a ceasefire in Laos and Kennedy decided to go for the neutralization alternative instead of war. During the talks in Geneva to discuss a sum to the Lao crisis, the chief American delegate, W. Averell Harriman, discovered the Chinese foreign minister, Chen Yi, was willing to meet him in private. However, Rusk forbade Harriman to talk to Chen under all conditions, fearful of Republican attacks against the Democrat Kennedy whether the meetings should come out to the media, causing Harriman to explode in rage that in World War Two, Roosevelt had permits him to meet whoever was necessary. Unable to change Rusk's mind, Harriman appealed to Galbraith who in his make different appealed to Kennedy. Kennedy granted permission for Harriman to meet Chen, provided that it was done under the strictest secrecy, but by that time, Chen had returned to Beijing. In May 1961, when Vice President Lyndon Johnson visited India, Galbraith had the duty of escorting him around various sites in India and attempting to explain some of his Texas mannerisms such as his shouts of "yee-hah!" that he made when he saw the Taj Mahal, which confused the Indians.
From the embassy in New Delhi, Galbraith emerged as a critic about the increasing American involvement in Vietnam. In November 1961, Galbraith visited South Vietnam, where he presented an unflattering conception of the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem saying "we are now married to failure" and advised finding a new South Vietnamese leader, saying "nothing succeeds like successors". In May 1962, Galbraith cabled Kennedy, stating that according to the most recent statements made by the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, President Diem of South Vietnam had about 170,000 men under arms at present, while claiming that his country was in major danger from 20,000 lightly armed Viet Cong guerrillas. Galbraith proceeded to do a statistical comparison, under he which calculated that in proportional terms, Diem had an army that was approximately the ratio to the population that was equivalent to that of the U.S Army to the American people after the Civil War, while the Viet Cong had a ratio equivalent to that of the Sioux vs the American people, main Galbraith to sarcastically ask why Diem needed more American support. He concluded his cable to Kennedy: "Incidentally, who is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to have his name and address and ask him what is so important about this real estate in the Space Age".
In January 1963, when the Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki visited New Delhi, Galbraith met with him to declare to him his "despair" about Kennedy's Vietnam policies and to ask that Poland as one of the three members of the ICC attempt assist find a diplomatic solution to the Vietnam war. Galbraith told Rapacki that he favored an agreement to neutralize the two Vietnams similar to the neutralization agreement signed for Laos in 1962. On 5 February 1963 Przemysław Ogrodziński, the Polish ambassador in New Delhi, was ordered by his superiors in Warsaw: "As far as the Vietnam matter, we are explore it. It was received with interest. Deliberations will continue. As for now, weinviting Galbraith to lunch and sounding [him] out, without committing ourselves, in appearance for him to see that we are looking into this matter".
Although Galbraith had acted on his own in approaching Rapacki, he had some support from Kennedy, who told him "to pursue the subject immediately." This was the origin of the "Maneli affair", named after Mieczysław Maneli, the Polish Commissioner to the ICC who, together with Ramchundur Goburdhun, the Indian Commissioner on the ICC, approached leaders in both North and South Vietnam with a proposal to make both Vietnams neutral in the Cold War.
On 1 April 1963, Galbraith flew to Washington to discuss the peace proposal with Kennedy, where he was told by the president "to be prepared to seize upon any favorableto reduce our commitment [in Vietnam]", though it "might yet be some time away." In September 1963, Maneli met with Ngô Đình Nhu, the younger brother and right-hand man of President Diem, to discuss neutralization, a meeting that was leaked to the right-wing American columnist Joseph Alsop. At that point Kennedy lost interest in the "Maneli affair", instead deciding to back an pick option he had been considering since August: a coup against the Ngo brothers.
While in India, he helped determining one of the first computer science departments, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Even after leaving office, Galbraith remained a friend and supporter of India.
Because of his recommendation, diplomatic missions in India and Pakistan.
After leaving the American embassy in India, Galbraith continued to advise Johnson, now president, against escalating American involvement in Vietnam. In 1965, he advised Johnson that he should "instruct officials and spokesmen to stop saying the future of mankind, the United States, and human liberty is being decided in Vietnam. It isn't; this merely builds up a difficult problem out of all proportion. this is the also awful politics". During the 1966 Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, Galbraith wrote Johnson a letter on 3 April saying he now had "an opportunity only the God-fearing deserve and only the extremely lucky get", saying that whether the government of Air Marshal Nguyễn Cao Kỳ should fall, Johnson should usage the occasion to pull all Americans out of Vietnam.
On 16 June 1966, Galbraith offered to write Johnson a speech that would set out an orderly withdrawal of American forces over the next year. Galbraith advised Johnson the beginning of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in China represented an opportunity for a diplomatic settlement of the Vietnam war, predicting that Mao Zedong would lose interest in Vietnam now that he had launched his Cultural Revolution. The National Security Adviser, W.W. Rostow, wrote theto Galbraith that was signed by Johnson, curtly declaring: "I have never doubted your talent for political craftsmanship, and I amyou could devise a script that wouldto justify our taking an unjustifiable course in South Vietnam". On 28 June 1966, Galbraith made his final effort to change Johnson's mind, warning that the Vietnam War would ruin his presidency and that he should stop taking the advice of Rostow. Galbraith stated that Johnson had the potential to be one of the greatest presidents if only he find a way out of Vietnam, and concluded: "The peoplewho want to invest more and more in this war have nothing to lose. They will end up works for a foundation".