Undismal scientist.(John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics)(Book Review)

John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, by Richard Parker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 832 pp., $35)

MIDWAY through this doorstop of a biography, the narrative is interrupted by a raft of photographs. There is John Kenneth Galbraith stooping--always stooping, as if his great beak of a nose were dragging him down from Olympian heights to a more mortal level--to speak with Jackie Kennedy and JFK; with Jawaharlal Nehru and George McGovern; with Jimmy Carter and Julia Child; with Bill and Hillary Clinton. The world has changed, these photographs seem to suggest, but Galbraith has been a hawk-nosed constant, casting a lengthy patrician shadow over the decades-long waning of the American liberal establishment.

Except that Galbraith is not really a patrician, by birth or breeding. Raised a Scottish-Canadian farmboy in rural Ontario, he spent his undergraduate years at an obscure agricultural college and found his way into the New Deal brain trust and the Ivy League half by accident. And the strangeness of this fate, in which his older identity as a rural nobody was subsumed into a variety of unexpected roles--bestselling public intellectual, ambassador to India, confidant to presidents and presidential candidates--would seem to have the makings of an acute and distinctly American psychological drama, rich in mystery and contradiction.

Unfortunately, though Richard Parker's biography runs for over 800 pages, it's only in the photographs that the contradictions, public and private, of Galbraith's unusual life come into focus. What Parker has given us, as his title suggests, is an intellectual biography, not an intimate portrait: Galbraith's relationship with his wife and children, his famous friendships (with this magazine's founder, among others), and his affinity for celebrity and power are all touched on but rarely analyzed. Parker is more interested in his subject's books and times, you might say, than his life and times, and while the books are interesting and the times fascinating, there is an absence at the center of the biography, a place where Galbraith withdraws from his biographer's gaze, or where Parker fears to tread.

Instead of intimacy, Parker favors broad sweeps and wide canvases, in which Galbraith's life opens out into the story of the American century, and particularly the nation's various political and ideological conflicts. This approach has its advantages: Parker writes cleanly and fluidly, and his subject--an idiosyncratic Keynesian who became FDR's price czar, worked for Henry Luce's Fortune, took part in the Strategic Bombing Survey, wrote speeches for Adlai Stevenson in the early 1950s and bestselling books throughout that decade--is no bad protagonist to follow through the tumult of mid-century America.

Even when Galbraith found himself far from the action--as ambassador to India, for instance, during the height of the Kennedy-Khrushchev staredown--Parker has an opportunity to shed some light into the era's obscurer corners. So we watch the Cuban missile crisis both from the Kennedy White House and from the vantage point of the Indian subcontinent, where Galbraith was forced to improvise an American diplomatic strategy to cope with the outbreak of the Sino-Indian War--a fascinating and almost-forgotten moment in Cold War history.

The book's intellectual narrative is less engaging, unfortunately, though this isn't entirely Parker's fault. Like any biographer of a talented writer, he's forced to offer brief and workmanlike summaries of famous books like The Affluent Society, which feel particularly plodding when contrasted with the often-sparkling excerpts of Galbraith's own prose that dot the biography's pages. And while Parker has taken as a subject one of the last economists who wrote for a general audience, a reader who lacks an abiding interest in economic theory is likely to find his eyes glazing over at times, amid detailed explanations of yet another slight Galbraithian revision of Keynesian theory.