Notes & asides.(John Kenneth Galbraith)

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

Mrs. Galbraith, ladies and gentlemen:

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

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

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

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

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