“Go around the corner to pick up Mr. Galbraith.”
So said Julia Child to me as she settled into the Lincoln Town Car I was driving on nights and weekends in college. I had just ushered Child and her husband Paul into the back seat, and this direction was news to me. I was given the usual pick-up - Child was a frequent customer - and an address for a destination. Both in Cambridge. No second stop.
You can listen to Carrie read this post here.
My first issue was asking Child where “around the corner” I was going without actually letting her know that I didn’t quite know. I looked up, saw the name of the street in front of me, said it, and asked if I should turn left or right. She was short with me, but not as short as I had expected, giving me an inkling that she knew she hadn’t given a second address to dispatch.
She was not as short with me as she was with Paul, though. Maybe short isn’t quite the right word. Exasperated. Much like I had seen my grandfather exasperated as he saw his wife fall into a dementia that eventually left her unable to know him. Paul knew who Julia was at that point, in the late 1980s, but it was clear he wouldn’t know for long. I wanted to hug him. But that was verboten. Besides, his wife was intimidating.
My second issue was the sheer physical reaction I had at the mention of “Mr. Galbraith.” I was shaking. I couldn’t contain my excitement. Just moving the car took all the focus I had.
In my head, I’m saying, “M-m-m-mr G-g-albraith? JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH!” But I just acted cool with Julia - can I call her Julia now, some 30 years later? - and surreptitiously asked her for directions to his house.
You can listen to Carrie read this post here.
This is not what I pictured as I was falling in love for the first time as a 10-year-old. Not with Galbraith, but with his boss, or the idea of his boss. It may have just been with books, honestly; books about a handsome man who was a war hero and became president and had all of these high ideals for a better society and died tragically one day in Dallas, Texas.
In fourth grade, I got tired of the girls asking me to chase away the boys who were chasing after them, only to watch the girls go back to figuring out how to get the boys to chase them again, and made my way during lunch recess to the library of Doris Hancock Elementary School. Mr. Fletcher, who was as old as my grandfather, with a gentle demeanor and a voice like Captain Kangaroo, was elated to see an actual student ask if she could spend her lunch reading books.
I was elated by these thick tomes with chapters and textured covers, so different from the weekly, color coded readers that my brain consumed like candy in the classroom.
And here were all these books that told the story of a boy born second, overcoming expectations, living on a slip of land in an ocean that was so far away from Las Vegas I couldn’t conceive of it. A man who worked on the first pre-United Nations summit in San Francisco. Who before that was leading his fearsome crew on his PT boat (109, since you’re asking) when they were viciously attacked by the Germans, and who grabbed a wounded man - or maybe two or three or 10 - and swam them miles back to shore.
He was a leader. He was brave. He could swim.
I was 10, and I was highly idealistic. I wanted to believe the world could be a better place, where the fathers of my classmates didn’t get captured in a war that people on the evening news hated.
As a teenager I would watch tapes of John F. Kennedy’s now infamous interactions with UPI reporter Helen Thomas - the only woman in the White House press corps - and was bothered by his dismissiveness. To him, she was a laughingstock; an anomaly. Would he laugh at me, I wondered.
And it broke my heart later to realize that Kennedy used his Secret Service as quasi pimps, bringing girls in from Lafayette Park across from the White House.
But Galbraith… He was an advisor to Kennedy, running Southeast Asia policy from his perch as Ambassador to India. He opposed all involvement in Vietnam, which he saw as a failure in the making. He helped construct Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which acted on the Keynesian belief that the aim of economics is to make the world better for everybody, not create winners and losers.
“The Affluent Society” was the first economics book I ever read. But it was Galbraith’s first novel, “A Tenured Professor,” that made me a life-long fan. This slim volume - which still sits in my bookcase - came out probably a year before that fateful day I picked up Julia and Paul Child. It’s about a professor at Harvard who figures out a computer program that could predict the stock market, and therefore allow its user to sell short and make money.
Selling short is about betting against a stock, benefitting when the stock price goes down. At first, the colleagues of the titular character tut tutted behind his back. It was unseemly for a Tenured Professor to be dabbling in stocks, much less raking in the dough - though Galbraith’s mentor Keynes became a millionaire less from his economic work than his shrewd market acumen.
The delicious part of this book, though, isn’t that the tenured professor made money, it’s what he did with it. He set up political action committees that funded lobbying for causes that benefitted poor people. THAT’s when his colleagues got mad. That’s when the people whose stocks the professor was shorting got mad. That’s when politicians got mad. They eventually passed a law prohibiting him from doing it.
The book is dry and cynical and hilarious. It remains my touchstone for U.S. political and economic morality.
And Galbraith is my hero for his unwavering view of justice over wealth.
So when I pulled up to his house and walked up the long winding steps to the tall carved wooden double doors, I felt what people in my mother’s generation must have felt meeting one of the Beatles. And when the door opened, my neck cranked higher and higher as my eyes made my way to his face.
I must have said something like, “I’m here with Ms. Child.” I have no idea. He was very friendly and - because there were four people in the car, and because he was so tall - he sat next to me in the front seat.
All I could think of was, “Fuck. John Kenneth Galbraith is sitting next to me. I can’t wait to tell my mom.”
I had met celebrities before and after. I grew up in Vegas. And I learned pretty young that money and fame do not buy happiness.
John Kenneth Galbraith, and through him John Maynard Keynes, taught me that economics is not so much about math as it is a study of how human nature and systems interact. Without realizing it, I have made this my life’s underlying inquiry. Actually, I think it was my way of looking at the world before I ever heard of economics. I have always fought for the underdog. I have always chased the bullies. I have always been mystified by people who excuse them. Or think it’s all a playground game.
It’s why I’m a journalist. It’s why I’m an idealist. And it’s why I’m poor. I never did figure out how to play that damn market.