John Kenneth Galbraith

Karsh, Yousuf, 1908-2002 · 1966

When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation wished to photograph me for television while I was photographing someone I had never met, Galbraith was my choice. He had a lined, craggy, and strikingly brooding look. He wrote with a clarity and power that make his books on economics so easy to read. Above all, he had a searing wit. He was, in short, a unique personality well worth meeting and recording. Subsequently I included his portrait in an exhibition of 125 world figures entitled 'Men Who Make Our World,' which opened in New York to mark the Centennial of Canadian Confederation. Regrettably Galbraith could not attend. He had not, however, forgotten the occasion, and timed a telegram to reach me on the gala opening night: 'I would be there if I could, if only to discover who the other hundred and twenty-four people are.' That message was typical. Galbraith likes to tease his friends as well as his critics, and attributes this quality to his childhood in Elgin County, Ontario. There, as one of his lighter and more charming books describes them, the inhabitants of the Lake Erie north shore were, like himself, descendants of Scots Highlanders - practical, dour, anti-English, anti-Tory, and highly suspicious of all patriotic appeals. It was from this background that he emigrated to the United States and became one of the world's most provocative economists. As one writer who knows him has suggested, the vintage Galbraith distrust of privilege, authority, and conventional wisdom, his constant effort to unstuff distinguished shirts, are quintessentially Scottish-Canadian - and his trade mark, his delight (Karsh, 1978).