John Kenneth Galbraith

摘要

Above a large oak bookcase in John Kenneth Galbraith's elegant sitting room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a framed sampler was displayed. "Galbraith's First Law", read the meticulous red and blue cross-stitch: "Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue." He thoroughly believed it. Save for his humble origins on a farm in Ontario, little about Mr Galbraith or his life was modest. At six foot eight, he was a giant. Intellectually he was equally towering, a man who spent more than seven decades either on the stage of American public policy-as a bureaucrat in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a confidante of John Kennedy and adviser to countless other Democrats—or loudly lambasting Washington from offstage left, as a Harvard professor.