THE WALLS OF JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH'S study are nearly covered with black-and-white photographs depicting one of Harvard faculty’s most senior members with many Democratic presidents of the 20th century — Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton — as well as other luminaries and international figures like Jawaharlal Nehru and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Warburg professor of economics, emeritus, Galbraith, 96, is both a man of ideas and a man of the world, and his larger-than-life personal history suits its six-foot, eight-inch protagonist. In a sense, he epitomizes the Kennedy School’s ideal of uniting academic insight with the rough-and-tumble world of elections, politics, and governing. And the professor is happy to relate his adventures. “Modesty is a greatly overrated virtue,” he intones, in his characteristically wry, theatrical manner. “You shouldn’t be reluctant to bring up your role in things.”

At the Kennedy School, his role has been a meaningful one since its inception. In the 1950s Galbraith was a close confidante of Senator John F. Kennedy, and after he won the presidency in 1960, Kennedy appointed Galbraith U.S. ambassador to India. His expertise as one of the 20th century’s preeminent economists, his many years of government service, and his close connections to the Kennedy family provided the school with important guidance in shaping its mission as it took on a greater intellectual and physical presence at Harvard.

Galbraith “was really instrumental in the creation of the school,” says Richard Parker, lecturer on public policy and author of the new biography John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. Galbraith himself calls the Kennedy School “the most significant institutional development at Harvard in the 20th century. Nowhere else in my observation of more than 60 years were initial expectations so low and achievements so significant.”

Indeed, Galbraith’s experience extends back to the early days of the Kennedy School’s predecessor, the Graduate School of Public Administration (GSPA), created in 1936 and housed in the Littauer Center of Public Administration, the longtime home of Harvard’s economics and government departments.

After its first three decades, the GSPA was still only a minor blip on Harvard’s radar screen, according to Galbraith. In 1966, Harvard renamed the GSPA as the John F. Kennedy School of Government and launched the Institute of Politics. Galbraith believed deeply in the Kennedy School’s mission of discovering and teaching precepts that underlie effective public policy. “He thinks leadership is ephemeral,” says Parker. “The issue is one of choosing a set of principles on which you are going to govern.” The Kennedy School’s engagement with realpolitik
resonates with Galbraith’s belief that academic research on social issues cannot ignore the political forces in play.

Furthermore, Galbraith believes the university can effectively shape the attitudes and approaches of the people who wield power, and raise the competence of public servants. “There is no question that you can teach people to govern,” he says. “You can first teach, and indeed achieve, a preoccupation with public issues. To this day you can go to the Kennedy School and hear a discussion of a whole range of problems that you will not encounter elsewhere in the university. You can also get people to think of the structural aspect of decision making — how you act, and how you delegate, and from whom you receive your delegated power. Perhaps most important is to develop, by tutorial interchange, a working knowledge of Washington.”

Just as Galbraith believes that economics cannot and should not separate itself from issues of power and justice, he also thinks that technocrats must not lose sight of their ultimate purpose. “Some thought of public administration as a well-defined entity in itself, apart from the policy administered,” he says. “I never thought that was possible.”

As the fledgling Kennedy School struggled to find its footing, Galbraith’s primary commitment was to the John F. Kennedy Library, which for years appeared destined to rise on the current Kennedy School site. (It eventually settled at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.) The school also became identified with the legacy of the Kennedy years, with the name itself generating excitement in the younger scholarly community, Galbraith says.

Excitement and a famous name were not enough, however. “It was only when the school got a personally committed group of leaders that I became convinced that it was on its way to becoming a major part of the university,” Galbraith said. He credits Graham Allison, dean of the Kennedy School from 1976 to 1989, with building the school, literally and figuratively. While faculty tend to underestimate the importance of physical structure, Galbraith says, the real estate of the Kennedy School was vital to its growth. “Graham never saw an inch of land on which he didn’t want to build a building for the Kennedy School,” says Galbraith. “He got it built, and very much had the vision of the school as it became.”

When it came time to build, Galbraith proved to be a useful economist to have on the team. “There are a lot of things that Harvard would like to build that the city can make very difficult,” Parker explains. “Ken was a critical factor in managing the institutional relationship with Cambridge. He was a nationally known liberal and incredibly popular with the city council.”

Indeed, Allison asserts that Galbraith has always been one of the school’s most generous backers: “There were a lot of skeptics about the Kennedy School, especially in the economics department. Whenever we needed support for an idea, Ken was always willing.” For example, Galbraith helped raise money for the school’s Fainsod Room and chaired the committee that supervised the design and construction of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Park. He even chose the quotations that are inscribed at each of the entrance points. “He was the only person who had the confidence of the Kennedys and, certainly, my confidence as well,” Allison adds. “I felt he could do anything.”

In fact, the professor has done just about everything, from the Roosevelt administration’s AAA (Agriculture Adjustment Administration) in Washington in the 1930s to the State Department after World War II to ambassador to India in the early 1960s. Throughout it all, Harvard has been his home base. Galbraith’s adopted home country (he is a native Canadian) has honored his service in the middle of the 20th century and at its end: He is the only person, other than Colin Powell, to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice, from Presidents Truman and Clinton.

The arterial connection between Cambridge and Washington, which Galbraith enjoyed during the early Kennedy years — “You could have a meeting of the economics department on the train going to Washington, and we occasionally did,” he recalls — is a legacy he has helped bequeath to the future, in the form of the Kennedy School. “Looking back on these years, nothing has given me more satisfaction, personally and academically, than seeing the way the school evolved,” he says. “In its public influence, the Kennedy School is the most important institution at Harvard.”

Craig Lambert is deputy editor of Harvard Magazine.