John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment that he needled in prolific writings for more than half a century—he was also the US ambassador to India in the 1960s—died yesterday at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachussets. He was 97.

Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his 33 books was The Affluent Society (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to reexamine its values. He wrote fluidly, even on complex topics, and many of his compelling phrases—among them “the affluent society,” “conventional wisdom” and “countervailing power”—became part of the language. He was so prolific that Art Buchwald, the humorist, once introduced him by citing his literary production: “Since 1959 alone, he has written 12 books, 135 articles, 61 book reviews, 16 book introductions, 312 book blurbs and 105,876 letters to The New York Times, of which all but 3 have been printed.”

From the 1930s to the 1990s, he helped define the terms of the national political debate, influencing the direction of the Democratic Party and the thinking of its leaders. An imposing presence, lanky and angular at 6 feet 8 inches tall, he was consulted frequently by national leaders, and he gave advice freely, though it may have been ignored as often as it was taken.

Still, he advised President John F Kennedy and served as his ambassador to India. Though he eventually broke with President Lyndon B Johnson over Vietnam, he helped conceive Johnson’s Great Society programme and wrote a major presidential address that outlined its purposes. In 1968, pursuing his opposition to the war, he helped Senator Eugene J McCarthy seek the Democratic nomination for president. In course of his career, he undertook a number of government assignments, including the organization of price controls in World War II and speechwriting for Franklin D Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson. In fact, after Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he appointed Galbraith the US ambassador to India. There were those, Galbraith among them, who believed the President had done this to get a potential loose cannon out of Washington. He said in his memoir: “Kennedy, I always believed, was pleased to have me in his administration, but at a suitable distance such as in India.”

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