However, my final proof of the indestructibility of Ken’s self-assurance came nearly a decade later, when he and I ran into a former British Prime Minister. It became apparent to me after about ten seconds of casual conversation that, unbelievable and discreditable though it was, the former Prime Minister did not really know who John Kenneth Galbraith was. It became apparent to Ken a moment or two later. He was in no way disconcerted. As soon as we separated he turned to me and said: ‘Who was that man? I thought he was Alec Home.’ The logic was impeccable. If he did not know Galbraith, he could not be an ex-Prime Minister. The dismissal was complete.
I have left myself no time to talk about the eighteen or so books I haven’t mentioned, including at least three major pieces of innovative socio-academic analysis, or the volumes of autobiography, or the travel books, or such reassuring titles as Annals of an Abiding Liberal, or Ken and Kitty in India, or Ken as an inimitable and iconoclastic lecturer, or Ken stealing the show at a Harvard Commencement Day, or Ken as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, the jewel in the crown of that junior university, or Ken the television presenter, or Ken the connoisseur of Indian art, or Ken the littérateur, the writer of reviews of Waugh and forewords to Trollope. I stop while my catalogue is still illustrative and not exhaustive: and merely ask you to drink to a man who has put more phrases into the language than the rest of us put together; whose great gifts have always been used in unselfish causes; whose friendship has given us all both pride and pleasure; and whose life if it exceeds the norm as much as do his other qualities, will, I calculate, extend to the age of ninety-seven (after which Kitty can be the Pamela Harriman of the 2008 campaign), so that we all look forward to meeting again for the ninetieth and the ninety-fifth birthdays. In the meantime I give you the toast of Kenneth and Kitty Galbraith.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
This miniature is based on a 1991 European review of Giscard’s Le Pouvoir et la Vie, Vol II: L’Affrontement (Cie 12).
This Second volume of President Giscard’s memoirs covers roughly the second half of the seventies - although chronological order is not its strong point - and, therefore, the bulk of his septennat as head of state (and of government) of the French Republic. It is very well written, revealing in a somewhat self-conscious way, like a boy letting off a firework and then standing back to judge the effect before deciding when the next one can be ignited, and wholly compulsive reading.
Giscard’s main objective I would judge to be the straightforward one of writing a good book, even a striking piece of literature, which enables him to express a view of life and himself which has been bottled up within him. But there was probably a subsidiary motive of making himself a less remote and condescending figure to the public, which he had been slowly persuaded was a factor in his shattering 1981 defeat, against the odds at the time, by François Mitterrand: perhaps, put bluntly, simply to make himself more likeable.
Happily this second objective produces no falseness of tone. The Giscard that he presents to the public is the Giscard that he believes he is, and not a bogus creation designed to make people like him because he is so like them. What he brings out to an astonishing extent is his vulnerability, which some might regard as closely allied to vanity. The most striking image from his first volume was that of his having to walk ceremonially and alone across the vast pavé of the Place de la Bastille on his first 14 July as President, and becoming terrified of losing his balance or fainting.
Even this did not prepare me for the revelation that, from 1979 to 1988, he could not bring himself to read a French newspaper or to watch an RTF news bulletin. It was not merely the fear of an attack. He had become neurotic about even a neutral mention of his name. After a time he found that he could keep up with events through the international and foreign press because, as he rather engagingly says, these journals had ceased to be much interested in him.
Equally he tells us that when walking in a street he is tormented by the risk of catching his image reflected in a shop window, for he dislikes both his shape and his baldness. Both of these reactions I find extreme, but not incomprehensible, having always avoided watching myself on television and even being reluctant to read my own printed words. Even so, I find Giscard’s cunicular terror in front of the headlights of Le Figaro or even Antenne II a bit over the odds.
This neurosis, however, neither kills his sense of wit nor prevents his casting an immensely observant and critical eye over those with whom he has direct dealings. I agree with most of his judgements on the statesmen or would-be statesmen who were his contemporaries in office, not least with those on Mrs Thatcher. He may betray a little prejudice when he writes of looking across the table at her ‘with her mouth open because of the British method of pronunciation’, but his analysis of her methods of thought is at once penetrating and devastating. ‘When she comes to the end of her own argument those who have not embraced her conclusions are incompetent, or addicted to half-measures or, last but not least, simply lacking in courage.’