Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

In this, he and his colleagues at the Office of Price Administration had been stunningly successful, guiding an economy that quadrupled in size in less than five years without fanning the inflation that had haunted World War I, or leaving behind an unbalanced post-war collapse of the kind that had done such grievous damage to Europe in the 1920s.

[26] He was promptly hired by Henry Luce, a conservative Republican and a dominant figure in American media as publisher of Time and Fortune magazines.

[35] The postwar period also was memorable for Galbraith because of his work, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey, to establish a progressive policy organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in support of the cause of economic and social justice in 1947.

[43] During the talks in Geneva to discuss a solution to the Lao crisis, the chief American delegate, W. Averell Harriman, discovered the Chinese foreign minister, Chen Yi, was willing to meet him in private.

In November 1961, he visited South Vietnam where he presented an unflattering picture of the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem, saying "we are now married to failure".

[52] On April 1, 1963, Galbraith flew to Washington to discuss the peace proposal with Kennedy, where the president told him "to be prepared to seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our commitment [in Vietnam]", though it "might yet be some time away.

"[52] In September 1963, Maneli met with Ngô Đình Nhu, the younger brother and right-hand man of President Diem, to discuss neutralization, a meeting that was leaked to the right-wing American columnist Joseph Alsop.

[52] At that point Kennedy lost interest in the "Maneli affair", instead deciding to back an alternative option he had been considering since August: a coup against the Ngo brothers.

[55] The National Security Adviser, W.W. Rostow, wrote the reply to Galbraith that was signed by Johnson, curtly declaring: "I have never doubted your talent for political craftsmanship, and I am sure you could devise a script that would appear to justify our taking an unjustifiable course in South Vietnam".

[54] On June 28, 1966, Galbraith made his final attempt to change Johnson's mind, warning that the Vietnam War would ruin his presidency and that he should stop taking the advice of Rostow.

[54] Galbraith stated that Johnson had the potential to be one of the greatest presidents if only he find a way out of Vietnam, and concluded: "The people who want to invest more and more in this war have nothing to lose.

[54] In 1966, when he was no longer ambassador, he told the United States Senate that one of the main causes of the 1965 Kashmir war was American military aid to Pakistan.

[57] During the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Galbraith toured the Granite State, giving pro-McCarthy speeches in churches, union halls, campuses and house parties.

[68] In autumn 1972, Galbraith was an adviser and assistant to Nixon's rival candidate, Senator George McGovern, in the election campaign for the American presidency.

During this time (September 1972) he travelled to China in his role as president of the American Economic Association (AEA) at the invitation of Mao Zedong's communist government, together with fellow economists Wassily Leontief and James Tobin.

[77] A memorial plaque stands adjoining a stone inukshuk overlooking the Galbraith family farm on the Thompson (Hogg) Line just east of Willey Road, just north of the one room school he attended.

Following Thorstein Veblen, he believed that economic activity could not be distilled into inviolable laws, but rather was a complex product of the cultural and political milieu in which it occurs.

In particular, he posited that important factors, such as the separation between corporate ownership and management, oligopoly, and the influence of government and military spending had been largely neglected by most economists because they are not amenable to axiomatic descriptions.

His 1955 bestseller The Great Crash, 1929 describes the Wall Street meltdown of stock prices and how markets progressively become decoupled from reality in a speculative boom.

In The Affluent Society (1958), which became a bestseller, Galbraith outlined his view that to become successful, post–World War II America should make large investments in items such as highways and education, using funds from general taxation.

In the market system, composed of the vast majority of business organizations, price competition remains the dominant form of social control.

That this power is exercised in the shortsighted interest of expanding commodity production and the status of the few is both inconsistent with democracy and a barrier to achieving the quality of life that the new industrial state with its affluence could provide.

The growing concern focused on the role of the corporation in politics, the damage done to the natural environment by an unmitigated commitment to economic growth, and the perversion of advertising and other pecuniary aspects of culture.

The New Industrial State gave a plausible explanation of the power structure involved in generating these problems and found a very receptive audience among the rising American counterculture and political activists.

Crucial to his analysis is the assertion that the common factor in boom-and-bust is the creation of debt to finance speculation, which "becomes dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment."

Galbraith's main argument is that as society becomes relatively more affluent, private business must create consumer demand through advertising, and while this generates artificial affluence through the production of commercial goods and services, the public sector becomes neglected.

"[95] Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, in a review of The New Industrial State, points at Galbraith's lack of empiricism and selectiveness in his use of evidence.

One would hardly discuss Gulliver's Travels by debating whether there really are any little people, or criticize the Grande Jatte because objects aren't made up of tiny dots.

Galbraith's primary purpose in Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (1952) was, ironically, to show that big business was now necessary to the American economy to maintain the technological progress that drives economic growth.