Ways to Be Wrong.

• Author: Pitney, John J., Jr.
• Position: Review

Name-Dropping: From FDR On, by John Kenneth Galbraith, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 194 pages, $26.00

When Government Was Good: Memories of a Life in Politics, by Henry S. Reuss, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 185 pages, $22.95

There's a right way to be wrong and a wrong way to be wrong. Some supporters of big, intrusive government manage to be witty, erudite, and tolerant of opposing views. If we must have statists, they're the ones to have. Alas, too many others are crabby, smug, and dogmatic - the kind who'd serve as the bad guys in an Ayn Rand novel.

John Kenneth Galbraith is of the first type, a sterling model of how to err in style. At the age of 91, he can look back on a rewarding life as a university professor, political adviser, ambassador to India, and debating partner of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. Though he's seldom been right, he's always been a gentleman. And he has always been a graceful writer, as we see in Name-Dropping, a short, readable volume that offers personality sketches of FDR, JFK, and other famous figures he has known.

Galbraith has a sharp eye for the telling anecdote. As he reminds us here, Bill Clinton was not the first president who tried to be all things to all people. In separate meetings with FDR, two aides gave contradictory advice, and both times he replied, "You are perfectly right." When Eleanor objected that he could not possibly agree with such opposing arguments, he answered, "Eleanor, you are perfectly right."

Galbraith keeps the focus on his subjects, minimizing his own part in historical events. Here is his description of working on FDR's 1940 speechwriting team: "We found out how much of what we had written had survived when we heard the President speak on the radio. We listened with some attention." He is also refreshingly candid about his own failures. Looking back on campaign addresses he drafted for Adlai Stevenson, he now sees the fatal flaw: "I had written seeking the approval of the candidate, his campaign acolytes and myself, not that of the larger public, the electorate as a whole."

Name-Dropping, sad to say, is not really an original book. In his first chapter, Galbraith admits there is "an occasional event or personal encounter of which I have told before." That is an understatement: He has recycled a distressingly large portion of the material from his 1981 autobiography, A Life in Our Times. The earlier work supplies much more detail and documentation, so...