Volume 28, Number 15 · October 8, 1981
Master Illusionist
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917-1965
by Jordan A. Schwarz
University of North Carolina Press, 679 pp., $27.50
Does anyone under fifty now remember Bernard Baruch? Yet he was a national icon in his time. 'Ever since World War I,' as John Kenneth Galbraith writes in his recent memoirs, Baruch had been 'the accredited, more precisely the self-accredited, sage. It is not easy now to convey an impression of his influence. Public deference was universal. At the same time private skepticism was also nearly obligatory. A number of New Dealers held that he was a highly accomplished fraud, but none ever said so in public.' The older generation will still recall him, the perennial adviser of presidents, dispensing wisdom from a bench in Lafayette Park across from the White House.
Review, 2195 words
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