ARTHUR
BURNS:ARTHUR
BURNS:Dr. Arthur Burns. I studied under Dr. Arthur Burns when I attended Columbia University in 1951 after I came back from my Fulbright scholarship in France. At that time he was undoubtedly the foremost business cycle theorist in the world. He was President of the then prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research which had done incredibly valuable work on business cyclesfor the previous 35 years.. He was well known and went on to become Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for President Eisenhower, Economic Advisor to Richard Nixon in the White House, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and finally Ambassador to Germany.
ASIDE:I loved the 'chutzpa' of that. He was an Austrian Jew! That is putting the needle to the Germans and a most delightful and justified retribution. Burns must have laughed until he cried! END OF ASIDE.
I got to know him quite well much later on but the first encounter I had with him after Columbia was as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Eisenhower. That is when he called me a whore! I met him frequently over time including meetings with Nixon in 1966 and 1967 before the run for the Presidency. We were on the same economic advisory board for Nixon in 1968 (along with Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman). I had meetings with him when he was Economic Counselor to Nixon at the White House. I acted as the messenger boy for Nixon in communicating with Dr. Burns when he was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. I ran into him frequently at the White House during cocktail parties and White House dinners for foreign dignitaries. I was with him when we were briefed by Al Haig (in place of Kissinger) at the White House on the Vietnam war. I therefore knew him socially as well as officially.
He looked down his nose at me for being an economic consultant, as he told me more than once but, strange enough, he was the mentor for Alan Greenspan who did the exact same thing!
I never knew Burns to be anything except ungracious and arrogant. When he was an economist he was a bit arrogant but he was courteous at all times but when he became a politician he was horrid.Of course all politicians worry about their own skin all the time and their first and foremost objective is to protect themselves from everybody else in the world! Burns made the transfer from economist to politician easily and along the way he picked up and mainlined all their flaws, in spades.
He had the nerve to ask me during the cocktail reception for the Prime Minister of the U.K, "what are you doing here?"! It must be fairly obvious that he disliked me ( mildly put) because he didn't have the guts to stick his neck out one iota, as I had to do, day in and day out.He looked down his nose at anybody that was not an academic and he was more often rude than polite. He never could understand why Richard Nixon called on me and was very jealous of that. He sneered at anybody and everybody that he felt was or might be a threat to him. He was an insecure man.
He smoked a pipe almost all the time and as I used to say "He blew smoke at everybody" including the Congress. He was held in high esteem and I did until I got to know him intimately. After I got to know him I disliked him thoroughly and lost all respect for him. He never failed to take pot shots at people whom he considered a threat to him and there was little in the way of invective he would not resort to if there was no one to overhear him!
He was one of those who had the ability to hood wink almost everybody he came into contact with at a personal and professional level. He was not a nice man but a vicious one, at that. He was a master at hiding his viciousness and his insecurity. He was the almost perfect politician, insecure and overbearing! But, arrogant, rude, impolite and vicious.
