Catherine Galbraith, at 95; transformed economist-husband's life and career

''KITTY'' GALBRAITH

Catherine Merriam Atwater was a graduate student at Radcliffe in the 1930s when she first met a young research fellow named John Kenneth Galbraith at a popular Cambridge café.

She looked up "and up and up," she would later say of her introduction to the 6-foot-8 man who became her husband and a legendary liberal intellectual.

Mrs. Galbraith, who was barely 5-foot-4, declined his first marriage proposal but later accepted in 1937, discovering her perfect match in the influential economist who served four presidents and relied on his wife to soften his rough Canadian farm boy edges.

She showed him Europe, minded the indexes for his famous books, and hosted heads of state. She once organized a lunch for a dozen generals when her husband was ambassador to India.

"There's just no doubt that without her he would not have accomplished what he accomplished," said son Peter of Cambridge.

Mrs. Galbraith, who was known as Kitty, died Wednesday of a heart attack at Mount Auburn Hospital. She was 95 and lived in Cambridge.

Her husband died of natural causes in 2006 at age 97. They were married 68 years.

In his memoir, "A Life in Our Times," Mr. Galbraith wrote about meeting his wife.

"She is a wise and affectionate woman of singular beauty. Intensely loyal to family and friends, a superb manager of our personal affairs, a brilliant linguist and student of comparative literature with no known enemy anywhere in the world. And we lived happy ever after," he said.

Mrs. Galbraith was born in Plandome, N.Y. She was the granddaughter of scientist Wilbur Olin Atwater, a pioneer in human nutrition and metabolism who invented the calorimeter.

She earned her undergraduate degree in Romance languages from Smith College and studied German as a graduate student in Munich. She told her sons she lived in a rooming house with Unity Mitford, one of Adolf Hitler's girlfriends.

"Occasionally, Hitler would come calling on the dorm, and when that happened, there was an enormous amount of perfume from Unity," Peter said, recounting his mother's story.

Mrs. Galbraith later worked for the Library of Congress and the Justice Department as a researcher before the start of World War II.

After marrying, the couple set off for Europe, where Mr. Galbraith was to complete a fellowship under British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes suffered a heart attack, however, and the Galbraiths spent much of their time traveling around Europe in a roadster, according to his biographer, Richard Parker.

"It was she who really introduced him to Europe," said Parker, author of "John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics."

They drove through the countryside with Mrs. Galbraith checking off towns and cathedrals.

"He was only five or six years away from milking cows and herding sheep. She represented a real transformation of his life," Parker said.

At the White House, Mrs. Galbraith was a favorite dance partner of President Lyndon B. Johnson and "held her own" in a room with Jackie Kennedy, Parker said.

The two women were of different generations, he noted, and Mrs. Galbraith's beauty was "not the beauty queen kind of beauty, but this deep, profound, womanly beauty with a sense of wholeness of person."

Mrs. Galbraith was fluent in several languages, including Hindi, and was the first to admit she was not a good cook, he said.

She was also an accomplished writer who published a travel book about India and several magazine articles.

An article she wrote for The Atlantic Monthly in 1963 was inspired by her son James's fourth-grade essay about his parents' work. He wrote extensively about his father's career and closed with the words, "Mother doesn't do much."

In her article, "Mother Doesn't Do Much," Mrs. Galbraith detailed the duties of an ambassador's wife as chief administrator and architect of dining room diplomacy.

The Galbraiths had four sons. The greatest tragedy of Mrs. Galbraith's life was the death of her second-born son, Douglas, who died of childhood leukemia at age 7.

"She always missed Douglas," Parker said. Decades later, her dressing table was covered with photos and mementos of him. "It was almost like a little Catholic shrine," he said.

After the Galbraiths returned from India in 1963, their home on Francis Avenue in Cambridge became a center of intellectual life.

They held an annual Harvard commencement party for more than 25 years, where guests invariably included heads of state and Nobel Prize recipients. The Benazir Bhutto, late prime minister of Pakistan, visited their home as a Harvard freshman in 1969 and later stayed with them in 1989 when she was in Cambridge to give the commencement address at the university.

"My mother was exceptionally persistent at maintaining friendships," said son Allan, of St. Helena, Calif.

It was Mrs. Galbraith who stoked the unusual friendship between her liberal husband and conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, according to her sons.

When she died, Mrs. Galbraith was working on a memoir and consulting the voluminous diaries she kept during her lifetime.

Every day during the summer, she would go swimming in Lake Kitty at the Galbraiths' farm in Townshend, Vt.

"At noon, rain or shine, she would go down there and paddle along with these water wings on. The caregivers were making her wear them," Parker said.

In addition to her sons, Mrs. Galbraith leaves 10 grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. on Oct. 21 in Memorial Church at Harvard. Burial will be in Middletown, Conn.