It had been the Great War that had first brought Giblin’s four together. In 1939 a still greater war was to unite them a second time. For the next six years they were absorbed in shaping Australia’s war effort.

They were at the front of the helter skelter dash to build war industries and to marshall a workforce to man them. They educated two Treasurers about the need to consider resourcing the war effort in macroeconomic terms. With the approach of victory, they articulated similar Keynesian notions to preserve full employment in peace. With the global spread of the war, they strived to assure what they believed were Australia’s interests in the approaching post-war international order. This was a struggle that culminated at San Francisco in 1945 in a bitter dispute over the place of the ‘full-employment pledge’ in the United Nations Charter (Crisp 1965).^[2]

Yet it might be said that none of the four had ‘a good war’. Their successes were mingled with frustration and bitter disappointment.