Sun, 1 Jul 2001 02:00:09 -0400
From: ANB Biography of the Day <biod-request@www.anb.org>


  American National Biography Online


Harriman, W. Averell (15 Nov. 1891-26 July 1986), businessman
and government official, was born William Averell Harriman in
New York City, the son of the railroad organizer Edward H. Harriman
and Mary Averell (Mary Williamson Averell Harriman). He spent
his early years in New York and on the family estate of Arden
in the nearby Ramapo Mountains. He was educated at Groton and
Yale. Harriman did poorly in preparatory studies, which brought
admonishment from his father, and it is possible that his stammer,
which he carried throughout his long life, resulted from this
experience. At Yale he did better academically, and excelled socially.

 After college Harriman prepared to move up the ladder of his
father's Union Pacific Railroad and spent two years in Omaha
studying railroading from the laying of track on up. In 1915
he was called back to New York to become a junior vice president.
Railroading did not, however, hold his attention. When the United
States entered World War I in 1917 he espied a way to follow
in the footsteps of his father, who had taken an interest in
ships in the years before he died, by going into shipbuilding.
He presided over construction of a vast shipyard at Chester,
Pennsylvania, for his Merchant's Shipbuilding Corporation which,
like all government-financed yards, was just beginning to turn
out ships by the time of the armistice in 1918. After the war
the world shortage of ships continued, and Harriman created the
United American Lines, one of the largest merchant fleets in
the world. He arranged a joint service with the German-owned
Hamburg-American Line. Not yet thirty, he was hailed as "Harriman
II" and "the Steamship King." When the glut of ships, merchant
and passenger, became evident in 1926, he abandoned the shipping business.

 Turning next to European investments, Harriman became involved
with the Georgian Manganese Company, which exploited manganese
deposits in Soviet Georgia. He entered the business in 1925 without
personally examining the mines, an error that his father would
never have made. He concluded a contract with the Soviet government
that permitted him to exploit only lesser deposits and again
lost out: the Soviets took over a rich preserve in the neighborhood
and a German firm picked up the remnants of the Harriman company.
Other European efforts during the 1920s, notably an attempt to
electrify vast areas of Poland, also failed.

 Returning to Union Pacific, Harriman was elected chairman of
the board in 1932 and sponsored the first streamliner trains
in the hope of rejuvenating the road's declining passenger traffic.
Pulled by diesel engines, the trains made the run from Chicago
to the West Coast in record time, with luxurious accommodations,
reasonably priced meals, and conductors replaced by stewardesses
in imitation of increasingly attractive airline travel. The experiment
was only a modest success. If Harriman and the Union Pacific
board had instead concentrated on reconstructing its freight
operations, they would have positioned the road far better for
the freight-carrying requirements of World War II and for the
competition with trucks that followed.

 With his brother Roland, Harriman meanwhile established an investment
firm, which in 1931 combined with Brown Brothers to create Brown
Brothers Harriman. Although in its initial years the partnership
did not do well, it eventually proved profitable. Until the beginning
of the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933,
Harriman had not enjoyed success in his work, in spite of his
efforts in the fields that had occupied his father.

 In 1915 he married Kitty Lanier Lawrance; they had two daughters.
After their divorce in 1929, he married Marie Norton Whitney
in 1930. Upon his second wife's death in 1970, he married Pamela
Digby Churchill Hayward (Pamela Harriman) in 1971. From his second
and third marriages there were no children. An excellent sportsman,
he took up polo and became a member of the American team in 1928
with a handicap of eight (out of a possible ranking of ten).
When his interest in polo waned he turned to croquet and eventually
was listed in the Croquet Hall of Fame. Early in the 1930s, seeking
a way to advance business for the Union Pacific, he created the
Sun Valley resort in Ketchum, Idaho, and took up skiing.

 At the beginning of the Roosevelt administration, Harriman's
interest began to turn from business to politics. He sensed that
power in the country had passed from Wall Street to Washington.
His political interests focused on the Democratic party. During
his attempt to mine manganese in the Soviet Union he had tangled
with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, which may have been
the reason that he voted in 1928 for the Democratic presidential
candidate. In 1932 he voted for Roosevelt, whose Hudson Valley
family he knew. The result was a post in the National Recovery
Administration, which he owed partly to his friendship with its
administrator, Brigadier General Hugh Johnson. After Johnson's
dismissal by the president, Harriman ran the NRA until the Supreme
Court declared it unconstitutional in 1935. Thereafter, Harriman
served the administration only as chairman of the business advisory
council for the department of commerce from 1937 to 1939.

 With the coming of war in Europe and increasing evidence that
the United States would be involved, Harriman unabashedly sought
a post in Washington or abroad. Early in 1941 he joined the Office
of Production Management. Then came a major assignment. With
passage of the lend-lease legislation in March, the administration
undertook to support the nation's allies with massive war materials,
a program that eventually totaled approximately $50 billion.
At the outset it was necessary to send a special presidential
representative to Britain, and Harriman flew to London first
as minister, then, after August, as ambassador. He soon was intimate
with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and often joined him at
his country place on weekends. The "defense expediter," as President
Roosevelt designated Harriman, bypassed the American ambassador
in London, John G. Winant, the State Department, and the American
military to communicate directly with the president, often through
his close friend Harry Hopkins, who at that time lived in the White House.

 When the Soviet Union entered the war, Harriman extended his
operations to Russian lend-lease. He recommended the removal
of the American ambassador in Moscow, Laurence Steinhardt, whom
the president replaced with Admiral William H. Standley. When
Harriman bypassed Standley, the latter quit and was replaced
by Harriman, who served in Moscow from 1943 to 1946. His access
to the president, however, no longer obtained when Hopkins became
ill in 1944, and Harriman had to communicate with Washington
through the State Department. Although he was present at the
Big Three conferences at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam, he was
no longer a major figure.

 Harriman served conspicuously in postwar foreign relations during
the administrations of Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy,
and Lyndon B. Johnson. The businessman-turned-public servant
played many roles but was disappointed when the post that he
dearly wished for, secretary of state, went in 1949 to his Yale
friend, Dean Acheson. At the beginning of the Kennedy administration
he again hoped for the secretaryship, which to his chagrin went
once more to a younger man, Dean Rusk.

 After serving briefly as ambassador to Great Britain in 1946,
Harriman replaced Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace when
the latter resigned in September of that year. He remained in
the Truman cabinet until 1948, when an opportunity arose with
passage through Congress of the first appropriation for the Marshall
Plan. He became the number-two man in the Economic Cooperation
Administration, balancing the Republican administrator of the
plan, Paul G. Hoffman. Upon virtual completion of the plan in
1950, he returned to Washington as a special assistant to the
president during the outbreak and initial course of the Korean
War. From 1951 to 1953 he served as director of the Mutual Security
Administration, supervising rearmament of America's allies in
Europe. In these positions his work varied in importance. At
the department of commerce he presided over a vast bureaucracy
that largely ran itself, but the position gave him the opportunity
to participate in cabinet meetings, which in the Truman administration
(unlike the Roosevelt administration) were important affairs.
In the ECA, Harriman's talents as a troubleshooter were much
in evidence; division of the Marshall Plan's $13.3 billion among
the nations of western Europe called for the highest qualities
of diplomacy. The months as special presidential assistant were
an interlude, after which in the MSA he dispensed billions in
military assistance as well as the final appropriations of the
Marshall Plan and the Truman administration's 1949 Point IV program
of technical assistance to developing countries.

 During the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harriman
turned his energies to political office. He sought the Democratic
presidential nomination in 1952 and 1956, but was defeated by
Governor Adlai E. Stevenson II of Illinois. Running for governor
of New York in 1954, he was elected by a slim margin of 11,000
votes out of 5 million. The governorship constituted the apogee
of his political career. He enjoyed Albany, and for the rest
of his life insisted upon being known as "Governor Harriman."
Privately he described himself as "the guv." In attempting to
manage the state's deteriorating finances, he instituted an austerity
program, which was understandably unpopular. To that program
he added his own ineptitude as a politician, giving miserable
speeches and displaying little judgment on matters politic. He
persuaded his Republican friend, Nelson Rockefeller, to head
up an attempt to revise the state's archaic constitution, which
overrepresented upstate and rural areas at the expense of New
York City. Rockefeller used the public attention that this appointment
brought him to defeat the man who had appointed him. Harriman
lost his bid for a second term to Rockefeller in 1958 by a half
million votes, at a time when the Democratic party was displaying
a national resurgence.

 In 1961 Harriman became part of the Kennedy administration by
taking on the posts of ambassador-at-large, assistant secretary
of state for Far Eastern affairs, and undersecretary of state
for political affairs, which made him available for tasks that
did not interest Secretary of State Rusk. These appointments
led to a series of international missions that took him all over
the world. He enjoyed them, as he loved to travel. Among other
tasks, he took up the problem of civil war in Laos, which the
Kennedy administration considered its largest international problem
until the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Here he was in his element,
willing to negotiate patiently and, when necessary, badger the
factional leaders into achieving peace, which he appeared to
have attained by the time the negotiation came to an end (although
critics later claimed that he only had made Laotian territory
available as a highway for men and supplies passing from North
to South Vietnam). In 1963 Harriman negotiated and signed the
limited test-ban treaty, a momentary triumph during a decade
of tense Soviet-American relations. He continued as undersecretary
for political affairs in the Johnson administration and in 1965
resumed the post of ambassador-at-large. In this role he began
negotiations for peace in Vietnam, which were concluded by the
subsequent administration of Richard M. Nixon.

 The advent of the Nixon presidency brought Harriman's nearly
thirty-year diplomatic and political career to an end. He continued
his interest in foreign policy and, as a private citizen, journeyed
to many places, including the Soviet Union, where he talked with
leading figures in Moscow. Undertaking to write his memoirs,
he resorted to several assistants, but, except for a book about
his World War II work in Britain and Russia, which was written
in collaboration with the journalist Elie Abel, he did not approve
of their work. Gradually, as age limited his activities, he slowed
down. Increasing deafness made conversation difficult, and his
eyesight nearly failed. In his last years he suffered from bone
cancer. He died in Westchester County, New York.

 Harriman's life spanned the century from President Benjamin
Harrison (1833-1901) to Ronald Reagan, two vastly different eras.
His movement from business to politics, particularly international
affairs, well-reflected the basic power change of his time. His
strengths as a negotiator and envoy did not lie in personal relations.
Having started at the top, he disliked dealing with people below.
This fact was evident in business dealings and government assignments,
in which he always sought out the source of authority. If he
had to deal with lower levels, he did his best to retrace quickly
his steps to the top. In diplomacy he fared best as the protege
of Hopkins in 1941-1943, and as an administrator of the Marshall
Plan and Mutual Security Administration, when his forceful personality
made an impression. In his occasional forays into domestic politics
he invariably proved inept.


 Bibliography

 Harriman's papers are in the Library of Congress. They include
a remarkable series of memoranda by one of Harriman's literary
assistants, Mark L. Chadwin, which were compiled from interviews
with Harriman and other individuals. The National Archives contains
major files of documents that concern his offices and posts.
His memoir is W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy
to Churchill and Stalin: 1941-1946 (1975). The only biography,
Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman,
1891-1986 (1992), is based in part on interviews with its subject
and friends and acquaintances. Harriman wrote Peace with Russia?
(1959) and America and Russia in a Changing World: A Half Century
of Personal Observation (1971). An obituary is in the New York
Times, 27 July 1986.

 Robert H. Ferrell



   Citation:
 Robert H. Ferrell. "Harriman, W. Averell";
http://www.anb.org/articles/07/07-00120.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

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