The Establishment's Envoy

By Evan Thomas

The American aristocracy, or what passed for one after the turn of the century, gave mostly lip service to the ideal of noblesse oblige. At morning chapel, prep school boys were earnestly implored to serve God and country, but as grown men most followed Mammon instead, heading directly to Wall Street to make money.

Born almost embarrassingly rich, W. Averell Harriman (Groton '09, Yale '13) could easily have idled his life away as a dilettante without appreciably denting his family fortune. Yet Harriman, who died last week at 94, always heeded the command of his father, Railroad Magnate E.H. Harriman, to "be something and somebody."

President John F. Kennedy once said that with the possible exception of John Quincy Adams, Harriman held "as many important jobs as any American in our history." After migrating from Wall Street to Washington as one of the dollar-a-year "tame businessmen" supporting Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, he went on to become wartime Ambassador to Moscow, Secretary of Commerce, Ambassador to Britain, European administrator of the Marshall Plan, Governor of New York and, in his 70s, Under Secretary of State. The titles scarcely matter; at pivotal points in the nation's history, Harriman always seemed to be there, a wise man high in the councils of Government.

American Presidents liked to use Harriman as their ambassador plenipotentiary. For Roosevelt, he helped maintain the often uneasy alliance with Stalin and Churchill during World War II. For Truman, he dealt with a cantankerous collection of European nations being rebuilt under the Marshall Plan. For Kennedy, he negotiated the Laos neutrality accords and the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. For Johnson, he served as emissary to the Paris peace talks on Viet Nam in 1968. As late as 1976, when Harriman was 84, Democratic Presidential Nominee Jimmy Carter sent him to Moscow to give assurances to Leonid Brezhnev on arms control.

President Kennedy referred to Harriman as a "separate sovereignty," and in truth he operated as a kind of independent fiefdom, communicating with other sovereigns on his own terms. He acquired friendships with powerful world leaders the way other men collect stamps.

His chief interest was the Soviet Union, and he had more experience dealing with that country than any other American in history. His first visit to Russia was in 1899, during the reign of Czar Nicholas II, when he accompanied his father on an expedition that reached Siberia. His last was in 1983, at the invitation of Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov. In between he negotiated his own private mineral concessions with Trotsky and spent more time with Stalin than any other American. Nikita Khrushchev liked the old capitalist so much that he jokingly offered him a job.

As World War II was winding down, Harriman was one of the first to warn of the Soviet threat to the U.S. After F.D.R.'s death in 1945, Harriman, then Ambassador to Moscow, hurried home to alert President Truman to what he called the "barbarian invasion of Europe." But like others from Wall Street who formed the core of the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment after the war -- and unlike more recent policymakers -- Harriman was not an ideologue who regarded the Soviets as an implacable "Evil Empire." As a banker and entrepreneur, he believed it was possible to deal with the Soviets the way a businessman might treat a tough competitor: with firmness and patience.

Harriman could hardly have been more removed from the ordinary man. He first saw the American West from his father's private railroad car, and was taught to row on the family's private lake by Syracuse University's crew coach, whom his father had hired for that purpose. As a Yale senior, Harriman was elected to the board of the Union Pacific Railroad; at 28, he founded his own investment bank, which subsequently became a part of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.

Mindful of his father's injunction that "great wealth is an obligation," Harriman became a Democrat in 1928. In 1952 and 1956, he ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination, in part because he could think of no one more qualified to head the nation in an international age. A wooden speaker, he was elected Governor of New York in 1954, but failed to win a second term when he was challenged by Republican Nelson Rockefeller, a millionaire with a more common touch.

Harriman was never a brilliant strategic thinker, but he could be shrewd. Often plodding yet at times strikingly bold, detached yet intense, he would seem half asleep at meetings, until someone uttered a fatuous remark. Then he would snap the offender's head off. His nickname in the Kennedy Administration was "the Crocodile."

His aides referred to his negotiating style as "water torture": he would make the same point over and over, until the other side wearily relented. He was endlessly patient, but knew when to be brusque. When a North Vietnamese negotiator disrupted the Laotian talks with abusive rhetoric, Harriman "accidentally" pressed the talk button on his microphone and remarked to an aide so that all could hear, "Did that little bastard say we started World War II?"

Darkly handsome and athletic (he was an avid skier until his doctor finally ordered him to quit in his 70s), Harriman was something of a ladies' man. During World War II, he conducted a famous flirtation with Pamela Churchill, who at the time was married to the son of the Prime Minister; he married her three decades later, after the death of his second wife Marie Norton Whitney.

With the obliviousness of the very rich, Harriman almost never carried any cash. Left stuck with the tab, young Foreign Service officers began calling Harriman "the world's richest cheapskate." That was perhaps the mildest of the many epithets he had to endure. At various times he was dubbed a playboy by the press, a traitor to his class by Wall Street and a Communist sympathizer by the Republican right. In history's verdict, he will be better remembered as a statesman who served his country with distinction.