William Averell Harriman

American politician

• Born: November 15, 1891
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: July 26, 1986
• Place of death: Yorktown Heights, New York

One of the chief architects of the containment policy in the 1940’s, Harriman lent valuable continuity to U.S. policy toward the communist world during his nearly forty years of government service.

Early Life

William Averell Harriman’s father, Edward Henry Harriman, was one of late nineteenth century America’s richest men; he controlled a railroad empire extending from Chicago to the Pacific. His mother, Mary (Averell) Harriman, was famous for her charities. When William was seventeen, his father died, leaving him a fortune of close to $100 million.

After graduating from Yale, the young Harriman went to work for the Union Pacific Railroad, where he had already been working during the summers as a clerk and section hand. Although primarily a railroad executive, Harriman had other business interests as well; he entered the shipping business and also became involved in various foreign investment ventures. One of his less successful ventures, an attempt made in the 1920’s to secure a manganese concession in Bolshevik Russia, provided the young Harriman with experience that was to prove of great value to him later.

In 1932, Harriman became chair of the board of the Union Pacific Railroad. He proved to be a worthy son of his late businessman father. At a time when the national economy was suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, the young Harriman managed not only to turn a profit through modernization of service and clever merchandising but also to maintain exceptionally good labor-management relations. Through Harriman’s efforts as a developer, the famous Idaho ski resort, Sun Valley, was opened for business. However, it would not be as a businessman, but rather as a public servant, that Harriman would win a lasting place in history.

In 1928, at a time when most big businessmen were Republicans, Harriman became a Democrat. This decision seems to have been partly a result of the influence of Harriman’s older sister Mary, who had an acute social conscience, and partly a result of Harriman’s own blossoming friendship with the then Democratic governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith. Above all, Harriman appears ultimately to have tired of the race to make money. Although he would throughout his life have a reputation for being careful with money to the point of stinginess, the mere amassing of an ever-greater fortune was probably not enough challenge for him.

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom Harriman had been acquainted since his preparatory school days, was elected president on the Democratic ticket. The connection with Roosevelt brought Harriman into government service after Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933. As an administrator under the National Recovery Act, as a member of the Business Advisory Council of the Department of Commerce, and, from 1937 through 1939, as chair of that Business Advisory Council, Harriman acted as a mediator between the Roosevelt administration and an often suspicious business community. Harriman’s active involvement in the carrying out of New Deal policies sharply distinguished him from most members of his social class during these years.

Life’s Work

As a still-neutral United States began to prepare for the possibility of war with Nazi Germany, Harriman finally found his true niche. Appointed chief of the raw materials branch of the Office of Production Management in May, 1940, he did much to speed up arms production. Once Harriman had shown his ability in this crucial area where business and government overlap, he was appointed, in February, 1941, to be “defence expediter” in London, the capital of an England still standing alone against Nazi Germany. Harriman’s job under the Lend-Lease Act was to do as much as possible to match British arms needs with American arms production.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, Harriman traveled to that country in late September of the same year, accompanied by the British prime minister’s representative, Lord Beaverbrook. Harriman’s mission was to find ways of extending Lend-Lease aid to the now-beleaguered Soviet state. In August, 1942, Harriman accompanied British prime minister Winston Churchill on another trip to Moscow, where the question of an Allied second front against Nazi Germany was discussed. On October 1, 1943, Harriman, who had already twice met Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union by President Roosevelt. Harriman’s long career as an expert on Soviet affairs was about to begin.

In 1943, Harriman, although well into middle age, still had a youthful appearance; he was a tall, slender, handsome man with thick, dark hair. His spouse, the former Marie Norton Whitney, was his second wife; his first marriage, to Kitty Lanier Lawrence, had ended in divorce in 1930. In his spare time, Harriman was an accomplished skier and polo player.

A patient negotiator, Harriman possessed in ample measure (perhaps as an inheritance from the social milieu in which he had been brought up) the charm and tact necessary for effective diplomacy; he instinctively knew how to be firm without being rude when dealing with foreign statesmen. Although not a snob in the usual sense, Harriman would, throughout his life, demonstrate a kind of power snobbery; he would instinctively gravitate, in any situation, to those who had the power to make crucial decisions. As ambassador to the Soviet Union, Harriman would attack his tasks with great zeal, driving both himself and his subordinates to work their hardest. A man who worked under him at this time, the later foreign policy theorist George Frost Kennan, would remember with great admiration his former boss’s concentration and attention to detail.

At first Harriman was very optimistic about the prospects for future good relations with the Soviet Union. Harriman’s initial optimism reflected the general enthusiasm then prevailing in the Western democracies of Great Britain and the United States for the active role the Soviet Union was playing in the military struggle against Nazi Germany.

As time wore on, however, Harriman became increasingly suspicious of Stalin’s intentions; these suspicions were heightened by the Warsaw Uprising of August-October, 1944, during which Russian troops stood idly by a short distance from the Polish capital while the German army suppressed a rising by anti-Communist Polish patriots within the city. Harriman came more and more to fear that Stalin would try to dominate all of Europe after the war was over. As early as September, 1944, Harriman was sending cables to Washington urging a stiffer policy toward the United States’ troublesome ally. American policy, Harriman urged his superiors, should demand, in a “firm but friendly” way, a quid pro quo from the Soviets. The threat of the withdrawal of American aid, Harriman believed, could be used as a bargaining chip to gain concessions from Stalin.

Despite his high regard for Harriman, President Roosevelt did not accept the ambassador’s recommendations. At the end of 1944, Nazi Germany, although on the defensive, still had considerable fighting strength left; nobody had any idea when Japan would be conquered. Roosevelt seems to have believed that Great Britain and the United States needed the Soviet Union more than the Soviets needed them. It was not until the death of President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, that Harriman’s hard-line point of view began to become influential within the inner councils of government. The surrender of Germany in May of 1945 and of Japan in September of that year, which removed the threat of enemies that the United States and the Soviet Union had in common, further strengthened the position of those who argued for a tougher American policy toward the Soviet Union.

The new American president, Harry S. Truman, proved much more willing to listen to Harriman’s advice concerning the Soviets than Roosevelt had been. In May, 1945, Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union was cut off, albeit more abruptly than Harriman would have liked. By the time Harriman’s stay as ambassador to the Soviet Union had come to an end, in February, 1946, the United States government was beginning to take diplomatic steps to oppose the growing Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. In March, 1947, the president, asking Congress for military aid to a Greece torn by Communist insurgency and a Turkey threatened by Soviet territorial demands, promulgated the Truman Doctrine , pledging the United States’ help to any country threatened by external pressures or internal subversion. The Cold War had begun.

Even after leaving his post in Moscow, Harriman continued to help shape the new American policy of containing Soviet expansion by all means short of all-out war. After a brief stint as ambassador to Great Britain, Harriman was appointed secretary of commerce in September, 1946, replacing Henry A. Wallace. As secretary of commerce, Harriman, through his testimony in Congress, did much to win appropriations for the Marshall Plan , President Truman’s program of helping Western Europe rebuild its war-shattered industrial base. In the spring of 1948, Harriman was appointed special representative in Europe for the organization set up to administer Marshall Plan aid. The aid Harriman disbursed, although limited in advance to the years 1948 to 1951, provided a much-needed impetus to European economic recovery, thus helping to check the further spread of communism. From 1950 to 1951, Harriman was special assistant to the president on foreign affairs; in 1951, he was the American representative on a committee studying Western European rearmament; from 1951 to 1953, he was director of the Mutual Security Agency, which disbursed military aid to American allies in Western Europe.

Since the Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected in 1952, chose not to make use of his considerable talents, there was, in the 1950’s, a hiatus in Harriman’s diplomatic career. Harriman tried in 1952, and again in 1956, to win the Democratic nomination for president; both times, he failed. Elected governor of New York by a narrow margin in 1954, he failed to secure reelection in 1958. With his patrician manner, Harriman never acquired enough of the common touch to win lasting popularity among the voters; his speaking style, moreover, remained wooden and uninspiring.

A return to the old life of government service as a diplomat, where Harriman so obviously excelled, did not come until the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960; in 1961, Harriman was appointed Ambassador at Large. Although old and slightly deaf, Harriman proved to be as mentally and physically vigorous as ever. Gaining influence rapidly within the new administration, he gained the nickname Crocodile for his impatient habit at meetings of brusquely cutting short those whom he believed were illogical or long-winded in their arguments.

Under the Kennedy administration, Harriman showed that although he was a realist in his attitudes toward the Soviet Union, he was no rigid Cold War ideologue. The man who had once rung the warning bells for the policy of containment now strove for peaceful solutions to the major sore points in Soviet-American relations. Harriman succeeded, against some opposition from military circles within the administration, in hammering together the fourteen-nation Geneva Accords of July 23, 1962. These agreements temporarily took the Southeast Asian state of Laos out of the Cold War by giving it a government of national union that all warring factions within that country neutralist, communist, and anticommunist could accept. Harriman was promoted first to undersecretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs, then, in April, 1963, to undersecretary of state for political affairs. As head of the American negotiating team, Harriman, with his characteristic mixture of restraint and toughness, played a crucial role in winning the signature of the Soviet Union to the treaty of August 5, 1963, which banned above-ground nuclear testing.

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. Under Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, Harriman, although retaining office, had considerably less influence over policy. After Johnson decided, in July, 1965, to commit American combat troops to the war against the Communists in South Vietnam, Harriman, as roving ambassador, defended the policy and pleaded (in vain) in Moscow for Soviet diplomatic pressure on Communist North Vietnam. Within the councils of the administration, however, Harriman’s was a voice for moderation, for negotiations, and for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. In March, 1968, in a dramatic policy turnaround, Johnson appointed Harriman chief of the United States delegation to the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam. The beginning of serious negotiations was frustrated by disagreements between the United States and North Vietnam; by the time Johnson had ordered a complete bombing halt to facilitate negotiations, his term as president was rapidly coming to a close.

Republican president Richard M. Nixon, elected in 1968, made no further use of Harriman’s service; Nixon’s lingering distrust of the liberal Democratic establishment was partly responsible for this failure to make use of Harriman’s talents in the still-lingering Vietnam peace talks, which would not be successfully concluded until January, 1973. During the frustrating Vietnam negotiations of 1969-1973, Harriman publicly urged both a fixed timetable for American withdrawal and the exertion of greater pressure on South Vietnam. Expressing these views aroused Nixon’s displeasure but won Harriman popularity with the growing American antiwar movement, even though the elder statesman had not originally sympathized with the movement’s demands.

Up to the end of his life, Harriman strove for better Soviet-American relations and for increased mutual understanding between the two superpowers. In June, 1983, as a private citizen, he visited then Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, concluded that the Soviets wanted peace, and urged a return by the administration of President Ronald Reagan to what Harriman considered to be the traditional American policy of peaceful coexistence. In the autumn of 1982, Harriman endowed the W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia University, to encourage a younger generation of Americans to devote themselves to the study of the politics, economics, society, and culture of the Soviet Union.

In 1970, Harriman’s second wife died, and the following year, he married Pamela Digby Hayward, the former wife of one of Churchill’s sons; Harriman had first met her during his World War II years in London. On July 26, 1986, Harriman, who had been in failing health for some years, died at the age of ninety-four.

Significance

In the course of his long life of public service, Harriman held a greater number of public posts than any American since John Quincy Adams. Although he had been one of the key architects of the early Cold War policy of containment of a Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin, Harriman had come, by the end of his life, to urge greater efforts to achieve peaceful relations with Stalin’s successors. Harriman was sometimes accused of being a warmonger, and at other times was charged with being an appeaser who was soft on communism. Harriman viewed the policy that he advocated as a steadfast attempt to preserve both the freedom of the Western democracies and the peace of the world, in an era in which the possession of nuclear weapons by both the Soviet Union and the United States had made another world war unthinkable.

In Harriman’s life, one also sees that adherence to the principle of noblesse oblige that has so animated some Americans born to wealth and privilege; the same phenomenon can be seen among the later generations of the Rockefeller dynasty. Despite his inherited wealth, Harriman did not live the life of the idle rich; instead, he devoted himself unstintingly to the pursuit of the common good, like other beneficiaries of the Ivy League education who also made their way in American diplomacy of this time.

Throughout his life, Harriman was fueled by burning ambition, not to acquire wealth, but to be at the center of the decision-making process. Perhaps this open hunger for power repelled the voters when it became apparent in the domestic scene. In the realm of diplomacy, such ambition could be harnessed to give the United States the best possible representation abroad. In the best sense of the word, Harriman truly was an American aristocrat.

Bibliography

Chandler, Harriette L. “The Transition to Cold Warrior: The Evolution of W. Averell Harriman’s Assessment of the U.S.S.R.’s Polish Policy, October 1943: Warsaw Uprising.” East European Quarterly 10 (Summer, 1976): 229-245. Argues that Harriman was at first sympathetic toward the Soviet position on Poland and adopted a stricter attitude only after observing Soviet response during the Warsaw Uprising.

Cooper, Chester L. The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970. Written by an aide to Harriman during the Johnson years, this book contains some interesting material on Harriman’s work as chief American negotiator in Paris in 1968. Asserts that Harriman was more impatient for progress in negotiations with Communist North Vietnam, even over possible objections from the United States’ South Vietnamese ally, than was President Johnson.

Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. New York: Random House, 1972. This controversial book, based on interviews with unnamed governmental officials, contains, among other things, a fascinating analysis of the role played by Harriman within both the Democratic Party and the two Democratic administrations during the years 1961-1969. Halberstam sees Harriman as part of the group within the Kennedy administration that effectively threw its weight against large-scale American military involvement in Vietnam. Ascribes the escalation of the war in 1965 partly to Harriman’s loss of influence following Johnson’s ascent to the presidency in 1963; Harriman had failed to cement his relationship with Johnson when the latter was Kennedy’s vice president.

Herring, George C., Jr. Aid to Russia, 1941-1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, the Origins of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973. A valuable monograph on the issue of Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union. The author concentrates on the struggle within the United States government between advocates of unconditional aid and those who wanted the United States to demand a political price for such assistance.

Hogan, Michael J. “American Marshall Planners and the Search for a European Neocapitalism.” American Historical Review 90 (February, 1985): 44-72. Deals with Harriman’s ideas. Argues that Harriman, and others, wanted to see established in Europe, as part of the reconstruction process, a new and reformed capitalism in which free-enterprise economic principles would be modified by close cooperation between business, government, and labor.

Larson, Deborah Welch. Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. A stimulating and original study of Cold War origins, in which Harriman is seen as one of the four principal architects of the containment policy during the years 1944 through 1947 (the others, according to the author, were Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, and President Harry S. Truman himself). Larson stresses how tentative and gradual was the American journey from cooperation to Cold War; even Truman did not fully share Harriman’s fears.

Rust, William J. Kennedy in Vietnam. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985. Relying on government documents that became available to the public in the early 1980’s and on oral history interviews, the book provides (among other things) fascinating bits of information on Harriman’s role in shaping Indochina policy at this time. Harriman is shown as having pressed for United States approval in advance of the coup that toppled controversial South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. This book, the memoirs of a man who was special assistant to the president in the Kennedy years, gives the reader an insider’s description of Harriman as New Frontier diplomat. Contains a good account of how Harriman achieved his two major triumphs: the Geneva Accords on Laos and the Atmospheric Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. Fairly sympathetic to Harriman.

Seaborg, Glenn T. Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Seaborg, the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission during the Kennedy years, provides a detailed account of the role played by Harriman in the negotiations for an atmospheric nuclear test ban in 1963. The author has a high regard for the skill with which Harriman led the American team during these talks.

Twing, Stephen W. Myths, Models, and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Cultural Shaping of Three Cold Warriors. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998. Traces the political evolution of Harriman, John Foster Dulles, and Robert McNamara.