TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/86/86capmil.6

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                                                                                August 4, 1986

The Establishment's Envoy

William Averell Harriman:  1891-1986


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.F. 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 king 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 America 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.

--By Evan Thomas