Harriman: When L.B.J. Lost Nerve

When W. Averell Harriman died July 26 at the splendid age of 94, he had become not only one of the history-makers of this century but also one of its great raconteurs. He was a sort of living Plutarch writing the “Lives” of our times, and he once told me a story--to be repeated here--that has never appeared in any of the massive research done on the Vietnam War, probably because it does not exist in any official documents or records.

Harriman was a vast repository of unpublished tales, gossip elevated to statesmanship because it involved first-hand encounters with national leaders. An hour or an evening in Harriman’s company always bubbled with “Stalin said to me . . . ,” or “Roosevelt was wrong,” or “I said to Winston” or “Jack Kennedy should have . . . .”

There was nothing self-important about his information relays. Harriman was far too tough to tolerate pomposity in himself or others. He was a kind of voracious curmudgeon who lived a full life non-stop, and he would recount it as others might a game of golf or a visit to the Grand Canyon.

We first met in 1946 when he arrived in London from Moscow, where he had been the U.S. ambassador and one of the first to warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the difficulty of dealing with the suspicious, insulated Soviets. In England, he would be President Harry S. Truman’s envoy to the more congenial Court of St. James’s but that turned out to be a brief tenure before he was whisked back to Washington as the new secretary of commerce. Yet those months were the beginning for me of nearly 40 years of sporadic contact and conversation that always seemed to take up where the previous talk had ended, because Harriman always talked in a stream-of-history manner.

Harriman liked the company of journalists but he was not a talkative news source. He was an absolute clam about any negotiation that he was engaged in; it was pointless to try to pry information out of him when he did not intend to give. But this never inhibited a good conversation and he had a technique of conveying the kind of stuff that a reporter today would attribute to “an informed source who declined to be identified.”

After a varied series of assignments and special missions for Presidents--Roosevelt, Truman and John F. Kennedy--with an interval as governor of the state of New York, Harriman was sent to Paris in May, 1968, by President Lyndon B. Johnson to launch the Vietnam peace talks.

Harriman stayed until President Richard M. Nixon’s inauguration in January, 1969, with nothing gained except the pleasure of being back in Paris, where he had been chief of the Marshall Plan for Europe from 1948 to 1951.

But a decade later, I heard from Harriman the untold story of “the peace that never was,” the peace he thought he was going to produce.

I was in Washington on leave in January, 1978, and went to see Harriman at his fine old Georgetown Colonial home on N street. We talked for more than an hour in the living room ornamented by Picasso and Manet paintings. As I was leaving, Harriman rose to see me to the door, as he habitually did.

Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.) had died of cancer a few days before, and his body was lying in state in the rotunda of the Capitol that day. As I opened the door, I said to Harriman, “It is sad about Hubert Humphrey, isn’t it.”

“Shut the door, shut the door. I must tell you something,” Harriman said. I shut the door.

Humphrey, he said, would have been President of the United States if Lyndon B. Johnson hadn’t lost courage about leaving the Vietnam War.

“When I went to Paris to start the Vietnam talks,” Harriman continued, “Johnson had decided to get out of Vietnam. L.B.J.’s plan was that once the Paris talks got going, he would move Clark Clifford from the Defense Department over to the State Department to replace Dean Rusk. He was then going to bring Cy Vance back from Paris to take over at defense.

“My job would have been to negotiate cease-fire arrangements so we could immediately begin withdrawing the troops,” Harriman said. “Vance would organize it from Defense and Clifford would handle the diplomatic side from State. But Lyndon Johnson lost his nerve--and Hubert Humphrey lost the election.”

I was a little incredulous, having covered nearly five years of the Vietnam talks in Paris. I asked Harriman if it really could have been done that way in 1968. He said in his usual didactic manner that of course it could have been done, insisting, “We were going to declare a cease-fire and bring our troops home, and the end result would not have been any different than it was five years later.”

If the story is not in the archives of the Johnson Administration, neither is it a story that Harriman would have invented. Moreover, it is plausible--politically, historically.

Clifford was all for a quick end to the war, but Rusk was for negotiating a way out. Johnson in May, 1968, had already withdrawn from the presidential race, and he had turned down further massive military reinforcements after the Tet offensive. The country was fed up and the war was a burning national issue.

In one sense Johnson had little to lose if, as commander in chief, he ordered the troops home. But he would have faced Republican scorn and outrage about surrender, for selling out to communism.

It would have been a messy business to manage, for retreats are always more difficult for generals and politicians than advances. But the heat would have fallen on a lame-duck President, and if the troops had been on their way home in the summer of 1968, it would have completely changed the politics of the election campaign between Humphrey and Nixon.

Would Nixon have campaigned on a Republican platform to keep the war going? Whatever denigration Johnson would have suffered, he would have given Humphrey a clear run for the White House without the burden of defending an unpopular and losing war. Even if Humphrey had not won, four more years of the Vietnam trauma would have been saved.

Averell Harriman had his critics and his faults, but he always kept his nerve.