Stealthy, Wealthy and Wise : SPANNING THE CENTURY: The Life of Averell Harriman, 1891-1986 <i> By Rudy Abramson</i> , <i> (William Morrow and Co.: $25; 748 pp).</i>
The last time Averell Harriman visited Moscow, Ronald Reagan was in the White House. But Harriman had first visited what was to become Soviet territory more than 80 years earlier, traveling with his father to its remotest tip on the shores of the Bering Strait.
When he was only 8, his dad, railroad king E. H. Harriman, took it into his head that he wanted to shoot a Kodiak bear. When a Harriman conceived such a wish, it was not just a matter of heading for the Arctic, hiring a professional hunter, finding a bear and killing it. Harriman pere set out for Alaska at the head of an expedition, 126 strong, complete with hunters, botanists, artists, stenographers, taxidermists, a chaplain and John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club.
On a whim, the whole expedition crossed into Russian territory and dropped in on a fragile community of Eskimos. Four decades later, that strange encounter enabled Harriman, as President Roosevelt’s ambassador, to boast to Josef Stalin that he first visited Russia without a passport.
As we learn in this most engaging, fair-minded and yet shrewd biography of a great American grandee, all his life E. H. Harriman’s son traveled first-class. It was not just the $70 million he inherited, or Arden House, the great stone castle his father built on a 30,000 acre estate in the Ramapo Mountains, almost within sight of New York City, or the controlling interest in the Union Pacific and all its tributary railroads, not to mention all the homes from Sun Valley to Hobe Sound by way of Manhattan, Georgetown and the Virginia hunt country. It wasn’t just the upbringing in the heart of the American upper class, from the Reverend Peabody’s Groton through Skull and Bones at Yale and all the doors that upbringing opened for him on Wall Street and in Washington, in London and Paris, as well as on polo fields from Meadow Brook to Pasadena.
One of the less obvious consequences of his fortune was that Harriman “knew everyone.” When his resignation from the Moscow embassy was accepted by the acting secretary of state in a dry form letter, for example, he fell about laughing at the idea that he should be treated like a run-of-the-mill diplomat by good old Dean Acheson, who had been in the rowing crew he coached at Yale. He was an acquaintance of everyone from J. P. Morgan to George Bush’s grandfather, as well as Al Capone and Charles Lindbergh. He lunched tete-a-tete with the Prince of Wales at Piping Rock in the 1920s, and was a regular for family supper with the Churchills at Chequers 20 years later.
The Harriman inheritance enabled him to start out in life where only the ablest end up, initiating and directing great ventures. In World War I, in his 20s, he took over a shipyard and pioneered the techniques of prefab shipbuilding. As an investor, he was in on the glory days of domestic aviation, and he introduced the streamliners to American railroads. He was one of the leaders among the bankers who poured money into German industry in the 1920s, and before he was 40 he had negotiated with both Trotsky and Stalin over his controlling interest in the strategic manganese mines in Soviet Georgia, flirted with oil in Azerbaijan and invested heavily in Silesian zinc.
In 1941, President Roosevelt sent him to London to “expedite” lend-lease, his program to bolster Allied countries “resisting aggression.” With extraordinary self-confidence, and taking the utmost advantage of the British government’s desperate need of American supplies, he ruthlessly undercut the official ambassador, Gil Winant, perhaps without fully understanding what he was doing. With even greater effrontery, having been admitted into Winston Churchill’s family circle, he began the great love affair of his life with the wartime prime minister’s daughter-in-law, Pamela. She was 21 years old at the time, and her husband, journalist Randolph Churchill, was away in the army.
In 1943, Harriman was sent as ambassador to Moscow, where he stayed until January of 1946. He proved to be an excellent ambassador, fascinated by Russia but never for one moment by communism, and he despised the apparatchiks he had to deal with. Stalin, on the other hand, he found “ruthless and brutal, certainly, but basically dependable.”
These are the words of Rudy Abramson, a Washington correspondent for the Times, not those of Harriman. As elsewhere in this enjoyable biography, however, Abramson seems to have summed up Harriman’s complicated and not always very self-knowing attitudes fairly. Harriman did not allow himself to be conned by Stalin. Two days after the Soviet Union entered the war in the Far East, Molotov demanded, on Stalin’s behalf, a share in accepting the Japanese surrender. Without bothering to consult Washington, Harriman turned him down flat. He took part in the great wartime conferences in Moscow and at Yalta, and played an important part in bringing Washington to understand that Stalin, in the aftermath of war, was not kindly old “Uncle Joe”.
World War II, in fact, was Harriman’s finest hour, though he continued to play a series of more or less important parts in American diplomacy for 30 years after. He enjoyed his time as American proconsul in Paris when even humble Americans could count on “hard currency, social status, priority at gas pumps, favoritism in housing and the gratitude of Europeans.”
He got on even better with Harry Truman than he had with Roosevelt, and soon became his national security adviser in the White House. In 1952, he made a bid of sorts for the Democratic presidential nomination, and in 1954 he was elected governor of New York by the narrowest of margins. In the 1960s, in his 70s, he signed up as a New Frontiersman. He became a close friend of Robert Kennedy, 40 years his junior, and served as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs as the Vietnam war was getting under way.
Yet the one office he most wanted eluded him. He never did become secretary of state. In fact, it is impossible to escape the conclusion from this admirably thorough biography that after 1946 Harriman was always looking for a job equal to his own estimate of his talents, and that he died a disappointed man for all the happiness his marriage to Pamela Churchill brought him in his last 15 years.
Another suspicion arises, too. Harriman was incomparable as a stylist. He moved through life as the beau ideal of the Great American Gentleman, stylish to a fault. When a revolution broke out while he was visiting Bogota, Harriman boldly strode to the president’s mansion to keep a lunch appointment. The presidential door opened a crack, and the head of the presidential butler appeared, wide-eyed, over a submachine gun. In his most debonair manner, Harriman handed the man his hat and walked in.
The question is whether the substance ever quite matched the style. Harriman was undoubtedly a fine polo player and a world-class player of croquet and bezique. As a businessman, he was hardly in that league. His career in shipbuilding and shipping was checkered. He lost money on his mining ventures, and as a banker he was as comprehensively outmaneuvered over a stock market deal in 1929 as any of his father’s business victims. Indeed, Abramson considers that Harriman’s driving motivation in life was to emulate his father’s achievements as a businessman, a playboy and a politician.
As a politician, he lacked the common touch. Abramson tells a defining anecdote about Harriman inviting Charles Collingwood, the star CBS reporter, to advise him on public relations. Collingwood came to breakfast and then got behind the wheel of his car to drive Harriman downtown. Harriman got in the back and began to read his newspaper. Collingwood ended up deciding not to work for his patrician employer.
If he was more ambitious than effective as a businessman and a magnificent failure as a politician, and undeniably impressive as a polo-playing playboy, the central question concerns Harriman’s claims to be regarded as a great international statesman. Here, too, Abramson’s verdict, though never expressed in so many words, would seem to be that he was better at representing the honor and dignity of the United States with style and indeed with a swagger than he was at the hard, patient work of negotiation.