Writers & Writing Missing the Midas Touch
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing MISSING THE MIDAS TOUCH BY ROGER DRAPER W. Averell Harriman, though born to greatness, was the son of a self-made man. In 1862, at the age of 14, E. H. Harriman left school...
...During the 1880s he took over the Illinois Central Railroad...
...Under Truman, Averell helped devise the Marshall Plan and acted as its director in Europe...
...He never had a chance...
...In banking, meanwhile, his "routine investments" in steel and bonds "steadily paid off' in the 1920s...
...This led to his being appointed assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs...
...In 1928 he abandoned the Republicans and supported Al Smith to protest Prohibition, because it had cut the number of voyagers on his ocean liners...
...Thanks to his friendship with Robert F. Kennedy, Averell was greatly suspect to Lyndon B. Johnson...
...To no avail...
...E. H. was more than a mere speculator—he revived several companies through active management—but he was a speculator of genius...
...Returning home to be the first Presidential assistant for national security affairs, he played an influential part in the Korean War, especially in the firing of General Douglas MacArthur...
...aims in Southeast Asia by persuading the Soviets to moderate North Vietnam's behavior...
...telling the President that all of Eastern Europe was in danger of falling under Soviet-style regimes...
...Harriman did manage to win election, rather narrowly, as governor of New York in 1954...
...In 1890 he began hoarding its profits, anticipating the panic of '93...
...While holding the chairmanship of the Aviation Corporation of America, in the late '20s and early '30s, Harriman showed "more affinity for making deals," notes Abramson, "than attending to details...
...In his next role, as chairman of that Western railroad, Averell spent large sums to improve service and develop a novel, faster locomotive...
...During World War II he had a brief fling with Churchill's daughter-in-law, Pamela, and in 1972, following Marie's death, she became his third and final spouse...
...He developed Sun Valley, in Idaho, the earliest major ski resort in the country...
...He did have some successes...
...all I am willing to grant you is the first half of the 20th century...
...After setting up as a tycoon in the shipbuilding industry, he created a revolutionary mass-produced ocean freighter...
...Until then Averell Harriman had always been the boss...
...military presence in Laos, he succeeded in arranging a treaty...
...A terrible candidate, so bad at remembering names that he had to greet people with the salutation, "Hello, stranger," he adopted the strongest civil rights stand of any aspirant to the office in 1952 and 1956...
...Yet another Harriman interest was politics...
...Although he felt closer to Truman than to Roosevelt—his senior by almost a decade and the scion of a much older family than the Harrimans—Truman did not grant him what he subsequently admitted was the true summit of his ambition: appointment as secretary of state...
...Horrified to discover that Thomas E. Dewey, his predecessor, had balanced the books by raiding an emergency fund and virtually exhausting it, he held the line on spending and therefore had "an unremarkable record...
...Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986 (Morrow, 779 pp., $25) by Rudy Abramson, a Washington correspondent of the Los Angeles Times...
...It was Harriman who circulated Kennan's famous "Long Telegram...
...The bank, now called Brown Brothers Harriman, returned to solvency but "never rivaled" his holdings of his father's stock in the Union Pacific...
...As a businessman, Averell could not equal his father's achievements, being less farsighted and attentive to detail...
...he naively expected that all foreign armies would quit that land, as the signatories had agreed, and overestimated the willingness, not to mention the ability, of the Soviets to pressure North Vietnam...
...When it duly came, he used these resources and funds raised by Jacob Schiff to take control of the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad...
...No doubt his career owed a good deal to the luck of his birth...
...But he had assiduously courted upstaters and was expected to get a second term by a landslide...
...Within eight years he owned his own seat on the exchange...
...In 1862, at the age of 14, E. H. Harriman left school and entered a brokerage as an office boy...
...By 1944 he was warning Hopkins that "unless we take issue with the present [Soviet] policy there is every indication the Soviet Union will become a world bully...
...Trotsky countered, "Oh, no...
...He was unenthusiastically present at Yalta and then, writes Abramson, went home to argue "for a stiffer approach...
...Averell Harriman was not the kind of man who could transform a diplomatic and political mess like Vietnam into a triumph, if there was such a man...
...He left a fortune worth $70 million and an example that haunted his son throughout a long career that has now been splendidly chronicled in Spanning the...
...he always attempted to fulfill his designs, says Abramson, "by entrusting himself to experts...
...This would seem to explain why, having built his reputation as a man who could talk to the Russians, he occasionally exaggerated the usefulness of that talent, and why he insisted on remaining in the Johnson Administration...
...In various ways, Averell tended to spread himself too thin...
...Johnson remained distant because in high councils Averell was a skeptic, a promoter of bombing halts and talks, though not of withdrawal...
...bred and ran racehorses...
...Again, he hoped to secure U.S...
...Averell observed, in his usual unappealingly pious style, that "the 20th century will no doubt go down in history as the American Century, but it is not impossible that the 21st century may become known as the Russian" one...
...Finally in the President's confidence, he was promoted to the third ranking post in State: undersecretary for political affairs...
...Four years later he voted a straight Democratic ticket...
...Instead, the Governor, as he ever afterward liked to be called, lost in a landslide to Nelson A. Rockefeller, who successfully represented him as a tool of the bosses...
...Would that more multimillionaires resembled him...
...In 1943 Averell was designated ambassador to Moscow...
...In this capacity, he negotiated the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and was largely responsible for the celebrated cable instructing our ambassador in South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, to encourage the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem...
...Alas, the collapse of 1920 greatly diminished demand and he had to sell his shipyards...
...Besides his business activities, he was a great rower, polo player, croquet player, and skier...
...Spurred on by a liberal older sister and his recognition that, to quote Abramson, "the real power in America had shifted from New York's financial district to Washington," he repeatedly left the Union Pacific to hold a series of subordinate jobs in Franklin D. Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration...
...In 1952, he had a mild attack of White House fever...
...Told to negotiate an end to the U.S...
...When you got to the inner core, you found that it wasn't filled...
...involvement in Laos...
...In Washington, however, as he told a journalist with only some exaggeration, he "started as a private" and struggled to win the trust of every President he served...
...Unfortunately, he did not listen to partners who wanted to retrench his banking operations before the 1929 crash, and eventually he had to merge with another foundering company...
...Nonetheless, he became increasingly hostile to Stalin...
...He was forced out of the shipping and cruise business as well by such unanticipated difficulties as the end of open immigration in 1924...
...There wasn't an independent, defining sense of who he was...
...Since Stalin was not available, he met with Trotsky...
...Averell soon wound up the concession...
...He resorted to diplomacy, going to Moscow to change the terms of his agreement...
...He never recognized that it was valuable solely as a means of extricating American forces...
...died in 1909, shortly before Averell turned 18...
...Writers & Writing MISSING THE MIDAS TOUCH BY ROGER DRAPER W. Averell Harriman, though born to greatness, was the son of a self-made man...
...Toward the close of Johnson's Presidency, Harriman led our delegation to the Paris peace conference...
...Harriman did not support John F. Kennedy (or any subsequent Democratic Presidential nominee) in advance of his anointment by the party...
...George F. Kennan, his deputy, said Harriman felt "he could learn more that was important in one interview with Stalin than the rest of us could learn in months of pedestrian study of Soviet publications," and he continued to overrate such contacts...
...Milton Katz, a longtime acquaintance of Harriman in the bureaucracy, was probably right in saying: "Separated from his role in important affairs, he had a horrible feeling that he had no personal significance as a human being...
...He was right when it really counted, and considering his great wealth, he had a surprising amount of pluck...
...He was not prominent in the Roosevelt Administration until he entered the circle of FDR's confidant, Harry Hopkins, who gave the ardently anti-Nazi Harriman the position of "expediter" of Lend-Lease in London—in effect, the President's (and Hopkins') personal representative to Churchill...
...This greatly increased ridership and helped the Union Pacific issue respectable dividends in an era when few competitors paid any at all...
...Harriman went to work on him, throwing huge parties to celebrate his daughters' weddings and invariably defending his Vietnam policy...
...And in plain fact, he was indeed their man...
...But that wasn't what turned him into an ardent opponent of Hitler and Stalin, or made him willing to put in 18-hour days working his way up through the bureaucracy...
...Still, the author suggests, Harriman made "a historic mistake" in restoring the passenger division in preference to shoring up freight traffic, which generated greater revenues and had better prospects of long-term survival...
...JFK, thinking him an antediluvian figure, threw him only a roving ambassadorship, with the seemingly minor assignment of investigating the U.S...
...Again, the idea that we could obtain anything through negotiations except an excuse to leave was an illusion...
...and pursued an active love life that included a wife and a substantial cast of mistresses—one of whom, Marie Whitney (estranged from a friend of his), was to be the second Mrs...
...Similarly, worldwide overproduction and Soviet non-cooperation undermined a manganese concession Averell acquired in the USSR in the mid-'20s...
Vol. 75 • August 1992 • No. 10
