Governor William Averell Harriman

William Averell Harriman

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/5971569/william-averell-harriman

Harriman was an American Democratic Party politician, businessman and diplomat. He was the son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman. He served as Secretary of Commerce under U.S. President Harry S. Truman and later as the 48th Governor of New York. He was a candidate for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 1952, and again in 1956 when he was endorsed by President Truman but lost to Adlai Stevenson. Harriman served U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as special envoy to Europe and served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and U.S. Ambassador to Britain. He served in various positions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Contents

   * 1 Early life

   * 2 Business affairs

   * 3 Thoroughbred racing

   * 4 War seizures controversy

   * 5 Diplomatic and political career

   * 6 Family life

   * 7 Summary of career

   * 8 See also

   * 9 References

   * 10 Bibliography

         o 10.1 Primary sources

   * 11 External links

Early life

William Averell Harriman was born in New York City, the son of railroad baron Edward Henry Harriman and Mary Williamson Averell, and brother of E. Roland Harriman. Harriman was a close friend of Hall Roosevelt (brother of Eleanor Roosevelt).

During the summer of 1899, Harriman's father organized the Harriman Alaska Expedition, a philanthropic-scientific survey of coastal Alaska and Russia that attracted twenty-five of the leading scientific, naturalist and artist luminaries of the day, including John Muir, John Burroughs, George Bird Grinnell, C. Hart Merriam, Grove Karl Gilbert, and Edward Curtis, along with 100 family members and staff, aboard the steamship George Elder. Young Harriman would have his first introduction to Russia, a nation that he would spend a significant amount of attention on in his later life in public service.

He attended Groton School in Massachusetts before going on to Yale where he joined the Skull and Bones society. He graduated in 1913. After graduating, he inherited the largest fortune in America and became Yale's youngest Crew coach.

Business affairs

Using money from his father he established W.A. Harriman & Company banking business in 1922. In 1927 his brother Roland joined the business and the name was changed to Harriman Brothers & Company. In 1931, it merged with Brown Brothers & Co. to create the highly successful Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.. Notable employees included George Herbert Walker and his son-in-law Prescott Sheldon Bush, Percy Rockefeller and Robert S. Lovell.

Harriman's main properties included Brown Brothers & Harriman & Co, Union Pacific Railroad, Merchant Shipping Corporation, and venture capital investments that included the Polaroid Corporation. Harriman's associated properties included the Southern Pacific Railroad (including the Central Pacific Railroad), Illinois Central Railroad, Wells Fargo & Co., the Pacific Mail Steamship Co., American Shipping & Commerce, Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actiengesellschaft (HAPAG), the American Hawaiian Steamship Co., United American Lines, the Guaranty Trust Company, and the Union Banking Corporation.

Thoroughbred racing

Following the death of August Belmont, Jr. in 1924, Harriman, George Walker, and Joseph E. Widener purchased much of Belmont's Thoroughbred breeding stock. Harriman raced under the name of Arden Farms. Among his horses, Chance Play won the 1927 Jockey Club Gold Cup. As well, he raced in partnership with Walker under the name Log Cabin Stable before buying him out. U.S. Racing Hall of Fame inductee Louis Feustel, trainer of Man o' War, trained the Log Cabin horses until 1926. [1] Of the partnership's successful runners purchased from the August Belmont estate, Ladkin is best remembered for defeating the European star Epinard in the International Special No. 2.

War seizures controversy

While Averell Harriman served as Senior Partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., Harriman Bank was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938, but who by 1939 had fled Germany and was bitterly denouncing Adolf Hitler. Business transactions for profit with Nazi Germany were not illegal when Hitler declared war on the US, but, six days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Trading With the Enemy Act after it had been made public that U.S. companies were doing business with the declared enemy of the United States. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City.

The Harriman business interests seized under the act in October and November 1942 included:

   * Union Banking Corporation (UBC) (for Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman).

   * Holland-American Trading Corporation (with Harriman)

   * the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (with Harriman)

   * Silesian-American Corporation (this company was partially owned by a German entity; during the war the Germans tried to take the full control of Silesian-American. In response to that, American government seized German owned minority shares in the company, leaving the U.S. partners to carry on the portion of the business in the United States.)

The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward. UBC was dissolved in 1951. [edit] Diplomatic and political career Averell Harriman (center) with Winston Churchill (right) and Vyacheslav Molotov (left) See also: 1963 South Vietnamese coup, Arrest and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, Reaction to the 1963 South Vietnamese coup, Cable 243, Buddhist crisis, Krulak Mendenhall mission, and McNamara Taylor mission

Harriman served President Franklin D. Roosevelt as special envoy to Europe, and was present at the meeting between Winston Churchill and the US president at Placentia Bay in August 1941. The outcome of this five-day meeting became known as the Atlantic Charter, a common declaration of principles of the US and the UK. He served as the US Ambassador to Soviet Union between 1943 and 1946 and the Ambassador to Britain in 1946.

In 1945, while Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Harriman was presented with a Trojan Horse gift. In 1952, the gift, a carved wood Great Seal of the United States, which had adorned "the ambassador’s Moscow residential office" in Spaso House, was found to be bugged.

He was later appointed the United States Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman to replace Henry A. Wallace, a critic of Truman's foreign policies. Harriman served between 1946 and 1948. He was then in Paris, where he was put in charge of the Marshall Plan, and had friendly relations with Irving Brown, a CIA agent charged of the international relations of the AFL-CIO. Harriman was then sent to Teheran in July 1951 to mediate between Persia and Britain in the wake of the Persian nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

In the 1954 race to succeed Republican Thomas E. Dewey as Governor of New York, Harriman defeated Dewey's protege, U.S. Senator Irving M. Ives, by a tiny margin. He served as governor for one term until Republican Nelson Rockefeller defeated him in 1958. As governor, he increased personal taxes by 11% but his tenure was dominated by his presidential ambitions. Harriman was a candidate for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 1952, and again in 1956 when he was endorsed by Truman but lost (both times) to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson. Harriman was generally considered to be on the left or liberal wing of the Democratic party, hence his losing out to the more moderate Stevenson.

His presidential ambitions defeated, Harriman became a widely-respected elder statesman of the party. In January 1961, he was appointed Ambassador at Large in the Kennedy administration, a position he held until November, when he became Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. In December 1961, Anatoliy Golitsyn defected from the Soviet Union and accused Harriman of being a Soviet spy, but his claims were dismissed by the CIA and Harriman remained in his position until April 1963, when he became Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. He retained that position through the transition to the Lyndon Johnson administration until March 1965 when he again became Ambassador at Large. He held that position for the remainder of Johnson's presidency. Harriman was the chief US negotiator at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam.

Harriman is noted for supporting, on behalf of the State department, the coup against Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Johnson's confession in the assassination of Diem could indicate some complicity on Harriman's part.

Harriman received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and West Point's Sylvanus Thayer Award in 1975.

Family life

His first marriage was to Kitty Lanier Lawrence, whom he had divorced before her death in 1936. He subsequently married Marie Norton Whitney, who left her husband, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, to marry him. They remained married until her death in 1970.

His third and final marriage was in 1971 to Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward, the former wife of Winston Churchill's son Randolph, and widow of Broadway producer Leland Hayward. Harriman died in 1986 in Yorktown Heights, New York, aged 94. He and Pamela are buried at Arden Farm Graveyard in Arden, New York.

Summary of career

   * Vice President, Union Pacific Railroad Co., 1915-17

   * Director, Illinois Central Railroad Co., 1915-46

   * Member, Palisades Interstate Park Commission, 1915-54

   * Chairman, Merchant Shipbuilding Corp.,1917-25

   * Chairman, W. A. Harriman & Company, 1920-31

   * Partner, Soviet Georgian Manganese Concessions, 1925-28

   * Chairman, executive committee, Illinois Central Railroad, 1931-42

   * Senior partner, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 1931-46

   * Chairman, Union Pacific Railroad, 1932-46

   * Co-founded Today magazine with Vincent Astor, 1935-37 (merged with Newsweek in 1937)

   * Administrator and Special Assistant, National Recovery Administration, 1934-35

   * Founded, Sun Valley Ski Resort, Idaho, 1936

   * Chairman, Business Advisory Council, 1937-39

   * Chief, Materials Branch & Production Division, Office of Production Management, 1941

   * U.S. Ambassador & Special Representative to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1941-43

   * Chairman, Ambassador & Special Representative of the US President's Special Mission to the USSR, 1941-43

   * U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1943-46

   * U.S. Ambassador, Britain, 1946

   * U.S. Secretary of Commerce, 1946-48

   * United States Coordinator, European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), 1948-50

   * Special Assistant to the U.S. President, 1950-52

   * U.S. Representative and Chairman, North Atlantic Commission on Defense Plans, 1951-52

   * Director, Mutual Security Agency, 1951-53

   * Candidate, Democratic nomination for U.S. President, 1952

   * Governor, State of New York, 1955-58

   * Candidate, Democratic nomination for U.S. President, 1956

   * U.S. Ambassador-at-large, 1961

   * United States Deputy Representative, International Conference on the Settlement of the Laotian, 1961-62

   * Assistant US Secretary of State, Far Eastern Affairs, 1961-63

   * Special Representative to the US President, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1963

   * Under US Secretary of State, Political Affairs, 1963-65

   * U.S. Ambassador-at-large, 1965-69

   * Chairman, President's Commission of the Observance of Human Rights Year, 1968

   * Personal Representative of the US President, Peace Talks with North Vietnam, 1968-69

   * Chairman, Foreign Policy Task Force, Democratic National Committee, 1976

   * Member, American Academy of Diplomacy Charter, Club of Rome, Council on Foreign Relations, Knights of Pythias, Skull and Bones Society, Psi Upsilon Fraternity and the Jupiter Island Club.

See also Wikimedia Commons has media related to: W. Averell Harriman

   * Florence Jaffray Harriman

   * Papers of W. Averell Harriman, Library of Congress (see [2])

   * U.S. presidential election, 1952

   * U.S. presidential election, 1956

1. ^ The Great Seal

  2. ^ http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r101:FLD001:E53490,E53490 INTRODUCTION TO `EMBASSY MOSCOW: ATTITUDES AND ERRORS' – (BY HENRY J. HYDE, REPUBLICAN OF ILLINOIS) (Extension of Remarks - October 26, 1988) page [E3490]

  3. ^ Harry Kelber, « AFL-CIO’s Dark Past », 22 November 2004, on laboreducator.org

  4. ^ Frédéric Charpier, La CIA en France. 60 ans d'ingérence dans les affaires françaises, Seuil, 2008, p. 40-43. See also Les belles aventures de la CIA en France, 8 January, 2008, Bakchich.

  5. ^ http://www.bibliothecapersica.com/articles/v12f1/v12f1011.html

  6. ^ http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1963_1104_jfk_vietnam_memoir.html

  7. ^ http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1966_0201_lbj_mccarthy_vietnam...

Bibliography

   * Rudy Abramson. Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986 (1992), 779pp

         o review by Hogan, Michael J. "The Vice Men of Foreign Policy" . Reviews in American History 1993 21(2): 320-328. ISSN 0048-7511 Fulltext in Jstor

   * Bland, Larry I. "Averell Harriman, the Russians and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe, 1943-45." Australian Journal of Politics and History 1977 23(3): 403-416. ISSN 0004-9522 Abstract: Portrays Harriman, Roosevelt's lend-lease expediter in London, and later ambassador in Moscow, as representative of "the best in the American diplomatic tradition." The rich, well travelled son of a railroad magnate broke with his class in 1932 and became a New Dealer. He took a "Wilsonian liberalism" into diplomatic affairs, but by 1943 urged hard reciprocal bargaining with the Russians. His optimism about Soviet postwar intentions was shaken in 1945 by the fate of Poland and the prisoners of war issue, and he became a pioneer "cold warrior." By the 1960s he was wanting to "de-escalate the rhetoric." Concludes that the irony of Harriman's ambassadorship is that some of his sound advice of 1943-44 was ignored, while his rather shrill rhetoric of 1945 was accepted as expert advice.

   * 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 1976 10(2): 229-245. ISSN 0012-8449. Abstract: Although Harriman helped develop the philosophical foundations of the Containment Policy he approached his job as Ambassador to the USSR with considerable understanding and acceptance of the goals of Soviet foreign policy. His position was generally conciliatory toward the Soviet Union until Stalin's stern refusal to aid the beleaguered Poles in the Warsaw Uprising convinced him that the "Soviet will could be bent, if at all, only by hard bargaining, a readiness to apply pressure by withholding favors, and a willingness to do without Soviet assistance in some other areas." Based on recently declassified documents.

   * Clemens, Diane S. "Averell Harriman, John Deane, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the 'Reversal of Co-operation' with the Soviet Union in April 1945." International History Review 1992 14(2): 277-306. ISSN 0707-5332. Discusses the events of April 1945 that led to a change in US policy concerning the Soviet Union. Harriman, ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Major-General John Deane, commanding general of the US military mission to Moscow, had been urging Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take a firmer stance against Stalin and his plans for Eastern Europe, especially as they concerned the formation of the new government in Poland. After Roosevelt died, Harriman and Deane were able to convince President Harry Truman to stand firm, and by the end of the month US-Soviet relations were deteriorating. According to the author, the Cold War had begun.

   * Isaacson, Walter and Thomas, Evan. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made 1986. 853 pp.

   * Langer, John Daniel. "The Harriman-beaverbrook Mission and the Debate over Unconditional Aid for the Soviet Union, 1941." Journal of Contemporary History 1979 14(3): 463-482. ISSN 0022-0094 Fulltext in Jstor. Abstract: US presidential adviser Harry Hopkins, suggested a mission to Moscow to determine Russian needs after the Nazi invasion. In mid-September 1941 W. Averell Harriman, US lend-lease representative in London, and Lord Beaverbrook, British supply minister, met with Joseph Stalin and offered incredibly generous aid. It was vainly anticipated that the USSR would reciprocate with information. Instead the formal protocol sealing the conference was but a restatement of Allied promises of specific help. The United States treated the protocol as sacred and even after Pearl Harbor gave preference to supplies to Russia before meeting the needs of American forces. Friendship with the Soviet Union, in the interest of peace, was to be won at any price.

   * Larsh, William. "W. Averell Harriman and the Polish Question, December 1943-August 1944." East European Politics and Societies 1993 7(3): 513-554. ISSN 0888-3254. A detailed investigation of the Harriman Papers, resulting in an appeal for a reexamination of American foreign policy and diplomacy during World War II, especially regarding the Polish question, and a new look at the origins of the Cold War. Czechoslovakia's Eduard Benes and the Czech solution had considerable influence on W. Averell Harriman and his optimistic belief that the USSR would honor its declarations for an independent Poland and exercise a restrained predominance in other East European matters.

   * Moynihan, Daniel Patrick and Wilson, James Q. "Patronage in New York State, 1955-1959." American Political Science Review 1964 58(2): 286-301. ISSN 0003-0554 Fulltext in Jstor. Abstract: An analysis of the efforts of the Harriman administration "to discover and apply guidelines for patronage decisions which would optimize the attainment of two potentially conflicting goals," namely, "staffing the government with competent and attractive administrators, and acquiring and consolidating power over the party apparatus."

   * Paterson, Thomas G. "The Abortive American Loan to Russia and the Origins of the Cold War, 1943-1946." Journal of American History 1969 56(1): 70-92. ISSN 0021-8723 Fulltext in Jstor. Abstract: In January 1945 the USSR requested a loan of six billion dollars from the United States to finance the purchase of industrial equipment, railroad equipment, and manufactured goods. Harriman dismissed the Russian terms as unreasonable and urged that the obvious Soviet need for a loan be used as a diplomatic weapon. The Truman administration followed this proposal, but failed to prepare Congress or public opinion for a loan and refused to enter into serious negotiations over it at Teheran. Russia was miffed at American "dollar diplomacy" at a time when a large British loan was negotiated at two percent interest. The USSR refused to accept the U.S. price of an "open door" in Eastern Europe, Soviet membership in Bretton Woods institutions, and compliance with U.S. international economic policy. The loan controversy may have worsened relations over reparations and East European questions.

   * Soares, John, “Averell Harriman Has Changed His Mind: The Seattle Speech and the Rhetoric of Cold War Confrontation,” Cold War History 9 (May 2009), 267–86.

   * Wehrle, Edmund F. "'A Good, Bad Deal': John F. Kennedy, W. Averell Harriman, and the Neutralization of Laos, 1961-1962." Pacific Historical Review 1998 67(3): 349-377. ISSN 0030-8684 Abstract: In the case of Laos, Kennedy sought to establish a truly neutral government in the volatile region of Southeast Asia. At Kennedy's behest, his special ambassador, W. Averell Harriman, sought a government in Laos that included nationalists, democrats, socialists, and Communists. Kennedy and Harriman secured Soviet support for a coalition government under Prince Souvana Phouma. In 1962 it looked as if the plan had been successful, but while the government remained in place for a decade Soviet and American support for true neutrality waned within a few years.

Primary sources

   * W. Averell Harriman. America and Russia in a changing world: A half century of personal observation (1971)

   * W. Averell Harriman. Public papers of Averell Harriman, fifty-second governor of the state of New York, 1955-1959 (1960)

   * Harriman, W. Averell and Abel, Elie. Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946. (1975). 595 pp.

External links

W. Averell Harriman has been interviewed as part of Frontline Diplomacy: The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, a site at the Library of Congress.

Source: Downloaded 2011 from wikipedia.

• Residence: Harriman, New York
• Residence: Orange, New York - Between 1917 and 1918
  • Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Dec 10 2016, 19:04:30 UTC

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William Averell Harriman (November 15, 1891 – July 26, 1986) was an American Democratic politician, businessman, and diplomat. He was the son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman. He served as Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman and later as the 48th Governor of New York. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952, and again in 1956 when he was endorsed by President Truman but lost to Adlai Stevenson both times.

Harriman served President Franklin D. Roosevelt as special envoy to Europe and served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and U.S. Ambassador to Britain. He served in numerous U.S. diplomatic assignments in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. He was a core member of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".

Early life Better known as Averell Harriman, he was born in New York City, the son of railroad baron Edward Henry Harriman and Mary Williamson Averell. He was the brother of E. Roland Harriman and Mary Harriman Rumsey. Harriman was a close friend of Hall Roosevelt, the brother of Eleanor Roosevelt.

He attended Groton School in Massachusetts before going on to Yale where he joined the Skull and Bones society. He graduated in 1913. After graduating, he inherited the largest fortune in America and became Yale's youngest Crew coach.

Career Using money from his father he established W.A. Harriman & Co banking business in 1922. In 1927 his brother Roland joined the business and the name was changed to Harriman Brothers & Company. In 1931, it merged with Brown Bros. & Co. to create the highly successful Wall Street firm Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. Notable employees included George Herbert Walker and his son-in-law Prescott Bush.

Harriman's main properties included Brown Brothers & Harriman & Co, Union Pacific Railroad, Merchant Shipping Corporation, and venture capital investments that included the Polaroid Corporation. Harriman's associated properties included the Southern Pacific Railroad (including the Central Pacific Railroad), Illinois Central Railroad, Wells Fargo & Co., the Pacific Mail Steamship Co., American Ship & Commerce, Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Aktiengesellschaft (HAPAG), the American Hawaiian Steamship Co., United American Lines, the Guaranty Trust Company, and the Union Banking Corporation.

He served as Chairman of The Business Council, then known as the Business Advisory Council for the United States Department of Commerce in 1937 and 1939.

Politics Harriman's older sister, Mary Rumsey, encouraged Averell to leave his finance job and work with her and their friends, the Roosevelts, to advance the goals of the New Deal. Averell joined the NRA National Recovery Administration, the first government consumer rights group, marking the beginning of his political career.

Thoroughbred racing Following the death of August Belmont, Jr., in 1924, Harriman, George Walker, and Joseph E. Widener purchased much of Belmont's thoroughbred breeding stock. Harriman raced under the name of Arden Farms. Among his horses, Chance Play won the 1927 Jockey Club Gold Cup. He also raced in partnership with Walker under the name Log Cabin Stable before buying him out. U.S. Racing Hall of Fame inductee Louis Feustel, trainer of Man o' War, trained the Log Cabin horses until 1926.[3] Of the partnership's successful runners purchased from the August Belmont estate, Ladkin is best remembered for defeating the European star Epinard in the International Special.

War seizures Nazi assets Harriman's banking business was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen; who was a financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938. The Trading With the Enemy Act (enacted on October 6, 1917) classified any business transactions for profit with enemy nations as illegal, and any funds or assets involved were subject to seizure by the U.S. government. The declaration of war on the U.S. by Hitler led to the U.S. government order on October 20, 1942 to seize German interests in the U.S. which included Harriman's operations in New York City.

World War II diplomacy Beginning in the spring of 1941, Harriman served President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a special envoy to Europe and helped coordinate the Lend-Lease program. He was present at the meeting between FDR and Winston Churchill at Placentia Bay, in August 1941, which yielded the Atlantic Charter, a common declaration of principles of the United States and the UK. He was subsequently dispatched to Moscow to negotiate the terms of the Lend-Lease agreement with the Soviet Union. His promise of $1 billion in aid technically exceeded his brief. Determined to win over the doubtful American public, he used his own funds to purchase time on CBS radio to explain the program in terms of enlightened self-interest. This skepticism lifted with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

On November 25, 1941 (twelve days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), he noted that "The United States Navy is shooting the Germans—German submarines and aircraft at sea".

In the summer of 1942, Harriman accompanied Churchill to the Moscow Conference to explain to Stalin why the western allies were carrying out operations in North Africa instead of opening the promised second front in France. Harriman was appointed as United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1943.

At the Tehran Conference in late 1943 Harriman was tasked with placating a suspicious Churchill while Roosevelt attempted to gain the confidence of Stalin. The conference highlighted the divisions between the United States and Britain about the postwar world. Churchill was intent on maintaining Britain's empire and carving the postwar world into spheres of influence while the United States upheld the principles of self-determination as laid out in the Atlantic Charter. Harriman mistrusted the Soviet leader's motives and intentions and opposed the spheres approach as it would give Stalin a free hand in eastern Europe.

Harriman also attended the Yalta Conference, where he encouraged taking a stronger line with the Soviet Union—especially on questions of Poland. After Roosevelt's death, he attended the final "Big Three" conference at Potsdam. Although the new president, Harry Truman, was receptive to Harriman's anti-Soviet hard line advice, the new secretary of state, James Byrnes, managed to sideline him. While in Berlin, he noted the tight security imposed by Soviet military authorities and the beginnings of a program of reparations by which the Soviets were stripping out German industry.

In 1945, while Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Harriman was presented with a Trojan Horse gift. In 1952, the gift, a carved wood Great Seal of the United States, which had adorned "the ambassador's Moscow residential office" in Spaso House, was found to be bugged.

Statesman of foreign and domestic affairs See also: 1963 South Vietnamese coup, Arrest and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, Reaction to the 1963 South Vietnamese coup, Cable 243, Buddhist crisis, Krulak Mendenhall mission, and McNamara Taylor mission

Photographic portrait of Lord Beaverbrook (left) and Harriman Harriman served as ambassador to the Soviet Union until January 1946. When he returned to the United States, he worked hard to get George Kennan's Long Telegram into wide distribution. Kennan's analysis, which generally lined up with Harriman's, became the cornerstone of Truman's Cold War strategy of containment.

From April to October 1946, he was ambassador to Britain, but he was soon appointed to become United States Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman to replace Henry A. Wallace, a critic of Truman's foreign policies. In 1948, he was put in charge of the Marshall Plan. In Paris, he became friendly with the CIA agent Irving Brown, who organised anti-communist unions and organisations. Harriman was then sent to Tehran in July 1951 to mediate between Iran and Britain in the wake of the Iranian nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

In the 1954 race to succeed Republican Thomas E. Dewey as Governor of New York, Harriman defeated Dewey's protege, U.S. Senator Irving M. Ives, by a tiny margin. He served as governor for one term until Republican Nelson Rockefeller unseated him in 1958. As governor, he increased personal taxes by 11% but his tenure was dominated by his presidential ambitions. Harriman was a candidate for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 1952, and again in 1956 when he was endorsed by Truman but lost (both times) to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson.

Despite the failure of his presidential ambitions, Harriman became a widely respected elder statesman of the party. In January 1961, he was appointed Ambassador at Large in the Kennedy administration, a position he held until November, when he became Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. During this period he advocated U.S. support of a neutral government in Laos and helped to negotiate the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. In December 1961, Anatoliy Golitsyn defected from the Soviet Union and accused Harriman of being a Soviet spy, but his claims were dismissed by the CIA and Harriman remained in his position until April 1963, when he became Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. He retained that position during the transition to the Johnson administration until March 1965 when he again became Ambassador at Large. He held that position for the remainder of Johnson's presidency. Harriman headed the U.S. delegation to the preliminary peace talks in Paris between the United States and North Vietnam (1968–69).

Vietnamese coup d'état President-elect Kennedy appointed Harriman as ambassador-at-large, to operate "with the full confidence of the president and an intimate knowledge of all aspects of United States policy." But by 1963, Kennedy had come to suspect the loyalty of certain members on his national security team. According to Colonel William Corson, USMC, by 1963 Harriman was running "Vietnam without consulting the president or the attorney general.". Corson said Kenny O'Donnell, JFK's appointments secretary, was convinced that the National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, followed the orders of Harriman rather than the president. Corson also claimed that O'Donnell was particularly concerned about Michael Forrestal, a young White House staffer who handled liaison on Vietnam with Harriman.

Harriman certainly supported the coup against the South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. However, it is alleged that the orders that ended in the deaths of Diem and his brother actually originated with Harriman and were carried out by Henry Cabot Lodge's military assistant. The fundamental question about the murders was the sudden and unusual recall of Saigon Station Chief John "Jocko" Richardson by an unknown authority. Special Operations Army officer, John Michael Dunn, was sent to Vietnam in his stead. He followed the orders of Harriman and Forrestal rather than the CIA. According to Corson, Dunn's role in the incident has never been made public but he was assigned to Ambassador Lodge for "special operations" with the authority to act without hindrance; and he was known to have access to the coup plotters. Corson speculated that with Richardson recalled the way was clear for Dunn to freely act.

Later years Harriman received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with Distinction, in 1969 and West Point's Sylvanus Thayer Award in 1975. Furthermore, in 1983 he received the Freedom Medal.

In 1973 he was interviewed in the now famous TV documentary series, The World at War, where he gives a recollection of his experiences as Roosevelt's Personal Representative in Britain along with his views on Cold War politics; in particular Poland and the Warsaw Pact; along with the exchanges he witnessed between Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin. In one such recollection he describes Stalin as utterly cruel.

Harriman was appointed senior member of the US Delegation to the United Nations General Assembly's Special Session on Disarmament in 1978. He was also a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy Charter, Club of Rome, Council on Foreign Relations, Knights of Pythias, Skull and Bones Society, Psi Upsilon Fraternity, and the Jupiter Island Club.

Personal life His first marriage, two years after graduating from Yale, was to Kitty Lanier Lawrence. Lawrence was the great-granddaughter of James Lanier, a co-founder of Winslow, Lanier & Co., and the granddaughter of Charles D. Lanier (1837-1926), a close friend of Pierpont Morgan. Before their divorce in 1928, and her death in 1936, Harriman and Lawrence had two daughters together:

Mary Averell Harriman (1917-1996), who married Dr. Shirley C. Fisk Kathleen Lanier Harriman (1917–2011), who married Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. (1913–1999), who had previously been married to socialite Babe Paley (1915-1978). About a year after his divorce from Lawrence, he married Marie Norton Whitney (1903–1970), who had left her husband, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, to marry him. On their honeymoon in Europe, they purchased oil paintings by Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, Picasso, and Renoir. She and her husband later donated many of the works she bought and collected, including those of the artist Walt Kuhn, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. They remained married until her death on September 26, 1970, at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

In 1971, he married for the third and final time to Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward (1920–1997), the former wife of Winston Churchill's son Randolph, and widow of Broadway producer Leland Hayward. In 1993, she became the 58th United States Ambassador to France.

Harriman died on July 26, 1986 in Yorktown Heights, New York, at the age of 94. Averell and Pamela Harriman are buried at the Arden Farm Graveyard in Arden, New York.

Legacy and Honors The Harriman Hall at Stony Brook University was named in his honor. The W. Averell Harriman State Office Building Campus in Albany, NY also carries his name. Summary of career[edit] Vice President, Union Pacific Railroad Co., 1915–17 Director, Illinois Central Railroad Co., 1915–46 Member, Palisades Interstate Park Commission, 1915–54 Chairman, Merchant Shipbuilding Corp.,1917–25 Chairman, W. A. Harriman & Company, 1920–31 Partner, Soviet Georgian Manganese Concessions, 1925–28 Chairman, executive committee, Illinois Central Railroad, 1931–42 Senior partner, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 1931–46 Chairman, Union Pacific Railroad, 1932–46 Co-founder, Today magazine with Vincent Astor, 1935–37 (merged with Newsweek in 1937) Administrator and Special Assistant, National Recovery Administration, 1934–35 Founder, Sun Valley Ski Resort, Idaho, 1936 Chairman, Business Advisory Council, 1937–39 Chief, Materials Branch & Production Division, Office of Production Management, 1941 U.S. Ambassador & Special Representative to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1941–43 Chairman, Ambassador & Special Representative of the U.S. President's Special Mission to the USSR, 1941–43 U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1943–46 U.S. Ambassador, Britain, 1946 U.S. Secretary of Commerce, 1946–48 United States Coordinator, European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), 1948–50 Special Assistant to the U.S. President, 1950–52 U.S. Representative and Chairman, North Atlantic Commission on Defense Plans, 1951–52 Director, Mutual Security Agency, 1951–53 Candidate, Democratic nomination for U.S. President, 1952 Governor, State of New York, 1955–59 Candidate, Democratic nomination for U.S. President, 1956 U.S. Ambassador-at-large, 1961 United States Deputy Representative, International Conference on the Settlement of the Laotian, 1961–62 Assistant US Secretary of State, Far Eastern Affairs, 1961–63 Special Representative to the U.S. President, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1963 Under Secretary of State, Political Affairs, 1963–65 U.S. Ambassador-at-large, 1965–69 Chairman, President's Commission of the Observance of Human Rights Year, 1968 Personal Representative of the U.S. President, Peace Talks with North Vietnam, 1968–69 Chairman, Foreign Policy Task Force, Democratic National Committee, 1976

Businessman, US Diplomat. He was the heir to his father's Union Pacific Railroad fortune. President Franklin Roosevelt sent him to Moscow in 1941 first as a minister and later as an ambassador. He briefly served as US Ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1946 and was appointed Secretary of Commerce by President Truman later serving as national security advisor during the Korean War. He was elected governor of New York in 1954 but lost re-election in 1958. After two unsuccessful tries for the Democratic nomination for president in 1952 and 1956, he served in various posts in the State Department under President Kennedy. He was later appointed ambassador-at-large for Southeast Asia in 1965 by President Johnson. In 1968 he wrapped up his political career serving as chief US negotiator during preliminary peace talks with North Vietnam. (bio by: Ron Moody)