A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Part of the heavy traffic at the White House last week was men of prominence turning down big Government jobs.

First there was Robert A. Lovett, onetime Under Secretary of State, who dropped in to tell the President he could not accept appointment as chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Council in London. Banker Lovett (Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.) explained that his health would not permit a return to Government harness. Then came ex-Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson. Baffled after 5 1/2 months of searching for a good man to be chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the President had offered the post to Bob Patterson for a second time. But Patterson, now a partner in a New York law firm, refused again.

At week's end, Harry Truman's batting average for the week went up to a presentable .333. With a flourish the White House announced that William Averell Harriman, 58, was leaving his post as roving ambassador for the EGA to become a "special assistant" to the President. The job's title made it sound routine--there were already twelve aides and assistants--but it was meant to be bigger than it sounded. Harriman will be a sort of Assistant President for foreign affairs, empowered to straighten out the arguments and kinks in relations between the State, Defense and Treasury Departments and the 25 or so other departments and agencies conducting U.S. programs abroad. Averell Harriman will not direct the show; he will be more a backstage manager who tries to keep the show going and on time.

It was slim, conscientious Averell Harriman's twelfth Government job since he took his first in 1934. A graduate of Groton and Yale and one of the heirs to at least $70 million left by his father Union Pacific Railman Edward H. Harriman, he left the world of Wall Street and eight-goal polo to serve in the New Deal's NRA. As one of Franklin Roosevelt's prize "tame capitalists," Harriman became coordinator of Lend-Lease in London, went to Moscow in 1943 as Ambassador, later served six months as an Ambassador to Britain. Home in 1946, he became Harry Truman's Secretary of Commerce when Henry Wallace was booted out of the Cabinet. Eighteen months later, Harriman went overseas again, to be Paul Hoffman's roving European chief of the Marshall Plan.

More the able administrator than the creator of policy, stoop-shouldered, hardworking Averell Harriman gets along well with most people, including Congressmen. Stepping into his vaguely defined new job, which will be largely what he makes it, he will need all his powers of gentle suasion to keep men like Dean Acheson and Louis Johnson working together on the same stage.

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