Ave & the Magic Mountain
(See Cover)
The U.S. political scene is thickly populated by men who rose from one-mule farms, little houses beside the tracks, and fruit-and-vegetable markets along the main highways just outside of town. But few have struggled up to the political heights from a 190-ft. steam yacht, a 100-room house on a 20,000-acre estate, and a fortune of $100 million. New York's William Averell Harriman is one politician who has overcome such handicaps to become the most important governor in the U.S. and to be mentioned frequently, if not yet very ponderably, as a candidate for President of the U.S. And he is still struggling up the steep slopes of polities' Magic Mountain.
Averell Harriman wants to be President, wants the office so much that it is hard for him not to seem too anxious. Not many politicians give Harriman much chance to get what he wants. But even the most skeptical, stopping to think, remember that only a year before the 1954 election in New York hardly any professional politicians thought that Harriman had a chance to be nominated and elected governor. While the politicians were doubting, Harriman was eminently confident that his hour had struck. Now he thinks of himself as exactly the right man to move into the White House on Jan. 20, 1957.
His mood has spread to some of the men closest to him. They make comparisons between Averell Harriman and Adlai Stevenson, and are inclined to look a long way down on Stevenson. Says a Harriman advocate: "I don't suppose there is anyone around who has had more experience in Government than Averell has had. The country needs someone with a thorough grasp of foreign affairs. Averell has it. During World War II, he may have met Adlai Stevenson [who was an assistant to the Secretaries of Navy and State], but he is not likely to recall it. The fact is that Averell was working on a much higher level. The people he saw were Leahy and Marshall and Hopkins and Roosevelt."
Waiting for the Blowout. Harriman's partisans look upon Stevenson as a political retread, done over from 1952, and they are watching and waiting and predicting the day the retread wears thin and blows out. Their campaign strategy is based on the hope that Democratic leaders next spring will come to believe that they have on their hands a tired figure that has lost as much of the old luster and appeal as Wendell Willkie had lost by 1944. An important Harriman supporter says of the 1952 nominee: "He hasn't made a good speech since early 1954."
Obviously, the Harriman forces are playing a long shot, and playing it negatively. They hope to stay on the sidelines, out of primaries, busy in New York (Harriman will have to cope with a Republican-controlled legislature from January into June next year). As he has said, he will not be an "active candidate."
But let anyone say that this means he is not a candidate, and Tammany Hall Boss Carmine De Sapio, Harriman's secretary of state and political mastermind, gently but firmly weaves that word "active" back into the sentence.
Some active primary races between Adlai Stevenson and Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver would suit the Harriman strategists just fine. There has been so much buzzing about this in Democratic Party circles that Oregon's Democratic State Chairman Howard Morgan exploded: "Harriman and Tammany money will be routed circuitously to Kefauver to finance bitter primary fights with Stevenson in the hope of hurting both. Harriman will remain aloof from these contests, and the Eastern bosses will try to sweep up the pieces and hand them to Harriman at the convention."
Both Averell Harriman and Carmine De Sapio issued outraged denials, but the fact is that Oregon's Morgan understood their strategy even if he was wrong about the money. While waiting for the swept-up pieces, Averell Harriman will be standing by--but not idly. He has already made one foray into the Middle West, for a speech last month in Des Moines. (Harriman gave this critique of his Des Moines performance: "What they think about out there is ham and corn, and I was both hammy and corny.") Next fortnight he will fly to the Northwest for appearances in Seattle, Eugene and Portland, Ore., and Lewiston, Idaho. Early in December he will speak at the national convention of Young Democrats in Oklahoma City.
New Dealer from Wall Street. Although Averell Harriman is a devoted and doctrinaire New Dealer, his forces believe he can pull strong conservative support in the West as well as in the East. They count, for example, on some spotty strength along the Harrimans' Union Pacific Railroad. They think Harriman has a two-way appeal. Says a partisan: "Because of his liberal record, he stands well with labor; because he's a businessman, the really big businessmen know that he's no crackpot."
Sounds coming from Democrats in the South, however, do not indicate that conservative sentiment for Harriman will run very deep. When the New York governor began to loom as a presidential prospect, Louisiana's Democratic Senator Allen J. Ellender cried: "Talk about giveaways; Harriman would go Eisenhower. Truman and Roosevelt one better. He would give away the Indian chief on top of the Capitol dome."
Harriman will have some nuisance trouble in his own New York delegation. His move into the center of the picture has brought real anguish to many a New York Democrat who is emotionally committed to Stevenson. For most, it would hardly be wise to speak out against their own governor, who will be in the Statehouse for two more years if he is not in the White House. Harriman and De Sapio will be able to control nearly all. of New York's go-vote delegation to the Democratic National Convention, but they face the possibility of a Stevenson minority clustered around U.S. Senator Herbert Lehman. Although Lehman has announced for Stevenson, De Sapio will have to let the senior U.S. Senator go to the convention. Said De Sapio last week with great gentleness: "Senator Lehman is entitled to every consideration--every consideration."
While De Sapio is making the proper maneuvers in public--keeping Harriman alive as a candidate, but not pushing him too far out--Averell Harriman will be working intensely toward the goal in his own way. At whatever game he is playing --polo, croquet, iskiing, bridge, railroading, diplomacy, politics--he has a consuming urge to keep working, driving, doing. One reason for that urge may well be the fact that, if he had been inclined to loaf, he would not have had to turn a hand throughout his life. His father gave him many of the rewards men work for. But, as Averell Harriman's career shows, his father did not give him everything.
"The Little Giant." E. H. (for Edward Henry) Harriman, the son of an impecunious Episcopal clergyman, went to work at 14 as a $5-a-week pad-shover (messenger-clerk) in Wall Street. A brilliant lad with a phenomenal memory, he studied the market, watched the rich and great of the Street in their buying. Soon he began to buy and win. At 18 he was a junior partner in an uncle's firm; in 1870, when he was 22, he had his own firm and a seat on the Exchange. Eventually, he became the "Little Giant" of Wall Street, one of the most successful and powerful financiers in U.S. history.
E. H. Harriman's fateful association with railroading began in 1879, when he married Mary Averell, daughter of the president of the Ogdensburg & Lake Champlain Railroad. The bride's father provided a special train with the name "E. H. Harriman" painted on the locomotive. E. H. became a director of the road the next year. By the time he died, in 1909, he was the dominant figure in 75,000 miles of railroads worth $5 billion; he controlled Wells-Fargo Express Co.; he was president of 16 corporations and a guiding genius of 27 others.
While he had great financial success, E. H. Harriman was not received into the highest social and political circles of his time. Theodore Roosevelt included Harri man among his "malefactors of great wealth." Such criticism hurt E. H. Harri man. He wanted to be accepted. In Vienna he once plaintively deplored the fact that he had not been received by Emperor Franz Joseph. Said he: "I am in a position to realize the magnitude of this monarch's task ... I feel sorry that arrangements have not been made to allow my being presented to the Emperor, whom I dare hope might have been interested to meet a man who had had some experience in controlling men and affairs, though of course in quite another sphere."
When E. H. Harriman died, he left a will of just 99 words, bequeathing his entire fortune to his wife. From Financial Genius Harriman, who was never accused of sentimentality, this was the highest form of compliment. It was deserved. Taking over the fortune at 58, to become the world's richest woman, Mrs. Harriman entered a special line in her biography in Who's Who in America: "Sole heir upon death of husband to estate appraised at about $100,000,000, of which is mgr."
She managed well. One monument to her imagination is the 2,257-ft.-long Bear Mountain Bridge, across the Hudson River 35 miles above Manhattan. She saw the need of a bridge there, and her younger son, E. Roland Harriman, now a Manhattan financier (and still a Republican), built the bridge (now state-owned) as a private venture. By the time mother Harriman died, in 1932, she was able to leave her two sons and three daughters a multimillion-dollar heritage.
A Prince's Life. Averell Harriman grew up to the pattern of his inheritance. He spent his summers at Arden, near Bear Mountain, where his father built a 100-room French Renaissance-style house on a 20,000-acre estate with a private railroad. The villages of Harriman and Arden were established near by just to supply the Harrimans. Below the main house were imposing stables, a polo field, a track for exercising trotting horses.
At Arden, Averell learned to shoot, swim, row. ride and race trotters (he later switched to polo because of a strange allergy to horses, which affected him when he rode behind them, but not when he rode on them). In winter the family retired to a big town house on 55th Street in Manhattan, where Averell fashionably attended Craigie School and Miss Dodson's dancing class, and became a cadet in the Knickerbocker Greys. He saw the world as a prince might see it, from his father's private railroad car, from the family's yacht and from chartered ships.
At Groton, Averell did not distinguish himself; he was a fairly good scholar, pleasant, modest, quiet, well-mannered, but he won no prizes. At Yale he was again just average as a student. It was at Yale that Averell Harriman's record first showed the intensity of concentration that has never left him. He became a bridge addict. After a bridge session, Averell would return to his room and sit for hours doing postmortems. He learned to memorize the hands and plays, and then would reconstruct them. His daughter Kathleen (Mrs. Stanley G. Mortimer Jr.), recalling his stories of this exercise in memory training, has said: "It's one of the best things he got out of Yale."
Harriman was also noted at Yale for his expertness as an oarsman. When he was a boy back at Arden, his father had hired the great Syracuse University crew coach, Jim Ten Eyck, to spend a month on the Harrimans' private lake teaching Averell and Roland to row. Averell was so good that, when Yale decided to use amateur coaches, he was assigned to coach the freshman crew. He wangled leave from classes, went to England to learn the long Oxford stroke, came home and introduced it successfully at Yale. When he became varsity coach, he appointed as the new freshman coach another keen oar named Dean Acheson. Bob Cook, Yale's grand old man of rowing, once called Averell "easily the most promising crew coach in America."
In his senior year at Yale, Averell was elected a director of the Union Pacific Railroad, startled the austere board by showing up for a meeting with a psychology textbook under his arm. After he graduated from Yale (B.A., '13), he went to work for the Union Pacific in the offices and yards. Within two years he highballed past his fellow trackmen to become a vice president.
Entrepreneur at Large. Harriman soon felt the need to achieve goals that his father had not set up for him. He decided to do in steamships what his father had done in railroads. For a decade he was involved in shipping, investing his own money and his mother's, but there is a screen around the final financial result.
Then he aimed at becoming the Harriman of aviation. He was chairman of the Aviation Corp., a holding company, which was the forerunner of American Airlines and many other enterprises. The eventual outcome of that venture, in dollars and cents, is also obscure. In neither shipping nor aviation did he come within hailing distance of his father's phenomenal success in railroading.
During those shipping and flying years, Harriman compiled a considerable record as a polo player (he played with Tommy Hitchcock, was an eight-goal man) and as a man about Manhattan, Long Island, the Hudson Valley and Europe. In 1915 he had married Kitty Lanier Lawrence, and they had two daughters. She divorced him in Paris in September 1929, on grounds of abandonment, never remarried, died in
Whitney, who had just divorced Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney. The Harrimans observed their 25th wedding anniversary last February.
In 1932 Averell Harriman returned to his father's business: he became chair man of the board of the Union Pacific Railroad, and served in that post until 1946 (without a word being raised about conflicts of interest between the job and his position irt the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations).
A New Road. The road that led Averell Harriman into politics began in 1928. A birthright Republican, he switched to the Democratic side that year because he liked Alfred E. Emith and disliked G.O.P. tariff policies. Four years later, he was for an old friend of the family, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and in 1933 he became New York chairman of the President's Re-Employment Campaign Committee, a unit of NRA. For Averell Harriman, that was the beginning of a Federal Government career that led him to one of the longest and most varied records any man has ever achieved in the administrative branch of the U.S. Government.*
Partners at Croquet. Early in the New Deal, Harriman's political tutelage was taken over by a real genius, the gaunt son of an Iowa harnessmaker, Harry Hopkins. Hopkins and Harriman used to play croquet (Harriman had dismounted from polo by that time) at Herbert Bayard Swope's estate on Long Island. It was the beginning of a great friendship. Wrote crotchety old Harold Ickes: "Mr. Harriman was one of the famous group of patron-proteges of the late Harry Hopkins. Probably he was the chief of these. He was always willing to scratch Harry Hopkins' back just as Hopkins was willing to scratch his ... He started Harriman on his public career, and kept promoting him until the very end."
Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman needed each other. While Hopkins could usher Harriman into Government importance, Harriman could introduce Hopkins into a life of croquet, champagne and social elegance. Through Hopkins, Harriman became one of the New Deal's "tame millionaires"--so tame, in fact, that some of his Wall Street friends could hardly believe it.
When Harriman finally reached a close relationship with Franklin Roosevelt, he brought a quality to the friendship that even Harry Hopkins did not have. George Backer, millionaire realtor and ex-publisher who is now one of Averell Harri man's closest political advisers, says of the Harriman-Roosevelt relationship: "They were both squires. A squire is a man with good property and unearned income, who doesn't have to work, who has been financially independent for generations. All of this Roosevelt liked. He didn't like indus trialists who worked for their money. Besides, Harriman went to Groton. And nobody could be too bad if he went to Groton."
When Harriman began to take important diplomatic assignments, this affinity between the two men soon showed itself.
At times, both the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department were circumvented when Harriman acted as direct liaison between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.
A Clear Eye. No man participated in as many of the key international conferences of World War II as did Averell
Harriman.* In recent months some of Harriman's political foes have sought to tar him with being duped by the Communists in those years. The record clearly shows that he was not.
Eloquent testimony on that point appears in the diaries of the late James Forrestal, then U.S. Secretary of the Navy, who wrote on April 18, 1945: "I saw Averell Harriman last night. He stated his strong apprehension as to the future of our relations with Russia unless our entire attitude toward them became character ized by much greater firmness. He said the outward thrust of Communism was not dead, that we might well have to face an ideological warfare just as vigorous and dangerous as Fascism or Naziism."
Nor was Harriman fooled about the situation in China. Wrote Forrestal: "He said he thought it was important that we determine our policy as to a strong or weak China, that if China continued weak, Russian influence would move in quickly and toward ultimate domination. He said that there could be no illusion about anything such as a 'free China' once the Russians got in, that the two or three hundred millions in that country would march when the Kremlin ordered."
The Greater Honor. Despite his high role as a national and international policymaker, Averell Harriman wanted a greater kind of honor: he wanted to be elected to office by the people.
He made his first try in 1952, seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency. It was not a happy effort. In the role of platform campaigner, the essentially shy Harriman stammered, mumbled, stumbled and froze his audiences into nervous, bored, agonized silence. As usual, he had been driving himself to fatigue, and his deepset eyes and solemn, gaunt face gave him the appearance of an aging pointer after a particularly tiring hunt. Harriman's efforts got him only 123-2 votes at the convention in Chicago.
Candidate Harriman's 1952 showing was one reason so many politicians and observers yawned when he announced last year that he would seek the Democratic nomination for governor of New York. Then there suddenly appeared at Averell Harriman's side the dark-spectacled visage of the grand sachem of Tammany Hall. With Carmine De Sapio's force behind him, Harriman ran over Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. and stood facing U.S. Senator Irving Ives for the governorship of the Empire State. Since election night 1954, in New York, there have been long and painful post-mortems about how Averell Harriman managed to skin past Irving Ives by 12,000 votes. Whatever the reasons, Harriman and De Sapio took control of the state government of New York for the Democratic Party after twelve years of Republican rule. On election night Harriman made a mistake he has since bitterly regretted. Over TV he said: "I am for Adlai Stevenson in 1956."
Eyes West. Governor Harriman had barely taken the oath before he began to change his mind. At his first press conference in Albany, he got into the national political picture with a blast at the Eisenhower Administration's economic policies.
Harriman apparently caught himself in the trap of his own propaganda. Because he did not expect the economy to flourish, he seriously underestimated the state's revenue for the year, angrily pushed aside Republican protests and increased state income taxes 11%. Now that the year is drawing to a close with the U.S. economy at an alltime peak, Harriman's finance aides admit that state income will run $50 million to $60 million above their estimates. Republicans promptly charged that he had saddled the taxpayers with an unnecessary increase.
When he moved into Albany, the new governor faced a serious political problem. Even Harriman partisans would admit, privately, that Republican Thomas E. Dewey had given New York a good administration for twelve years, and that about all the progressive legislation that could be asked for had been enacted under Harriman's predecessors--Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman and Dewey. There was no genuine way for Harriman to make a big move toward a new era. So he decided to make a big noise. He cried that Dewey, by tricks of bookkeeping, had covered up the fact that he was leaving the state in dire fiscal straits. Harriman says: "I'm trying to put a little atomic bomb under the myth that Dewey was a good administrator."
The Hairsplitter. Harriman went to Albany with a reputation as a hard-driving but somewhat spastic administrator. He is likely to start calling aides as early as 7 a.m. (expecting them to be fully informed at that time on what is in the morning papers). He will assign a task to one aide, and a few hours later will ask another, who knows nothing about the project, how it is going. In Washington, this sort of operation, and a preoccupied manner, had earned him a nickname: "Misty Bill." It is misleading. Harriman is not vague. Rather, he tends to concentrate on details. He tries to describe with elaborate precision any situation he has studied; often his hearers cannot follow his fine distinctions. This led to another and better name: "Honest Ave, the Hairsplitter."
Although the Harrimans have five houses of their own (in Manhattan; at Sands Point, N.Y.; Kobe Sound, Fla.; Sun Valley, Idaho, and one of the small houses at Arden), they are now spending most of their time in the ornate old governor's mansion in Albany. They seem to enjoy it. Harriman usually goes home for lunch, frequently has a glass of upstate New York sherry as a starter. For a recognized connoisseur of fine French wines, this bow to state pride may be a considerable trial, but Politician Harriman takes it without a grimace. "It's really quite good," he says.
On the walls of the governor's mansion, Marie Harriman has hung a fine collection of American art. Once (1930-42) the proprietress of a famed commercial gallery, she has in their Manhattan town house a magnificent collection of fine paintings--Seurat, Gauguin, Renoir, Picasso, Van Gogh, Cezanne. A gracious and gregarious woman, she has become a popular hostess in Albany.
"Cherish It for Me." Getting elected and serving as governor has been a strong tonic for Averell Harriman. He is thriving on the job. Since the campaign of 1954, he has gained 15 Ibs. (he quit smoking), his face has filled out, he looks and sounds stronger than he has for years. He will be 64 next week--a factor that will not help him in the presidential sweepstakes--but he has been taking every opportunity to show his vigor, e.g., if there is a rock pile handy when he is making a street-corner appearance, he will charge briskly to its top. In the 1954 campaign a photographer had to ask him to "show a little more affection toward the baby." By now, Harriman can romp with a roomful of tots and look as if he enjoys it.
Harriman has learned to say the politically right words. Arriving home from a trip to Europe last fall, he expressed his gratitude to the "fine Irish pilot" who had safely landed the plane in which he was riding after a tire blew up, complimented the burgeoning economy of Israel, and told of the inspiration he had gained from an audience with the Pope. In Elmira last month, when an Elmira College coed gave him a cloth donkey on which she had embroidered the college "E," he told her, "I'll cherish it always." Later, after getting into his car, he tossed it to his bodyguard, Ed Galvin, and cracked: "Here, Ed, will you cherish it for me?"
As a diplomat, Averell Harriman came over as a generous and kindly man, but in his new role as a politician, other characteristics have come to the fore. He can be sharp and hard, and at times genuine strains of bitterness pour out against his political foes. One day last summer he told a Washington newspaperman, with more venom than humor, that he hoped "this damned heat is drying up that Gettysburg farm and blowing it away." Talking recently to Democratic wheelhorses from Auburn, the home of New York's crusty old (75) Republican Representative John Taber, Harriman growled: "He's the most constipated, cantankerous, narrow-minded s.o.b. I ever saw. He's a Yale man--yes, he really is, and I went to Yale, too, and I tell you that when I look at Taber and some of the other graduates of Yale, I'm almost tempted not to contribute my support to the place."
This harsh tone, in the eyes of Harriman partisans, is one of their man's assets as a presidential prospect for 1956. They believe that Adlai E. Stevenson strikes too soft a note against his political foes, and that next year's campaign will call for hard blows. Harriman's tone as a politician is also merely another evidence of the intensity with which he has always played any game he is in.
Even if he fails to get to the mountain-top in 1956, William Averell Harriman has struggled his way to success of a kind that his father never knew. E. H. Harriman, the "Little Giant," was an "undesirable citizen" to his President, and he could not get in to see the Emperor of Austria. His son is on first-name terms with Winston Churchill, one of the greatest statesman of the age; he was at Franklin Delano Roosevelt's right hand during great moments of history; he knew Dictator Stalin better than any other American; he has beaten Dwight Eisenhower at bridge. And the people of the great state of New York have elected him their governor. What more could E. H. Harriman's son want--except the presidency of the U.S.?
* Harriman's remarkable series of Government posts centered around these major assignments: 1934-35, a division administrator, then a special assistant to the administrator, and then chief administrative officer of NRA: 1940-41, an executive in the Office of Production Management; 1941, special missions to London and then to Moscow for President Roosevelt; 1941-42, Lend-Lease expediter in London with rank of minister; 1943-46, Ambassador to Russia; 1946, Ambassador to the Court of St. James's; 1946-48, Secretary of Commerce; 1948-50, roving EGA ambassador in Europe; 1950-51, Special Assistant to the President; 1951-53, Director of Mutual Security. * In 1941 Harriman was at the Atlantic Charter meeting with Churchill and Roosevelt, and at their later conference in Washington; in 1942 he was with Churchill and Roosevelt in Washington, with Churchill and Stalin in Moscow; in 1943 he was with Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca, in Washington and in Quebec; with Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow; with Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang in Cairo, and with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at Teheran; in 1944 he was with Stalin, Churchill and Eden in Moscow; in 1945 with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, Harry Hopkins and Stalin in Moscow, Harry Truman, Churchill, Clement Attlee and Stalin at Potsdam. He missed only one of the big World War II conferences: the second Quebec Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill in September 1944.
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