AVERELL HARRIMAN: The Toughest Test

AS head of the U.S. negotiating team in Paris, Averell Harriman faces the most delicate and grueling test of his 34-year career in Government service. President Kennedy once remarked that the lean, lantern-jawed New York millionaire had held "as many important jobs as any man in our history," with the possible exception of John Quincy Adams.* At 76, Harriman is hard of hearing, but his vigor of mind and body remain unimpaired--and perhaps a touch of deafness might even help in talks that are likely to drone on for months, perhaps years.

Harriman's public history is, with only a few gaps, parallel to and part of the sweep of U.S. foreign policy since the eve of World War II. Son of Railroad Baron E. H. Harriman (Union Pacific), whom Teddy Roosevelt castigated as one of the "malefactors of great wealth," William Averell Harriman has been a Secretary of Commerce (under Harry Truman), Governor of New York (Nelson Rockefeller unseated him in 1958), ambassador to Moscow during the war and to the Court of St. James's afterward. Of the major World War II conferences, he missed only Quebec in 1944, where F.D.R. and Churchill agreed to press the war against Japan after Hitler's defeat.

Always outspoken and never involved in personal vendettas, he even managed to charm Joseph Stalin during his Moscow service, but at war's end found the aims of Communism and the U.S. "irreconcilable." Calm and courtly, Harriman became a bridge expert at Yale (class of 1913), coached crew and rowed in the same shell with Dean Acheson, later was an eight-goal polo player at Long Island's Meadow Brook club. Even today, dismounted, the slim six-footer is acknowledged by Hobe Sound (Fla.) residents to be a champion croquet strategist.

Two abortive tries for the Democratic presidential nomination (1952 and 1956), coupled with the defeat at Rocky's hands, dimmed the Harriman aura for awhile, but John Kennedy brought him back into public service in 1961. As an ambassador at large, Harriman conducted the sensitive negotiations that brought about the 1962 Geneva accords on Laos. A year later, he represented the U.S. during the nuclear test-ban talks and initialed the treaty with Andrei Gromyko and Britain's Lord Hailsham--perhaps the high point of Harriman's career.

Across the table from Hanoi's representatives, Harriman will be dealing with minds far more involuted and methods far less direct than the Russians'. Since 1961, Harriman has been deeply involved in the conflict between Saigon's independence and Hanoi's drive for hegemony. He has been in almost constant motion in both the policymaking and negotiating phases, remaining unruffled even during the past month's dickerings. "I never pack my bags until we move," Harriman says of his many missions. Last week he once again began packing. "It is 20 years almost to the day," Harriman recalled, "that I went to Paris to take over direction of the Marshall Plan."

* Who at age 14 journeyed to Russia as an envoy's secretary; at 15, joined the commission that negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1782; served as Minister to The Netherlands and to Berlin, sat in the U.S. Senate, was the first U.S. Minister to Russia and Minister to the Court of St. James's, served as Secretary of State under James Monroe, President of the U.S., and U.S. Representative until he died at the age of 80.

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