W. Averell Harriman Totally Explained

Everything about Averell Harriman totally explained

William Averell Harriman (November 15 1891 – July 26 1986) 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 President Harry S. Truman and later as 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 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 Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Among his wives were Marie Norton Whitney, who left her husband Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney to marry him, and Pamela Harriman, former wife of Winston Churchill's son Randolph.

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). He attended Groton School in Massachusetts before going on to Yale where he joined the Skull and Bones society. His first marriage was to Kitty Lanier Lawrence, whom he'd divorced before her death in 1936. He subsequently married Marie Norton Whitney, who left her husband Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney to marry Harriman, bringing her two young children along, Harry Payne Whitney II and Nancy Marie Whitney. 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.

Political career

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 of 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.
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 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 (External Link

).
   In the 1954 race to succeed Republican Thomas Dewey as Governor of New York, Harriman defeated Dewey's protege, Irving M. Ives. 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 in the conservative post-war America of the 1950s.
   His presidential ambitions defeated, Harriman became a widely-respected elder statesman of the party. He was appointed Ambassador at Large in the Kennedy administration, a position he held until November 1961. He was then appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. He remained in that position until April 1963, when he became Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. He continued in that position in the Lyndon Johnson administration, until March 1965 when he again became Ambassador at Large, a position he'd hold 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. LBJ's confession in the assassination of Diem could indicate some complicity on Harriman's part (see(External Link

), (External Link

)).
Harriman received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and West Point's Sylvanus Thayer Award in 1975. He graduated from Yale University in 1913.

Business affairs

Using money from his father, in 1922 he established W.A. Harriman & Co, a banking business. In 1927 his brother E. Roland Harriman joined the business and the name was changed to Harriman Brothers & Company. In 1931 they merged with Brown Bros. & Co. to create the highly successful Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.. Notable employees included George Herbert Walker, and his son-in-law Prescott Bush (father of U.S. president George H. W. Bush).
Harriman's main properties included: Brown Brothers & Harriman & Co; Union Pacific Railroad; Merchant Shipping Corporation; and various venture capital investments including 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 (HAPAG), the American Hawaiian Steamship Co., United American Lines Co.; the Guarantee Trust Company and the Union Banking Corporation.

Thoroughbred horse racing

Following the death of August Belmont, Jr., Averell Harriman, along with Joseph E. Widener and George Herbert Walker, 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.

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 business.)

The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward. UBC was dissolved in 1951.

Trivia

Harriman gained the nickname of "Crocodile" within US State Department and foreign affairs circles (see "The Best and the Brightest").

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 .

Summary of career

Vice President, Union Pacific Railroad Co., 1915-1917

Director, Illinois Central Railroad Co., 1915-1946

Member, Palisades Interstate Park Commission, 1915-1954

Chairman, Merchant Shipbuilding Corp.,1917-1925

Chairman, W. A. Harriman & Company, 1920-1931

Partner, Soviet Georgian Manganese Concessions, 1925-1928

Chairman, executive committee, Illinois Central Railroad, 1931-1942

Senior partner, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 1931-1946

Chairman, Union Pacific Railroad, 1932-1946

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

Administrator and Special Assistant, National Recovery Administration, 1934-1935

Founded, Sun Valley Ski Resort, Idaho, 1935-1936

Chairman, Business Advisory Council, 1937-1939

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

US Ambassador & Special Representative to the Prime Minister of Britain, 1941-1943

Chairman, Ambassador & Special Representative of the US President's Special Mission to the USSR, 1941-1943

US Ambassador to the USSR, 1943-1946

US Ambassador, Britain, 1946

US Secretary of Commerce, 1946-1948

United States Coordinator, European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), 1948-1950

Special Assistant to the US President, 1950-1952

US Representative and Chairman, North Atlantic Commission on Defense Plans, 1951-1952

Director, Mutual Security Agency, 1951-1953

Candidate, Democratic nomination for US President, 1952

Governor, State of New York, 1955-1958

Candidate, Democratic nomination for US President, 1956

US Ambassador-at-large, 1961

United States Deputy Representative, International Conference on the Settlement of the Laotian, 1961-1962

Assistant US Secretary of State, Far Eastern Affairs, 1961-1963

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

Under US Secretary of State, Political Affairs, 1963-1965

US Ambassador-at-large, 1965-1969

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

Personal Representative of the US President, Peace Talks with North Vietnam, 1968-1969

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.Further Information

Get more info on 'Averell Harriman'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://w__averell_harriman.totallyexplained.com">W. Averell Harriman Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.