Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986.

Marie Harriman, The second and most irreverent of Averell Harriman's three wives, used to toss off a sarcastic quip when friends would tell her how well her husband looked. "You'd look good too if you'd done nothing but play polo until you were 50," she'd say.

It was, of course, not true.

Harriman, the son of an immensely rich father, did spend much of his life indulging himself in the pursuits of the wealthy. He surrounded himself with cronies from his Ivy League background--Groton, Skull and Bones, and the Yale boathouse. There were town houses and country houses and summer estates, and parties at all of them to which were invited the witty, the famous, including actors and writers and journalists. Harriman financed his obsessions--croquet, rowing, polo--as only a rich man could.,

He also indulged his attraction to beautiful women. One of his liaisons was with Pamela Churchill, daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill. This was at a time in WW II when Harriman was President Roosevelt's eyes and ears in London, and was one of the British Prime Minister's closest confidantes. According to Rudy Abramson, as Pamela Churchill's marriage to Churchill's son Randolph faded, she was tom between Harriman and Edward R. Murrow, whose reports from London made him a kind of journalistic demi-god. Murrow returned to his wife, Pamela divorced and married someone else, but years later became Harriman's third wife.

Although a playboy , he spent the early part of his adult life as businessman, managing the companies and millions left him by his father. Those millions served him well, keeping him afloat when he made bad business calls that would have sunk a poorer investor. But he honed his negotiating skills wherever in the world the deals took him and built up contacts with international leaders that were to serve him well as he moved, in the second part of his life, into politics and diplomacy.

A dull public speaker, unenthusiastic about mingling with the crowds, he blew a presidential bid, but became a single-term Governor of New York, losing in his bid for reelection to Nelson Rockefeller. But it was diplomacy that he relished, and that he excelled at, and it was closeness to a series of American presidents that he sought, sometimes by weedling, cajoling, and unashamedly pleading for special assignments. Rudy Abramson is at his best when chronicling this Harriman career as Ambassador, special envoy, cabinet secretary, and State Department official.

Thus Harriman over the years established a remarkable record of achievement in public service and of contributions to his country's national interests.

As he grew older, Harriman's energy level was high and he kept in good physical shape, skiing into his late |70's. His mind remained sharp, his worldwide contacts excellent. But as presidents came and went, his star began to fade. President, Kennedy told a friend: "If we're going to give [Harriman] a job, he has to have a hearing aid."

Secretly, Harriman lusted for the job of Secretary of State, but it f eluded him. instead he filled a series of lesser posts at State, ending his diplomatic career as a negotiator for Lyndon Johnson with the North Vietnamese in Paris. Even this was a bittersweet assignment, for Harriman's role was to set the scene for the new Nixon administration to negotiate the United States out of Vietnam.

Widowed, and in retirement, Harriman seemed "old, spent, and ready to die," according to Abramson. But into his life again came his old flame from London days, Pamela Churchill. Suddenly Harriman again had "spring in his step and his killer instinct on the croquet lawn." They married, and kept a Georgetown salon frequented by statesmen, journalists, diplomats. "Spanning the Century" is Abramson's first book, but his twenty-five years as a Washington corespondent--covering such big stories as the landing of the astronauts on the moon, the Vietnam war, Watergate and arms control debates--have served him well here.

Abramson has done a good job of chronicling Harriman's personal frailties and uncertainties without diminishing his stature as a statesman.

John Hughes, NF '62, is former Editor of The Christian Science Monitor and currently Director of the International Media Studies Program at Brigham Young University.

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Author:	Hughes, John
Publication:	Nieman Reports
Date:	Sep 22, 1992
Words:	697
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