by Lynne Olson
Like Winant, Murrow was greatly disheartened by the lack of freedom and justice in the postwar world as well by as the souring of the peace and rise of international tension. He was equally distressed by the rise of McCarthyism, which he denounced in his history-making See It Now broadcast in 1954, and by what was happening within his own industry—specifically, by what he considered as the decline of broadcast journalistic standards. Murrow would have liked CBS News to model itself after the BBC, whose primary objective was to serve the public interest. CBS, however, was a commercial network, not a quasi-public enterprise, and the chief aims of its chairman, Bill Paley, were profits and ratings. The news division, which had made CBS the number one network in the country during the war, was pushed into the background. Entertainment was Paley’s main focus, and “news was his hobby,” as Don Hewitt, the executive producer of the CBS news magazine program 60 Minutes, put it. “He collected Murrows and Sevareids the way he collected Picassos and Manets and Degas.”
Jack Gould, a television critic for the New York Times, once described Murrow as “an individual in a world beset by organization…. His office was called the Tobruk of journalism…. It was the fortress which defended electronic journalism in its dark hour and left a glowing heritage for a craft and a country.”
The conflict between Paley and Murrow grew increasingly sharp until, in 1961, Paley and CBS made clear they had no place for Murrow anymore. At the invitation of the new president, John F. Kennedy, he left to become head of the U.S. Information Agency, the postwar successor to the Office of War Information. Four years later, he died of lung cancer at the age of fifty-seven.
Shortly before his death, Queen Elizabeth II made Murrow an honorary Knight of the British Empire. The night he died, the BBC interrupted its scheduled programming for a half-hour special report on Murrow and his achievements. According to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who appeared on the program, the awarding of the KBE to the American was merely the formal recognition of a widely recognized reality: Murrow had been an “honorary Briton” since he first arrived in London in 1937.
UNLIKE HIS TWO wartime compatriots, Averell Harriman had little trouble adjusting to life after the war. As he had hoped, the conflict transformed him from a playboy businessman, caught in the shadow of his dominating father, to a major figure in international diplomacy. Parlaying his wartime service in London and Moscow into a distinguished forty-year government career, Harriman held significant positions in the Truman, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson administrations. He was, the New York Times observed, America’s “super diplomat,” the country’s “plenipotentiary supreme.”
Ironically, he was not happy with the first postwar diplomatic post to which he was appointed: ambassador to the Court of St. James. It was a job that, during the war, he would have been thrilled to be offered, but in 1946, Britain, impoverished and fast losing its imperial clout, was no longer a center of power and action. To his subordinates at the embassy, Harriman seemed “aloof, distant and not altogether engaged.” Shortly after arriving in London, he moved into the official ambassador’s residence in Prince’s Gate, the mansion formerly owned by J. P. Morgan that Winant had spurned.
Harriman also renewed his affair with Pamela Churchill, who welcomed his attentions after the humiliation of being jilted by Murrow. Their relationship, however, was now considerably more problematic than it had been in the early 1940s. The freewheeling, feverish atmosphere of wartime London, where, in Harrison Salisbury’s words, “sex hung in the air like a fog,” had vanished. Harriman was also much more of a public figure as ambassador than he had been as Lend-Lease administrator, and he was worried that a scandal might erupt, threatening his diplomatic and political ambitions. To forestall that, he persuaded his wife to join him in London. Before she arrived, however, Truman summoned Harriman to Washington to become secretary of commerce, just six months after he had arrived in London.
As he had done with Churchill and Roosevelt, Harriman worked hard to cultivate Truman. In 1947, the president sent him to Europe with the rank of ambassador, to disburse billions of dollars in Marshall Plan aid. By most accounts, he acquitted himself well. Plodding and stiff, he had never been considered, even by his closest friends, as intellectual or even particularly bright. Lord Beaverbrook would later tell John F. Kennedy: “Never has anyone gone so far with so little.” But he was ferociously hardworking, blunt, tough, determined, and acquainted with virtually every leader in postwar Europe—qualities that stood him in good stead for the rest of his government career. In 1948, Truman named Harriman as his national security adviser. According to Robert Sherwood, he “was the closest thing to a Harry Hopkins that Truman ever had”—a remark that must have given Harriman considerable pleasure.
By the late 1940s, the former Union Pacific chairman, together with such longtime friends and associates as Dean Acheson, John McCloy, George Kennan, and Robert Lovett, were widely regarded as the architects of America’s overarching role in the postwar world. Known as the Wise Men, Harriman and the others were determined to create a Pax Americana throughout the globe, a vision of their country’s future that, in the words of the Wise Men’s biographers, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, demanded the “reshaping of America’s traditional role in the world and a restructuring of the global balance of power.”
In a move that many of his friends believed to be breathtakingly wrongheaded, Harriman ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 and again in 1956. With no previous experience as an elected official, the wooden, imperious candidate had almost no appeal to the average voter; unsurprisingly, he lost both times, to Adlai Stevenson. In 1954, Harriman did win the governorship of New York by a small margin but was defeated by Nelson Rockefeller in his reelection bid.
Harriman was sixty-eight when Kennedy was elected president, but he was determined not to let age stand in his way of becoming a White House insider once again. “Everybody has his weaknesses, and Averell’s is the desire to be near power,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a friend of Harriman’s, wrote in his diary. Harriman told another friend: “I am confident that before things end up, I will be in the inner circle. I started as a private with Roosevelt and worked to the top. And then I had to start as a private all over again with Truman and work to the top. That is what I intend to do again.”
And that, indeed, is what he did. Initially skeptical of Harriman, Kennedy ended up appointing the aging diplomat as his chief international troubleshooter, later naming him undersecretary of state. At the age of seventy, Harriman negotiated the Geneva Accords ending a civil war in Laos and, two years later, led the American team that hammered out a limited test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the seventy-six-year-old Harriman traveled to Paris in 1965 to inaugurate talks with the North Vietnamese to try to end the Vietnam War—an effort that proved unsuccessful.
When he was seventy-nine, Harriman, by then a widower, encountered his wartime mistress at a dinner party at the home of Washington Post owner Katharine Graham. In the years since the war, Pamela Churchill had had affairs with a number of rich and powerful men, including Elie de Rothschild and Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli, before marrying the American theatrical producer Leland Hayward, who died in 1971. Once again, Harriman and Pamela renewed their relationship, and a few months later, they were married. When Pamela told eighty-six-year-old Clementine Churchill of her impending nuptials, Clemen tine exclaimed with delight, “My dear, it’s an old flame rekindled!”
Harriman died in 1986 at the age of ninety-four. His indefatigable wife went on to become a doyenne of the Democratic Party and U.S. ambassador to France. She was still serving as ambassador when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1997, after a swim at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.
MORE THAN SIX DECADES after the end of World War II, Edward R. Murrow and Averell Harriman remain well-known figures in the United States. Widely regarded as the founding father and patron saint of broadcast news, Murrow has been the subject of several books and mov
ies. A leading broadcasters’ organization—the Radio and Television News Directors Association—presents the Edward R. Murrow Award each year for excellence in broadcast journalism. A number of schools throughout the country, including the school of communications at his alma mater, Washington State University, bear his name. As for Harriman, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York has the W. Averell Harriman program in European studies, and Columbia University houses the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies.
John Gilbert Winant, while virtually forgotten in the United States, has been memorialized, too, albeit in a far different fashion than either Murrow or Harriman. The principal tribute to him was the brainchild of Father Tubby Clayton, the Anglican priest to whom Winant spoke the day before he died. Clayton was reportedly stricken with guilt by Winant’s suicide, believing he might have prevented it if he had seen his friend the night he called.
After Winant’s death, Clayton gave an impassioned speech to the students of St. Paul’s School, urging them to come to London and work in the East End the following summer in honor of Winant, still a revered figure at the school. Several did, becoming members of the first group of young Americans dubbed the Winant Volunteers. Every year since then, dozens of high school and college students in the United States have spent their summers working with poverty-stricken communities in British cities. Since 1957, young Britons have returned the favor, coming to work with the underprivileged in America’s towns and cities. The program is now called the Winant-Clayton Volunteers.
For some Winant-Clayton alumni, the experience turned out to be a life-changing event. “It helped me grow up and see the world for what it really was,” recalled the Reverend J. Parker Jameson, who, as a recent graduate from Harvard, worked with disadvantaged youths in Liverpool in the summer of 1975. “It knocked out of me the idea that America was the center of the world. I learned that the globe is a much bigger place and that there’s a whole world of hurt out there that needs to be taken care of. We need to work together to deal with it.” Once the summer was over, Jameson stayed on in Liverpool for another year. When he returned to the United States, he decided to become an Episcopal priest, influenced in large part by his Winant-Clayton experience.
THE VIEW OF America that Parker Jameson gained that summer in Liverpool was not widely shared in his homeland, especially in the immediate postwar years. Having emerged from World War II as the mightiest country in the world, the United States was serenely convinced of its own omnipotence. Initially, it had little interest in close collaboration or partnership with its former Western allies, whose empires and global influence were fast disintegrating. Indeed, within months after the war, the United States had begun to displace Britain, France, and the other European colonial powers as the main economic and military force in Southeast Asia, the Pacific region, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.
At the end of the conflict, the United States had briefly envisioned the Soviet Union as its main partner in dealing with postwar international problems. The onset of the Cold War, however, put an end to that notion, as well as to Roosevelt’s plan for a speedy American withdrawal from European affairs. Having spent much of the war pacifying the Soviets, the U.S. government now launched a campaign to contain them. To do so, Washington realized it must not only maintain but increase America’s wartime involvement with Europe, despite its long-held determination to stay out of Continental entanglements. Two years after the Marshall Plan was launched, the United States, Canada, and ten European countries established the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance promising a collective defense by all member countries in the event of an armed attack on any one member. For the first time in its history, the United States had agreed to become a permanent force in keeping peace in Europe.
As they adjusted to their new role, American policymakers developed a new appreciation of their old wartime partner, Britain. “No other country has the same qualifications for being our principal ally and partner as the U.K.,” a State Department paper noted. “The British, and with them the rest of the Commonwealth, particularly the older dominions, are our most reliable and useful allies, with whom a special relationship should exist.”
That “special relationship” was never to be the close-knit, equal partnership that Britain had sought during and after the war. The United States always made clear who the dominant partner was, as during the Suez crisis in 1956, when American leaders put economic pressure on Britain to force a halt to an invasion of Egypt by British, French, and Israeli troops.
Yet, for all the recurrent strains and tensions, the United States and Britain had much more in common with each other than with any other ally, and their postwar connections turned out to be remarkably close, especially when compared to America’s ties with the rest of the world. Such intimacy was heightened by the web of personal acquaintances and friendships that bound Britons and Americans together during the war. Having helped to smooth over problems during the conflict, those close-knit, informal relationships worked to promote cooperation after it. Speaking of the British, Robert Reich, a former Rhodes Scholar and labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, observed: “Here was a people whom Americans could trust: friends and confidants in an unfriendly and confusing world…. There is little doubt that American officials often sought the counsel of their British counterparts, and obtained the sort of frank and confidential advice that one can only get from an old and trusted friend whose judgment is deeply valued.”
For many Americans and Britons who experienced their countries’ wartime alliance firsthand, the legacy was deep and lasting. “The Americans’ coming was an education and gave me a broader outlook on life. They gave me an insight into democracy,” said a woman from Liverpool. A Birmingham man, who’d been a schoolboy during the war, observed: “Whatever happens to the ‘special relationship’ at the national level, we worked out our own special relationships all those years ago…. [The Americans] were never merely ‘them,’ and they rapidly became ‘us.’ I for one will never lose the sense of good comradeship, generosity and basic solidarity we developed then.”
In Schenectady, New York, a former American sailor observed: “I think I understand the people of the U.K. as well as I do the people of the U.S. In other words, I could hang my hat on either side of the Atlantic and say ‘I’m home again.’ ” Ernie Pyle expressed much the same sentiment shortly before he was killed in the Pacific late in the war. “I have loved London ever since first seeing it in the Blitz,” the columnist wrote. “It has become sort of my overseas home.” New York Times correspondent Drew Middleton once remarked: “The years in London were the happiest of my life…. One can ask no more than to live in a place he knows and loves, among people he understands, respects and likes.” Even the dyspeptic novelist and playwright William Saroyan, who despised virtually everything about his Army experience during the war, had nothing but good to say about London and its people. “It embarrasses me to say that I am in love with this city, for it seems such a false thing for anyone to say, but I am in love with London, and I will never stop being in love with it,” declares the protagonist of Saroyan’s wartime novel, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson.
To a number of Americans who spent time in wartime Britain, the country and its capital seemed to resemble Brigadoon—a magical place where courage, resolution, sacrifice, and a sense of unity and common purpose triumphed, if only for a few short years. Robert Arbib eloquently made that point in his memoir of the months he spent in Britain, which he wrote shortly before the end of the war. “Every Englishman you meet apologizes,” he observed. “They all say, ‘Too bad you are seeing England in wartime. Too bad you cannot see England at her best.’ ” But Arbib forcefully disagreed with that view. “Damn it,” he wrote, “this is England at her best. Right here and now!”
True, the streets were dirty, the shopfronts needed paint, and the trains ran late. True, also, that food and hot water were scarce, the beer was
weak, the grass in the parks was shaggy, and the lights were out. “But, to some of us, who remember other things,” Arbib wrote, “who knew a country wholly united behind one purpose, a country where danger made all men friends, where sacrifice came not only to the soldier or catastrophe came only to the poor, where everyone shared in the work, where terror and trouble could not subjugate humour and wit, where gallantry and heroism was the man standing next to you at ‘The Rose and Crown,’ and where democracy was the duke on the bicycle and the farmer in the car—this was a nation at its best, this was an experience to be shared with pride, this was a time of greatness, and Britain a wonderland indeed.”
Shortly before leaving London in October 1940, CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid expressed a similar sense of kinship with a city and a nation he had grown to admire and love. In his last broadcast, the twenty-seven-year-old Sevareid compared his departure from London to his flight from Paris just days before its fall to the Germans four months earlier: “Paris died like a beautiful woman, in a coma, without struggle, without knowing or even asking why. One left Paris with a feeling almost of relief. London one leaves with regret. Of all the great cities of Europe, London alone behaves with pride, and battered but stubborn dignity.”
Throughout his paean to the British capital and its residents, Sevareid fought to keep his voice steady. At the end, he lost the struggle. His voice choked with emotion, he concluded: “Someone wrote the other day, ‘When this is all over, in years to come, men will speak of this war and say, ‘I was a soldier,’ ‘I was a sailor,’ or ‘I was a pilot.’ Others will say with equal pride, ‘I was a citizen of London.’ ”
