The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  He had not been born with those particular liberal prejudices; if anything, he had been born with a silver railroad in his mouth. He was the son of E. H. Harriman, the man who built the Union Pacific (a company not known for its dedication to public service), one of the great ruthless titans of an age, who had himself been born in 1848, which links Harriman seemingly to another age. Averell was second-generation, still very much tied to that ruthless first generation, aware of the reputation, stiff and proper in his public gestures and stances, unable to repudiate the past in public gestures, still sensitive about his father, as Nelson Rockefeller was not about his grandfather, the Rockefeller image having been deliberately and successfully tempered from the money grabber of the first generation to the blintz-eating, arm-pumping good fellow of the third generation. Years and years after, when contemporary America had long ago forgotten it, Harriman still felt the sting of Teddy Roosevelt’s reference to his father as being among the “malefactors of great wealth,” a charge which must have made the switch to the Democratic party easier.

  He went to Groton, of course, and then Yale. His father, who believed that rowing was the right sport for a young gentleman, particularly a very tall young gentleman, had imported the Syracuse crew coach in the summers to coach Averell on a special lake in Orange County in the middle of a vast Harriman estate, with the result that when Averell arrived at Groton he easily made the crew. Going on to Yale, he would have rowed there, except that a slight heart murmur was discovered, so he had to row in single and double sculls instead. This was hardly enough for his abnormal energy, and since rowing seemed to be in great decline at Yale, he volunteered to coach first the freshman and eventually the varsity crew. (“Most of the rest of Washington thinks of Dean Acheson as the Secretary of State under Harry Truman and a great figure of another time. I still think of him as someone I taught rowing to on the freshman crew at Yale,” he has told friends.) Since there was only one place to learn about rowing in those days, England, Harriman went there for two months at his own expense to study Oxford rowing; after his return to Yale, the crews there showed marked improvement. It was a typical Harriman act, both in professional and in personal life: whatever it is you’re interested in, find the source and learn all you can, let nothing stand in your way. At a late date he decided he wanted to learn bowling, thereupon built two bowling lanes in his home and practiced until he became quite proficient; similarly, wanting to learn about croquet, he read every book on the subject, studied the game, and when he played he took as much as twenty minutes to play a stroke, thus infuriating and upsetting opponents.

  His boyhood was spent at the best school, he traveled around the country in a private Pullman car, and he was elected to the board of Union Pacific as a college senior. He did not serve in the Great War, though he was twenty-two when it began and most members of his age group were attracted to it. There was in fact a certain deal of murmuring at the time about his not going. In those days he seemed well on his way to being another powerful businessman. (Interviewed in Forbes magazine in 1920, when he was twenty-nine, he said, “It is indefensible for a man who has capital not to apply himself diligently to using it in a way that will be of most benefit for the country as it is for a laborer to refuse to work, or for a revolutionary to resort to bombs in this country. Idle capital or capital misapplied is as destructive economically as the conduct of the loafing worker or the bomb thrower.”) He expanded the Harriman empire into shipping and he immediately became the foremost American operator in that field. He was adventurous in his dealings, and in 1924, when the Soviet Union was looking for foreign capital, it made available a twenty-year concession for exploiting manganese in Georgia. It was the kind of arrangement which appalled almost all capitalists at the time; if the Soviet Union seemed the enemy in the nineteen-fifties, this was even more true thirty years earlier. The mutual stereotypes were more pronounced, and there was an almost neurotic capitalist fear of Communist Russia. For Harriman to take up the Russian offer—he put up about $3.5 million for the rights—was deemed disloyal and excessively risky, but it was a good insight into the unpredictability of Harriman, even in his incarnation as a stiff and traditional businessman. The deal never worked out; the Soviets made a comparable agreement with a German group at better rates, and much merriment was made of Averell’s folly. Harriman himself went to the Soviet Union and lobbied for better terms; although he did not succeed, he did talk the Russians into announcing that they would pay back his original investment with a certain amount of interest, which they eventually did. The experience left both Soviet officials and Harriman seeing beyond some of the stereotypes of the period, each side believing that the other could be talked to, and dealt with.

  Exactly what brought Harriman into the political world and the Democratic-party world in 1928 is hard to say, but a number of factors worked together. One was the pressure from a maverick elder sister, Mary Harriman, who was far more socially concerned, and was a close friend of Frances Perkins. She had entered a world vastly different from her origins, and had a sense of responsibility to do something with her privileges. Another was his close ties with New York Governor Al Smith, who helped bring Harriman into the Democratic party. Their relationship was warm and personal, and there are those who feel that Harriman’s special feeling for John Kennedy (Harriman seemed to age twenty years after the assassination) was a way of paying back this young Catholic President for what an earlier Catholic candidate had done for him, for the worlds he had opened up. A large part of it was the worlds to conquer: in the worlds of business, the son of E. H. Harriman could be little more than the son of E. H. Harriman. The empire was already built, the mountain had been climbed (and in fact literally chopped down on the Harriman estate in order to find a perfect level site for their home). The challenge was more or less gone. Money bored him, he was not interested in it. Though he accepted what money could do for him, he was not motivated to gain more and he did not like to spend it; he was sensitive to the malefactors-of-great-wealth accusations and saw no reason to give his life to amass an even greater fortune. He could find the challenge in the world of international politics and domestic politics, worlds which would produce enough problems to satisfy his restlessness, and let him become totally absorbed in his project and mission of the moment. In his Memoirs, George Kennan later wrote of Harriman’s single-mindedness, his total lack of affectation and snobbery (as free of it as only the very rich and very aristocratic can be; Averell, says another friend, is a certain kind of snob, a power snob—he’s interested only in who has power).

  The concentration, the attention to detail became legendary; he delegated nothing. He made his young aides work hard but he was always aware of everything they were doing, and he remained in command, even when they thought his attention was elsewhere. Among those who learned this particular lesson was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was offered a campaign job with Harriman in 1954. Moynihan thought the campaign job would be a marvelous chance to learn the ropes of political machinations, to set up studies and develop issues, but he soon found himself announcing over a loudspeaker system for the Harriman entourage, that and nothing else. The last day of the campaign they started early in the morning on Long Island, with Moynihan doing his thing: “Come meet Averell Harriman here at the Grumman works in ten minutes. The next governor of New York, Averell Harriman, will be here in ten minutes. Come meet Averell Harriman . . .” He had done it all day stop after stop just as he had done it for three months, and now at the end of the day, during the rush hour in the middle of the garment center, with Harriman about to make his last appearance, Moynihan had let loose. All the pent-up energy, all the good lines he had intended to put into speeches came out: an attack on the inequitable tax the Republicans planned, on their insensitivity to the workingman, on their opposition to basic New Deal welfare protection—all this, and other sins as well. He was still attacking the Republicans when he felt a tap on his shoulder from the cop riding with them. “Hey, Mac,” the co
p said, “Mr. Harriman says 'Just announce. Nothing more. Don’t make policy.’ ”

  If he, one of the richest men in the world, did not particularly care that much about making money, he was at least cautious about spending it, and stories about Harriman’s tightness became legend. Part of it was a real fear which traced back to his childhood, that people were after him for his money, and he was singularly loath to encourage them in that pursuit. At times this hurt him as a politician: where Rockefeller spent lavishly in his own behalf and occasionally for his party in order to sweeten other party relationships, Harriman was far more austere, both to himself and to his party, particularly the latter. As a good Democrat he had of course contributed to the funds for Herbert Lehman when he campaigned in the past, so when Harriman decided to run on his own in 1954, his aides went to see Lehman. They wanted not just any contribution, they soon made clear, but a large one, worthy of Lehman’s own considerable wealth. Lehman listened for a while and inquired what they had in mind. The figure they suggested was in the thousands, several thousands. Lehman, who had a long memory, then asked if they would take a contribution which was double what Harriman had given Lehman. Eagerly the aides said yes. Lehman excused himself, went back to his office to go through the files, came back and handed the aides a check for $200.

  Harriman had been the perfect figure for the Democratic party in foreign affairs in the Roosevelt-Truman years, a full-blown true-blue capitalist who had the allegiance of his class and yet was a party partisan on domestic issues as well. He was the party’s most legitimate capitalist, and foreign governments, including the Soviet, knew that he spoke not just for an Administration but for the power structure as well. (When Khrushchev came to America in 1959, he asked Harriman to round up the real power structure of America for him, not the paper power structure. Harriman did just that, thus confirming to Khrushchev that his own view of who held power in America, as opposed to that of those who thought they held power in America, was correct, which it probably was.)

  As governor of New York he was a singularly poor politician, stiff and proud and unbending to the public, and totally compromising in private. What made him so bad in domestic politics was that he was working for himself and thus was ruthless in the pursuit of his own ambition, whereas in Washington his ambition was still great but somehow tempered by a sense of country, thus evoking the best in him, wisdom, patience and a sense of perspective. Yet not only was he a poor governor, and beaten badly by Rockefeller in 1958, but he almost destroyed the Democratic party of New York, as pointed out by Theodore White, one of his admirers, in The Making of the President, 1960. After emphasizing that no American had helped exercise his nation’s power throughout the world as Harriman had in the previous two decades, White wrote:

  Yet brought face to face with the domestic system of American power, no man proved more incapable of understanding; and his performance in 1958 in directing the Democratic Party in New York not only destroyed the pride and honor of both machine and citizen elements of that Party but probably rendered the Party incapable of governing New York again for years.

  That was written in 1960, and in 1972 Rockefeller is still governor, there is a Republican senator, and a Conservative senator, and the last two Democratic candidates for mayor of New York City have been defeated.

  He had started the Kennedy years at the bottom rung. He had not realized the Kennedy electoral force early enough, and was prejudiced against the candidate not on grounds of religion, but on grounds of heredity, disliking old Joe Kennedy for many reasons. The early indices of his future with the Administration were not good. He was sent on a preinaugural fact-finding tour of Africa, a place far from the center of the action, and when he showed up at Kennedy’s Georgetown house to give his report, he was allowed the grand total of five minutes with the President-elect, then was quickly shuttled off to lunch with an aide named Tom Farmer, delegated to hear the entire story of Africa and Harriman. He was given the job of roving ambassador, and the Administration thought that that would be both the beginning and the end of it. But he had moved up quickly, gaining the President’s admiration for his handling of the Laotian problem. Later he would tell friends that it was the easiest set of presidential instructions he ever had, a five-minute phone call during which Kennedy said, “A military solution isn’t possible. I want a political solution.” He was what Kennedy had been looking for all along, a man both of the Establishment and of the Democratic party with a transferable personal loyalty. He got things done; he did not make a good target for enemies; he was not soft. He had of course entered the Administration fully operative, unlike many of the men in the Administration for whom it was their first time in office. And he had diagnosed the Kennedy Administration very ably; he had sensed that they needed him, that there would be a role to play, and now it was coming true. With Rusk vulnerable, there would have to be a new Secretary of State, and only George Ball at State was a potential rival for the job (Bundy was a Republican and too valuable at the White House, and McNamara was good at Defense and not wise or political enough for State). So he began to move into the vacuum at State that Rusk had created.

  In late 1962 and 1963 he clearly emerged as a figure in the Department openly challenging Rusk for leadership, obviously a candidate for Secretary of State, a job which he, a man so private about his own feelings, would once admit wistfully was the only job he had ever wanted; the Presidency thing had not been real, but State, that was his ambition. Although he had not been a particular fan of Rusk’s from the start, he had begun by being extremely correct with him. But Rusk’s style soon irritated him, and those who were around him detected a very subtle patronizing of the Secretary. (It showed at one staff meeting of high-level State officials: Rusk, Ball, Harriman, the Assistant Secretaries. Rusk addressed his team, saying that Harold Wilson was in town and that it looked as if he was going to win the election and become Prime Minister, and perhaps they had better do something for him. Did anyone know where he was staying? No one knew, so Rusk dispatched Ball to call the British embassy and find out. Ball left, came back white-faced a few minutes later, and whispered to Rusk, “He’s Averell’s house guest.” Harriman, sitting there, never moved a muscle.) One incident during the Geneva negotiations had particularly enraged Harriman. He had asked Rusk for permission to see the Chinese delegates in Geneva, and Rusk had refused, leaving Harriman furious.

  He began to by-pass Rusk more and more, and encouraged others, such as Hilsman, to do the same; he had, he felt, deferred to the Secretary, but if the Secretary was not going to fight, then the time for deference was past. He became more open in his lack of respect for Rusk, finally turning to friends, saying how could you deal with someone like Rusk who was spending all his time protecting his private parts, and at that point Harriman, usually so correct and proper, bent over and imitated his own description.

  The bureaucracy Harriman had entered tended to be about ten years behind in their view of current events, but he felt that the Administration, more politically sensitive to changes at home and overseas, should react more rapidly. If so, the bureaucracy and its reporting did not serve the President well and should be challenged by younger and bureaucratically unencumbered men. Then the President would have a choice, otherwise the top people would get together and agree among themselves what was the wise and safe, and tailor the reporting to it. Which of course was exactly what was happening. Harriman’s feelings about Vietnam were hardly the result of his ideological bias, and unlike Bowles, he did not bring a grand design to foreign affairs. He was a man who was totally divorced from his own class’s political viewpoints and prejudices; more important and far more remarkable, he was able to divorce himself from the prejudices of his own political past, from the years of tension with the Soviet Union. No one had been more a part of the Marshall Plan confrontation than Harriman, yet for him Vietnam would never be Germany, Laos never Italy, and SEATO never NATO. In an era when too many of the key figures seemed overly conscious of their own
immediate part in the Marshall Plan—those lessons learned being the only lessons learned; having stopped the Communists in Europe, anxious to apply once more the lessons of containment. Harriman was markedly different, yet no one could have had a greater stake in that era. As ambassador to Russia at the end of the war Harriman had, with Kennan, been among the very first to warn of the difficult years ahead. He had also played a crucial role in influencing James Forrestal, who subsequently geared up the Washington machinery for the American half of the Cold War. The entry in the Forrestal Diaries for April 20, 1945, reads:

  I saw Averell Harriman, the American Ambassador to Russia, last night. He stated his strong apprehensions as to the future of our relations with Russia unless our entire attitude toward them became characterized by much greater firmness. He said that, using the fear of Germany as a stalking horse, they would continue their program of setting up states around their borders which would follow the same ideology as the Russians. He said the outward thrust of Communism was not dead and that we might well have to face an ideological warfare just as vigorous and dangerous as Fascism or Nazism.