Averell Harriman was an american industrialist and financier, had a distinguished second career as a top-level diplomatic negotiator for five Democratic presidents. He was Governor of New York for one term.
Background
Better known as Averell Harriman, he was born in New York City, the son of railroad baron Edward Henry Harriman and Mary Williamson Averell. He was the brother of E. Roland Harriman and Mary Harriman Rumsey. Harriman was a close friend of Hall Roosevelt, the brother of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Education
He attended Groton School in Massachusetts before going on to Yale where he joined the Skull and Bones society. He graduated in 1913. After graduating, he inherited the largest fortune in America and became Yale's youngest Crew coach.
Career
During the administration of U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harriman was an officer of the National Recovery Administration and during 1940–41 served with the National Defense Advisory Commission and its successor agency, the Office of Production Management. In 1941 President Roosevelt sent him to Britain and the Soviet Union to expedite U.S. lend-lease aid. He then served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union (1943–46), ambassador to Great Britain (April to October 1946), and secretary of commerce (1947–48).
From 1948 to 1950 he was special U.S. representative in Europe to supervise administration of the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan); in 1950 he was named special assistant to the president and in 1951 director of the Mutual Security Agency. He was twice unsuccessful in his attempt to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency (1952 and 1956). Governor of New York from 1954 to 1958, Harriman lost the position to Nelson A. Rockefeller. He served as Pres. John F. Kennedy’s assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs from 1961 to 1963. During that period he advocated U.S. support of a neutral government in Laos and helped to negotiate the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. Under Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson Harriman served as ambassador-at-large and headed the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam (1968–69). He retired in 1969 (though he remained active in foreign affairs in an unofficial capacity) and was replaced by Henry Cabot Lodge.
Harriman’s reflections on his relations with the Soviet Union, America and Russia in a Changing World, appeared in 1971 and his Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941–1946 (with Elie Abel) in 1975.
Author: Peace with Russia?, 1959, America and Russia in a Changing World, 1971, Special Envoy: To Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946, 1975.
Politics
Harriman's older sister, Mary Rumsey, encouraged Averell to leave his finance job and work with her and their friends, the Roosevelts, to advance the goals of the New Deal. Averell joined the NRA National Recovery Administration, the first government consumer rights group, marking the beginning of his political career.
Membership
Chairman foreign policy task force advisory council Democratic National Committee, 1974-1986. Delegate Democratic National Convention, 1976.
Connections
His first marriage, two years after graduating from Yale, was to Kitty Lanier Lawrence.[16] Lawrence was the great-granddaughter of James Lanier, a co-founder of Winslow, Lanier & Co., and the granddaughter of Charles D. Lanier (1837-1926), a close friend of Pierpont Morgan Before their divorce in 1928, and her death in 1936, Harriman and Lawrence had two daughters together:
Mary Averell Harriman (1917-1996), who married Dr. Shirley C. Fisk
Kathleen Lanier Harriman (1917–2011), who married Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. (1913–1999), who had previously been married to socialite Babe Paley (1915-1978)
About a year after his divorce from Lawrence, he married Marie Norton Whitney (1903–1970), who had left her husband, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, to marry him. On their honeymoon in Europe, they purchased oil paintings by Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, Picasso, and Renoir. She and her husband later donated many of the works she bought and collected, including those of the artist Walt Kuhn, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. They remained married until her death on September 26, 1970, at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.
In 1971, he married for the third and final time to Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward (1920–1997), the former wife of Winston Churchill's son Randolph, and widow of Broadway producer Leland Hayward. In 1993, she became the 58th United States Ambassador to France.
Harriman died on July 26, 1986 in Yorktown Heights, New York, at the age of 94. Averell and Pamela Harriman are buried at the Arden Farm Graveyard in Arden, New York.