Livingston Tallmadge Merchant was born on November 23, 1903, in New York City, and was one of two children of Huntington Wolcott Merchant and Mary Floyd Tallmadge. His ancestors on his father's side included Oliver Wolcott, George Washington's secretary of the Treasury; and, on his mother's side, William Floyd, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
"Livy, " as his friends usually called him, was educated at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, and at Princeton University; he graduated in 1922 and 1926, respectively.
Following graduation from Princeton, Merchant pursued a successful career as an investment counselor with the prominent Boston firm of Scudder, Stevens, and Clark, becoming a partner in 1930. After the United States entered World War II, Merchant began what would be a twenty-year career with the State Department. His first position, as assistant chief of the division of defense materials from 1942 to 1945, proved an especially demanding one in view of the critical importance and sensitivity of procurement issues during wartime. In 1945 he was appointed chief of the war areas division, another post in which Merchant's expertise in economic matters served him in good stead. Later that year, he accepted his first overseas assignment, becoming the counselor for economic affairs at the American Embassy in Paris. In 1947, in the middle of a two-year stint back in Washington as chief of the State Department's aviation division, he formally joined the foreign service. In 1948, Merchant was posted to China as the counselor of the American Embassy in Nanking. In November 1951, Merchant was named special assistant to the secretary of state on mutual security affairs. The next year, he was again posted to Paris, this time as deputy for political affairs to the United States special representative in Europe. He served simultaneously as the alternate United States special representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Council. Merchant remained in that position until early 1953, having attained the rank of ambassador in 1952.
He served as assistant secretary of state for European affairs from 1953 to 1956, and again from 1958 to 1959; in 1959, he was named under secretary of state for political affairs, the third-highest ranking position within the State Department and a post he maintained until the early days of the John F. Kennedy presidency. During his first tour of duty as head of the European bureau, Merchant helped Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles respond to the changes in Soviet policy that occurred after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, played a leading role in the "Big Four" (comprising Soviet, American, British, and French heads of state) summit meeting at Geneva in 1955, and served as a senior adviser to Eisenhower at the Berlin conference of 1954 and the London, Geneva, and Paris conferences of 1955. Those conferences dealt primarily with East-West issues, European security, and the German question. In addition to those duties, both Eisenhower and Kennedy dispatched Merchant on a number of delicate negotiating missions. Merchant also served two separate stints as United States ambassador to Canada, from 1956 to 1958 and again from 1961 to 1962. Following his retirement from the foreign service in 1962, Merchant served as the United States executive director of the World Bank from 1965 to 1968. He died at his home in Washington, D. C. , after suffering a heart attack.
Merchant played an important role in the development and supervision of the European Recovery Program. At the time of Dwight D. Eisenhower's accession to the presidency in January 1953, Merchant ranked as one of the foreign service's most respected diplomats. That reputation solidified during the Eisenhower years, as Merchant was increasingly tapped for the most important and difficult diplomatic assignments. Among other matters, he helped promote an improvement in United States-Panamanian relations following a dispute in 1959 over the canal zone, and he worked to achieve a temporary rapprochement between Pakistan and Afghanistan following a flare-up in tensions between those rival nations in 1961. Although relations between the United States and Canada have historically been placid, during his tenure in Ottawa, Merchant needed to respond with unusual sensitivity to a burgeoning anti-Americanism that had become a potent force in Canadian political life. The pervasive American economic presence and cultural influence within the country fueled Canadian resentment toward the United States, helping propel conservative nationalist John G. Diefenbaker into the prime ministership in the general elections of June 1957. Merchant did his best to ease the ensuing strain in relations between the two NATO allies. Utilizing the calm personal demeanor, command of details, and diplomatic professionalism that formed his stock-in-trade, he helped soothe angry voices on both sides of the border.
In the position of the counselor of the American Embassy in Nanking, he witnessed the final stages of the Chinese civil war. The Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, to which he was accredited, disintegrated in front of Merchant's eyes, its remnants fleeing to Taiwan with the establishment of the Communist regime in October 1949. Like many of his colleagues serving with the United States diplomatic corps in China at that time, Merchant had grown disillusioned with the corruption and isolation of Chiang's government and believed that some form of rapprochement should be pursued between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Consequently, he joined the State Department's "China hands" in advocating formal recognition of the government of Mao Tse-tung. Merchant continued to advocate that position upon his return to Washington late in 1949 to assume his new job as the deputy assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. But, like the man he served under for much of that time, Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk, Merchant never forcefully advanced his personal views. Indeed, Merchant's trademark throughout his career was the low-key, team-player approach favored by most career foreign service officers. During his two years as deputy assistant secretary of state, he participated regularly in the often rancorous policy debates concerning China, Korea, Japan, and Indochina without ever becoming strongly associated with a particular policy orientation.
On Dec. 10, 1927, Merchant married Elizabeth Stiles of Washington, D. C. ; the couple had three children.
