Background
Harriman was born on November 15, 1891 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.
Businessman Diplomat Financier Industrialist politician
Harriman was born on November 15, 1891 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 attended Groton School in Massachusetts before going on to Yale where he joined the Skull and Bones society. He graduated in 1913.
Harriman first visited Siberia under the reign of Czar Nicholas II at age 7, and at age 91 made his last visit to Moscow to meet the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov. As a 35 year-old investment banker and industrialist, Harriman conducted mining negotiations with Leon Trotsky, and subsequently dealt directly as a diplomat with every Soviet leader from Stalin to Andropov. He worked on New Deal projects for President Franklin Roosevelt, and in 1943 was appointed Ambassador to the Soviet Union by FDR. After the war, he was President Harry Truman's ambassador to Great Britain and later, secretary of commerce, chief negotiator in Europe for the Marshall Plan, and special assistant to the president. In the Kennedy administration, Harriman served as ambassador at large, reporting directly to the president; as assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs, he negotiated the Laos neutrality accords; and, at 71 years of age, as undersecretary of state for political affairs, he conducted successful negotiations with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for the historic limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Under Lyndon Johnson, Harriman was again named Ambassador at Large, and then, more vaguely, "Ambassador for Peace; " in both capacities, he met with heads of state around the globe, and in 1968 spent the last seven months of his negotiating career as Johnson's emissary to the Paris Peace talks on Vietnam. Finally, at age 84 and in Moscow once again, Harriman gave Leonid Brezhnev assurances that candidate Jimmy Carter was seriously interested in nuclear arms reduction. His worldly experience led him to see the United States as part of a global community. He thought of the oceans as avenues of commerce instead of shields isolating America from foreign enemies.
Harriman first marriage, two years after graduating from Yale, was to Kitty Lanier Lawrence. Before their divorce in 1928, and her death in 1936, they had two daughters together. About a year after his divorce from Lawrence, he married Marie Norton Whitney (1903-1970). 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).
She was an American art collector and First Lady of New York from 1955 to 1958.
He was an American financier and philanthropist.
She was the founder of The Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Movements, later known as the Junior League of the City of New York of the Association of Junior Leagues International Inc.
