by Lynne Olson
He subscribed to the view of objectivity set forth years later by a BBC director general, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, who said that the BBC was objective “except where the fundamental truths of life were concerned. It did not propose ever to be objective about injustice, intolerance, or prejudice.” In Europe, Murrow observed to his wife, people were dying and “a thousand years of history and civilization [were] being smashed” while America remained on the sidelines. How could one possibly be objective or neutral about that? “He wanted the Americans to face up to their responsibilities,” said BBC correspondent Thomas Barman. “They either had to see the whole Western world go down … or stand up and fight.”
On September 30, 1940, the second anniversary of the Munich agreement and the end of the Blitz’s first month, Murrow tartly told his listeners: “Perhaps you can relax as these people did after Munich…. But consider what’s happened in the last two years and try to ignore what the next two years will bring—if you can.” More often, though, he did not resort to this kind of overt, if craftily worded, advocacy to try to affect American public opinion. He did it through his word pictures of the British at war. “Murrow and his colleagues offered something akin to drama: the vicarious experience of what they were living and observing,” noted the broadcast historian Erik Barnouw. “It put the listener in another man’s shoes. No better way to influence opinion has ever been found.”
Yet, while his broadcasts were generally laudatory of the British, he did not refrain from pointing out what he viewed as the shortcomings of their country and its leaders. He was, for example, one of the most outspoken critics of the British government’s penchant for secrecy, which led to extremely tight censorship and withholding of war news. He was also sharply critical of the government’s failure to provide decent air raid shelters for the residents of the East End and other working-class areas. “Every shelter is a stinking hole,” his wife wrote home.
AS 1940 CAME to its inglorious end, Murrow, like most Londoners, was exhausted. It had been impossible for anybody to get a decent night’s sleep during the Blitz; most people were lucky if they snatched three or four hours. As the bombing continued, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote, the city’s residents became “disembodied” by tiredness. “The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain. To work or think was to ache.”
But even when the Luftwaffe attacks began to lessen in November, Murrow, who had lost thirty pounds in the previous four months, continued living and working like a man possessed. “He looked like a ghost, pale and shaken,” a CBS colleague recalled. “I thought he was going to keel over.” Increasingly moody and short-tempered, he spent little time with his wife, who later wrote, “Sometimes he seemed not to have any energy for me.” Said a friend: “He internalizes world events. They flow right through him like a stream. The fall of Britain would have been as meaningful to him as the loss of a child to one of us.”
Taking advantage of a lull in the bombing in late December, Janet Murrow persuaded her husband to spend a relatively relaxed Christmas at home. On December 29, however, the capital’s holiday quiet was shattered when German bombers unleashed a ten-hour firestorm on the City, Britain’s financial and commercial center and one of London’s most historic districts. The most devastating conflagration to sweep through the area since the Great Fire of 1666, it destroyed, among other landmarks, eight churches designed by Christopher Wren and much of the medieval Guildhall, the seat of the city’s municipal government since William the Conqueror. Miraculously, St. Paul’s Cathedral, looming high in the middle of the inferno, managed to survive. As Murrow walked home early the next morning, he noticed that “the windows in the West End were red with reflected fire, and the raindrops were like blood on the panes.”
Two nights later, he spoke with barely suppressed emotion and an edge of anger as he contrasted for his listeners the New Year’s Eve celebrations they were enjoying with the bleak experience of most London residents: “You will have no dawn raid, as we shall probably have if the weather is right. You may walk this night in the light. Your families are not scattered by the winds of war. You may drive your high-powered car as far as time and money will permit.”
He concluded: “You have not been promised blood and toil and tears and sweat. Yet it is the opinion of nearly every informed observer over here that the decision you take will overshadow all else during this year that opened a few hours ago in London.”
A decision, he knew, that could well decide the fate of Britain.
SIX WEEKS AFTER ED MURROW’S SOMBER NEW YEAR’S EVE BROADCAST, Franklin Roosevelt summoned W. Averell Harriman to the Oval Office. Halfway through their rambling discussion, the president offhandedly mentioned he planned to dispatch Harriman to London to oversee the flow of American aid under the Lend-Lease program, which was about to be approved after a bruising fight in Congress.
For the forty-nine-year-old heir to one of America’s greatest railroad fortunes, the chat with the president was an oddly unsettling experience. Here FDR was, talking as if it had long been understood that Harriman would get this vital job, when just a few weeks earlier, the White House had brushed him off when he had volunteered his services. In truth, until that moment, Roosevelt had shown little interest in appointing Harriman to anything of substance. In the thirty-five years they had known each other, the president had not been impressed with either the intelligence or personality of the dark-haired, square-jawed man sitting across the desk from him.
The two had numerous social links. Both had grown up on sprawling Hudson River estates; Harriman had been a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s younger brother, Hall; and Harriman’s and FDR’s mothers had known each other for years. Moreover, Harriman’s older sister, Mary Rumsey, a fervent social reformer and New Dealer, headed the administration’s Consumer Advisory Board and was a close colleague of the president’s wife.
Yet, despite those connections, the Roosevelts, who were one of the Hudson Valley’s most prominent patrician families, had never quite accepted the nouveau riche Harrimans, whose vast wealth had been derived from means that many people considered ill-gotten. As the man who built the Union Pacific into the most dominant railroad in the country, E. H. Harriman, Averell’s father, had won international notoriety as one of America’s most powerful robber barons. According to President Theodore Roosevelt, the elder Harriman was among the most egregious “malefactors of great wealth” that the United States had ever seen.
While Franklin Roosevelt had chosen a life in public service, Averell Harriman had followed in his father’s footsteps as an aggressive, hard-driving businessman. The emotional opposite of FDR, Harriman had none of the president’s charm, gregariousness, interest in people, or sense of fun. He hated gossip and small talk and was renowned for his lack of a sense of humor, especially about himself. Brusque and impatient, he was intensely pragmatic, even in his closest friendships. Harriman “was no good at human relations,” said Robert Meiklejohn, his longtime assistant. “God only knows how many thousands of hours I spent in his company, but I do not know one interesting anecdote about his personal life.”
Although Harriman had run several businesses by the time of the White House meeting and was currently chairman of Union Pacific, Roosevelt regarded him for the most part as a dilettante sportsman and playboy. He had become a champion polo player in the late 1920s, devoting more than a year to the effort, and in the 1930s had developed Sun Valley, Idaho, as one of the country’s preeminent ski resorts. Notwithstanding his dour personality, the twice-married Harriman had also gained a reputation as an inveterate womanizer, with at least one scandalous love affair to his credit. He was catnip to many women—courtly and shy, with a dash of vulnerability, and, despite his legendary stinginess, willing to lavish money on his girlfriends. “He was good-looking, affluent and very aloof back then, which made him quite a lady’s man,” recalled John McCloy, an assistant secretary of war under FDR, who, as a Wall Street lawyer, had served on the U
nion Pacific board.
Harriman also had a reputation for spreading money around if it would help him in Washington. “He used to subsidize politicians … so that he would have a line into power,” McCloy remarked. Like Gil Winant, Harriman had deserted the Republican Party to support Roosevelt for president. Unlike the new ambassador to Britain, however, Harriman’s involvement in the New Deal stemmed not from an interest in helping the common man but in promoting business recovery from the Depression. And also unlike Winant, he believed in covering his bets. After the 1940 election, Roosevelt mentioned to his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, that Harriman had contributed $25,000 to his campaign. “Confidentially, Franklin, he contributed $25,000 to mine,” Willkie shot back. What’s more, Harriman had told a friend before the election that if Willkie won, he’d be happy to join his administration.
On the fringes of the New Deal since 1933, Harriman was desperate for a more important position on Roosevelt’s team. And for all his misgivings about Harriman’s ambition, loyalty, and sense of purpose, the president was finally persuaded by Harry Hopkins, his closest adviser and another of those whom Harriman had cultivated, to give the wealthy businessman a chance. He would go to London as Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease liaison with Churchill and the British government.
It was the job Harriman wanted—indeed, lusted after. Yet, while thrilled with the assignment, he was discomfited by what he perceived as the president’s nonchalant attitude toward Lend-Lease. Though he yearned to be at the center of things, he had sought the position because he strongly believed that the United States was obliged to save Britain from defeat. “Are we willing to face a world dominated by Hitler?” he asked in a speech at New York’s Yale Club a few days before his meeting with Roosevelt. “If not, we still have time to aid Britain…. The most fatal error would be half-hearted and insufficient help.”
After the Oval Office session, however, he was unsure whether the president shared his sense of urgency. Throughout the meeting, Roosevelt was vague about the parameters of Lend-Lease and, indeed, about Harriman’s post, offering him no guidance and giving him no instructions other than to take a look around Britain and “recommend everything that we can do, short of war, to keep the British Isles afloat.” The president “was a bit foggy as to whom I was to work with on this side as he had not yet set up the lend-lease organization,” Harriman wrote in a memo to himself shortly after the meeting. “He said I was to communicate with him on any matters that I thought were important enough.”
Later that day, when Roosevelt broke the news of Harriman’s appointment to White House reporters, he was just as airy and imprecise. Harriman, the president said, would leave for London “as soon as the defense program under the Lend-Spend, Lend-Lease—whatever you call it—bill is perfected. I suppose you will ask about his title, so I thought I would invent one…. We decided it was a pretty good idea to call him an ‘expediter.’ ” He laughed. “There’s a new one for you.”
“Mr. President,” one of the journalists called out, “what is Mr. Harriman’s relation to our embassy over there? Does he represent you directly?” With a snort, Roosevelt replied, “I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn!” When another reporter asked whom Harriman would report to in Washington, the president retorted: “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
Yet, as Harriman thought about it, Roosevelt’s haziness, though worrisome in one sense, was the opportunity of a lifetime in another. With few strictures on his actions, he could, with any luck, turn this job into something much more meaningful and important than anyone, including the president, had in mind. And if he accomplished that, he might—finally—emerge from the all-encompassing shadow of E. H. Harriman.
AS A TEENAGER, Averell had grown considerably taller than his diminutive father, yet in other ways, he never felt he measured up. A titan of American business, the elder Harriman had put the fear of God in nearly everyone—from his railroad competitors to the outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who regularly robbed his trains until Harriman set a band of relentless Pinkerton detectives on their trail.
Young Averell was under constant pressure to live up to his father’s expectations. His relationship with E.H., according to his biographer Rudy Abramson, was “a never-ending lesson in discipline, striving, and self improvement.” His stepdaughter noted that Averell “had no fun. He was a child who never learned to express himself.” Having received little warmth or outward signs of love and encouragement from his parents, Harriman “needed reinforcement for his self-esteem” throughout his life, said a friend.
He attended Groton, the exclusive prep school in northern Massachusetts, which, like St. Paul’s, was modeled after Eton. An undistinguished student, Harriman went on to Yale, where he was tapped for Skull and Bones, the school’s most prestigious secret society, and became coach of Yale’s freshman rowing crew. Determined to help Yale regain its former rowing glory over Harvard, he took a six-week leave from classes in his sophomore year for a trip to England to learn from the masters of the sport—the vaunted crews of Oxford. That sort of intensely competitive move was typical of Harriman. “He went into any game lock, stock, and barrel,” recalled the former defense secretary Robert Lovett, whose father had been a close associate of E. H. Harriman’s and who had known Averell since early childhood. “He would get whatever he needed—the best horses, coaches, equipment, his own bowling alley or croquet lawn—and work like the devil to win.”
While his grades were as mediocre at Yale as they had been at Groton, Harriman’s education at those two schools gave him a priceless advantage. Like the sons of British industrialists who attended Eton and Oxford, he was given an entrée into his country’s elite old-boy network, which presided over the business, social, and government establishments. Among his fellow Yale alumni were Lovett and Dean Acheson, who, like Harriman himself, would go on to play major roles in the emergence of the United States as the leading world power in the 1940s and 1950s.
Four years after Harriman’s graduation from Yale, the United States entered World War I, but, unlike most of his college classmates, he chose not to enlist. Instead, with his mother’s financial backing, he bought a shipyard in Chester, Pennsylvania, hoping to capitalize on the skyrocketing demand for merchant shipping created by the war. According to his mother, Averell was “trying to match in shipping what his father had achieved as a railroad man.” He ended up controlling one of the largest merchant fleets in the world. Once the war was over, however, the enterprise lost considerably more money than it made, and in 1925, he sold out to a German firm.
Harriman spent most of the 1920s chasing business deals all over Europe: a manganese concession in the Soviet Union, coal mines in Silesia, waterworks and streetcar lines in Cologne, steel mills and an electric power plant in Poland. During his travels, he met some of the most important figures in Britain and on the Continent, among them Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill, who was then British chancellor of the exchequer. Throughout his very long life, Harriman relished meeting and befriending powerful people, collecting them, E. J. Kahn Jr. wrote in The New Yorker, the way a philatelist collects rare stamps. “Averell’s a power snob,” said one of his associates. “His attitude always is: ‘There’s only one guy worth talking to in any situation—the top guy—and I’m the guy who talks to him.’ ”
The chairman of his family’s investment firm, W. A. Harriman and Company, Harriman was far more successful as a deal maker than as a manager. After acquiring a new business, he usually showed little interest in its actual operation, and most of his enterprises failed. His reputation as a playboy was already firmly in place, and, in the view of the other partners at W. A. Harriman, the company would have been far better off if its chairman had spent less time amusing himself and more time running his businesses during his lengthy trips abroad.
His pleasure-seeking image was reinforced in 1928 when he took a sabbatical from the business world and devoted his relentless energy to mastering h
is new obsession, polo. After becoming one of the top polo players in the country, he returned to his family’s business empire and took over the chairmanship of Union Pacific. Seeking to develop new tourist traffic for his railroad, he spent most of the next few years building and promoting Sun Valley, turning it into the most popular ski resort in the nation.
But as successful as Sun Valley was, both it and its founder were regarded as frivolous by much of the country’s business and political elite. The fact that Harriman had chosen to profit from World War I, rather than fight in it, was also held against him. Some of his friends from Yale considered his behavior shameful; several would not speak to him for years. “Averell was regarded as something much less than the beau ideal during those days,” noted Bob Lovett, who, like Gil Winant, had been a pilot in France during the war. The issue was a sensitive one for Harriman, who, many years later, acknowledged: “Intellectually, I could reason that I had done the right thing because I thought that shipping was the real bottleneck of World War I. But emotionally, I never felt entirely comfortable.”
Increasingly restless and eager to embark on new ventures, Harriman turned his attention in the early 1930s to Washington and the New Deal. Thanks to the activist Roosevelt administration, the power in the country had shifted from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, and Harriman, who had never been involved in politics before, was anxious to become part of the action in the nation’s capital.