The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  At the time Harriman took over FE, it was the most conservative branch of the State Department. More than any other bureau it had been damaged by the McCarthy period, and had therefore held to the policies of the Dulles years. Just a few months earlier James Thomson, Chester Bowles’s young staff aide, had been assigned the job of clearing a major speech that Bowles planned to give on Asia. He went to the appropriate official, the public affairs officer for FE, who, after looking at the speech, pointed to a particular passage and said that it had to go. This was a reference to the great troubles that China had suffered from 1849 to 1949 at the hands of foreigners, and Bowles wanted to express regret for whatever role the United States had played in what the Chinese viewed as a painful and humiliating period.

  Thomson, a China expert himself and later a professor of Asian history at Harvard, wondered why it would have to be cut.

  “Because it’s the Communist line,” said the official.

  “It’s the Chiang Kai-shek line too,” said Thomson, and began the awkward business of negotiating the speech through. Bowles would be allowed to keep the offending passage if he referred to the Chinese capital as Peiping, which was the Chinese Nationalist preference, instead of Peking, which was the Chinese government’s preference, and thus normally State Department preference as well; eventually the speech was cleared.

  The incident was not surprising to Bowles or Thomson because they were by then accustomed to it. The men who might have served at FE, John Davies, Jack Service, Edmund Clubb, had all been destroyed by the McCarthy investigations, and their successors had been men willing to serve in Asia under the terms dictated by Dulles, terms of the most rigid anti-Communism, where viewpoint and rhetoric often had very little to do with the facts. Dulles had wanted to appease the conservative Republicans on the Hill, and he had done it, but the price had been the integrity of the China desk and the Asian bureau. Neutralism was frowned on at FE; neutralists might come to power and be more sympathetic to the Communist side than to the Western side. At FE, loyalty came before intelligence.

  “A wasteland,” Harriman said. When he took over, he looked around his office, talked to the people, read the cables, and was absolutely appalled by what he found. “It’s a disaster area filled with human wreckage,” he confided to friends. “Perhaps a few can be saved. Some of them are so beaten down, they can’t be saved. Some of those you would want to save are just finished. They try and write a report and nothing comes out. It’s a terrible thing.”

  As Undersecretary of State, Bowles had begun the process of trying to change FE, but Rusk had held the line by putting his old friend Walter McConaughy there, which struck the Bowles people as too much in the Dulles tradition. Bowles had enjoyed more success with ambassadorial appointments in Africa than in Asia (because Asia was considered a more serious continent, with more at stake, where fewer risks could be taken). He had won one notable battle with the older foreign service people in Asia when he wanted Edwin O. Reischauer, the distinguished Harvard professor, to be ambassador to Japan. The traditionalists in the foreign service lobbied for Graham Parsons, the outgoing Assistant Secretary, and had in fact lined up the right wing of the Japanese Foreign Ministry to claim that it would be embarrassing for the Japanese to have Reischauer there, since his wife was Japanese. Even more striking in the Reischauer case, old FBI reports showed up claiming that Reischauer was a security risk because he was linked with John K. Fairbank, another Harvard professor, who according to the FBI reports had been called “a conscious agent” of the Stalin camp by Senator McCarran. At that point Bowles blew up and told the security people, “If you want someone close to Fairbank, why the hell don’t you look over at the White House where he has a brother-in-law working?” (at that time Fairbank and Schlesinger were married to sisters). Reischauer eventually got the Japanese post, but it had not been easy.

  So FE had remained much the same during the first year of the Kennedy Administration; now Harriman immediately set out to change it. He was the eldest member of the Kennedy group in the State Department, but he soon became the man that most young people in the Department began to turn to for leadership and freshness—for that element which had been so desperately needed at State for so long—an honest airing of new thoughts. All his career he had specialized in reaching out to young people, and he began to do this now. There was, for example, Michael Forrestal, the son of James Forrestal who had virtually been adopted by the Harrimans after the suicide of the father. Michael Forrestal had been brought down from Wall Street by Kennedy at Harriman’s request, placed on the White House staff to work on Vietnam, and given these instructions by the President: “You will be my personal envoy to that special sovereignty known as Averell Harriman.” And there was Roger Hilsman, the Director of Intelligence and Research, a Bowles man who seemed to be somewhere between Bowles and Rostow in his view of the underdeveloped world (aggressive on counterinsurgency, he believed his own experiences in Burma were more politically meaningful than they were, but he was against bombing and combat troops in Asia and for a more modern view of China). Harriman assigned Michael Forrestal and Jim Thomson to look for former FE men who still had some ability left, and see if they could be rehabilitated—and if they wanted to come back to dealing with Asia. Ed Rice, an older China hand who seemed to deviate from the accepted Chiang line, was summoned from Policy Planning. (Rice had earlier caught the eye of Bowles by sending over a paper from Policy Planning which showed a surprising degree of flexibility on China. Bowles was pleased by the freshness of the outlook and sent his specialist on China to meet with Rice. Jim Thomson was impressed that someone with Rice’s background—he had served in China during the worst and most sensitive period of the forties—had managed to survive without being crushed in the Republican purges of the fifties. The answer was simple, Rice explained; for some reason which he did not understand, Patrick Hurley, the leader of much of the witch hunt, had placed a letter of commendation in his file long before China had become sensitive, and this had scared off the head hunters.) Paul Kattenburg, one of the best of the old Indochina hands, was brought back to the Vietnam working group, where he began to have immediate impact. Bob Barnett, another exiled China hand, was transferred to Harriman’s office. Allen Whiting, a China expert, came to INR from Rand and had particularly good credentials because he had written with great insight about the Chinese entry into Korea. But Whiting warned Roger Hilsman that he wanted no part of Vietnam because, as he put it, if the policy was (in the words of Homer Bigart) “Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem,” then we were going to sink.

  Harriman wanted, above all, men who spoke freely and who did not automatically produce the existing mythology of the recent past. He drove those around him relentlessly, he did his homework (when he heard that Whiting’s book on China crossing the Yalu was good, he did not ask some young officer to brief him on it; he read it himself and then summoned Whiting to spend an entire Sunday going over it). He was single-minded, wildly ambitious, often thoughtless, sometimes savage, always combative (at one of the tough sessions on Vietnam he called Major General Victor Krulak, the JCS special representative who was spouting the Taylor-Harkins line of pure optimism, “a goddamn fool”). He became one of the foremost figures in the bureaucracy, a restless, bruising figure who never quit.

  He was seventy at the time. “Averell looks terrific,” a friend told Marie Harriman that year. “You’d look terrific too,” she answered, “if you did nothing but play polo until you were forty years old.” He was unique in many ways; he brought with him so much history, so many ties to great figures of the past that the young men who had taken office could not imagine that he would be able to function at their level and speed. They soon learned that it was they who were hard pressed to function at his level and speed and intensity. Six years later Robert Kennedy, admitting defeat (he had once doubted Harriman’s vitality), would give a surprise birthday party at Hickory Hill for Harriman. The main feature came at the last minute when the curtains were
drawn back to show an illuminated porch with huge blowups of figures from Harriman’s past: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. There was a special touch of historic irony here: Joe Kennedy’s boy, the boy Joe thought most like him, giving a party in honor of Harriman, the man whom Roosevelt had sent to England at the beginning of the war almost to counteract the pessimistic impressions and appraisals of Joe as ambassador. Harriman, the special envoy, who had stood beside Churchill again and again in public as a visible and tangible evidence of American commitment and presence, who in the dark days of North Africa had hand-carried messages from Winston to General Wavell which said that Harriman had Winston’s complete confidence, was most intimate with Roosevelt and Hopkins, and “no one can do more for you . . .”

  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 me
et 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 cop 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.