William
Averell Harriman, the son of the railway magnate, E. H. Harriman,
was born in New York City on 15th November,
1891. He joined his father's Union Pacific Company in 1915 and became
chairman of the board in 1932.
Franklin
D. Roosevelt appointed Harriman as U.S. Ambassador of the Soviet
Union in 1943. He held the post until 1946 when Harry
S. Truman appointed him as Secretary of Commerce. Harriman worked
on the Marshall Plan and served as
national security adviser during the Korean
War.
A
member of the Democratic Party Harriman
was elected governor of New York in 1954. After two unsuccessful attempts
to become the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 and 1956
Harriman served in several posts under President John
F. Kennedy.
This included negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.
Despite
being named as a Soviet spy by Anatoli Golitsin,
Harriman was appointed by President Lyndon
B. Johnson as ambassador-at-large for Southeast Asian affairs
in 1965. He also served as chief US negotiator when preliminary peace
talks opened in France between the United
States and North Vietnam in 1968.
Harriman
lost this position as US negotiator under President Richard
Nixon but returned to office in 1978 when he was appointed the
senior member of the US Delegation to the United Nations General Assembly's
Special Session on Disarmament. William Averell Harriman died in 1986.
(1)
Studs
Terkel interviewed
W. Averell Harriman
about his experiences
during the Second World War for his book, The
Good War (1985)
Roosevelt was the one
who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world
leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been
the same since. The war changed everybody's attitude. We became international
almost overnight.
I found that Churchill
felt it was very important to help Stalin. I certainly agreed. There
was that meeting at sea between Roosevelt and Churchill. I attended
it. Churchill decided to send Beaverbrook and Roosevelt decided to
send me. We both went to Moscow in October
1941. We both agreed that Stalin was determined to hold out
against the Germans. He told us he'd never let them get to Moscow.
But if he was wrong, they'd go back to the Urals and fight. They'd
never surrender. We became convinced that, regardless of Stalin's
awful brutality and his reign of terror, he was a great war leader.
Without Stalin, they never would have held.
Much of the aid we first
gave to Russia we took away from what we
promised Britain. So in a sense, Britain participated in a very real
way in the recovery
of Russia. After that, the Russians got mean. Poland,
of course, was the key country. I remember Stalin telling me that
the plains of Poland were the invasion route of Europe to Russia and
always had been, and therefore he had to control Poland.
It was fear. He didn't
want to see a united Germany. Stalin made it clear to me - I spoke
with him many times - that they couldn't afford
to let Germany build up again. They'd been invaded twice, and he
wasn't willing to have it happen again.
There's a myth that Roosevelt
gave Stalin Eastern Europe. I was with Roosevelt every day at Yalta.
Roosevelt was determined to stop Stalin from taking over Eastern Europe.
He thought they finally had an agreement on Poland. Before Roosevelt
died, he realized that Stalin had broken his agreement.
I think Stalin was afraid
of Roosevelt. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, he sort of watched him with
a certain awe. He was afraid of Roosevelt's influence in the world.
If FDR had lived, the cold war wouldn't have developed the way it
did, because Stalin would have tried to get along with Roosevelt.
Last
updated: 27th May, 2002
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