The Wise Men

Six Friends and the World They Made

Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439126530
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With a new introduction by the authors, this is the classic account of the American statesmen who rebuilt the world after the catastrophe of World War II. A captivating blend of personal biography and public drama, The Wise Men introduces six close friends who shaped the role their country would play in the dangerous years following World War II.They were the original best and brightest, whose towering intellects, outsize personalities, and dramatic actions would bring order to the postwar chaos and leave a legacy that dominates American policy to this day. The Wise Men shares the stories of Averell Harriman, the freewheeling diplomat and Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill and Stalin; Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall; George Kennan, self-cast outsider and intellectual darling of the Washington elite; Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense throughout the formative years of the Cold War; John McCloy, one of the nation's most influential private citizens; and Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.

PART ONE

GATHERING

I am sure you will catch on,

and go on and on

and be something and somebody.

—E. H. HARRIMAN TO HIS SON AVERELL

CHAPTER 1

Harriman, standing fifth from left, on the Groton crew

WORLD OF THEIR OWN

To the manner born

As he stood on the dock of the brown-shingled boathouse, Averell Harriman paid little notice to the spindly boy rowing in seat seven of the shell hacking up the languid Nashua River. Dean Acheson was more than a year younger and two forms behind him, and at Groton there was little fraternizing between boys of different ages. In addition, with his air of stoic detachment, Harriman seemed aloof even to students his own age. He had been taught to row by a private tutor on his family’s own private lake, and the other boys came to regard him as more of a coach than a schoolmate as he helped organize the underclass crews. Acheson, on the other hand, had quickly earned a reputation of being too cheeky for his own good. He went out for rowing only because the school required that each boy play some sport. Yet Harriman soon came to believe, as he later recalled, that the boy with toothpick legs and an impish demeanor showed some promise, at least on the water. He began to offer unsolicited tips, a bit of encouragement. Eventually he would bestow the pronouncement that Acheson “was a good oar.”

In the years to come, Harriman would continue to fancy himself a tutor to the fresh schoolmate he had helped with the intricacies of stroking an oar. He would lecture Acheson about the postwar Soviet threat and, much later, gently prod him about the futility of the Vietnam War. Acheson, for his part, would later confess to being bemused by Harriman’s plodding and sovereign style, though he would find him ever a reliable ally when it counted. And when it was all over, just weeks before he died in 1971, Acheson would recall the relationship fondly in a letter to his old friend:

Sometimes it amuses me to confuse the young by pointing out what really elder statesmen we are by telling them that our friendship began—though perhaps neither of us knew it at the time—sixty-six years ago this month. Then I came as a new boy to the school at which you were a little, though not much, my senior. In most of those years that have passed, we have joined in activities that sometimes have been pretty strenuous, first of all on the water, where we rowed, and later in government, where we struggled.

Harriman’s sense of sovereignty and detachment was hardly surprising: he was the eldest son of one of America’s richest men, a domineering railway tycoon whose family more closely resembled a medieval duchy than an American household. Edward Henry Harriman’s personal fortune surpassed $70 million at a time when there was no inheritance tax, the average hourly wage was twenty-two cents, and a dollar could buy an imported linen dress shirt or a hundred eggs. His money was entirely self-made. “My capital when I began was a pencil and this,” he would say, tapping his head.

The first American Harriman was a London stationer who had migrated to New Haven in 1795 and made a comfortable fortune chartering vessels for trade in the West Indies. But E. H. Harriman’s father had been an itinerant Episcopal clergyman who wandered through California preaching in prospecting camps before returning east as the rector of a small wooden church in Jersey City. At age fourteen, E. H. dropped out of school to become a five-dollar-a-week messenger boy at a brokerage house on Wall Street. “I have become convinced that there is something else in life for me besides school and books,” he told his disapproving father. “I am going to work.”

A compact dynamo, he plunged with relish into the cutthroat market of the Robber Baron era. With three thousand dollars borrowed from a wealthy uncle, he bought himself a seat on the Stock Exchange and captured Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould as his mentors and clients. By twenty-six, E. H. had parlayed his own first fortune of $150,000 by selling short in coal-mine stocks when he guessed that a speculator’s attempt to corner the market would fail.

Marriage to Mary Williamson Averell in 1879 brought Harriman his first link to railroads. Her father, William Averell, the president of a small upstate New York rail company, provided a special train for the couple’s honeymoon with “E. H. Harriman” painted on the locomotive. It was the first of many destined to be so emblazoned.

Harriman’s railway holdings were built with both paper and steel: he became an adroit and notorious speculator in railway stock options and an energetic builder of the lines he thus came to control. The empire that he eventually accumulated as chairman of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific stretched twenty-three thousand miles and was capitalized at $1.5 billion. In the process he made some daunting enemies, including J. P. Morgan and the President of the United States. After a feud that began over a political appointment, Theodore Roosevelt took to calling him an “enemy of the Republic” and a “malefactor of great wealth.”

The railway madness of that era was noted for its untrammeled excess, epitomized by the brutal take-over battles between E. H. Harriman and James J. Hill. Theirs was an exalted realm. “When the master of one of the great Western lines travels toward the Pacific in his palace car,” wrote the awed British observer Lord Bryce, “his journey is like a royal progress. Governors of States and Territories bow before him; legislatures receive him in solemn session; cities seek to propitiate him.”

• • •

William Averell Harriman, born on November 15, 1891, bore many of his father’s traits. To his childhood friends, who called him Bill, Averell was noted for his curious combination of tenacity and detachment. Unlike his small and tightly wound father, Averell was somewhat plodding, almost to the point of seeming dull; but both were blunt and unvarnished—proudly so. No jokes or small talk crept into their conversations, no easy laughter or self-deprecating tales. Although his older sister Mary and younger brother Roland abounded in gregarious charm, Averell displayed little of the frivolity of youth. He affected an imperious demeanor that was accented by his quiet manner.

Even when he was young, Averell looked somewhat haggard and sallow, but appearances were deceiving: he was tough, physically and mentally, and relished putting his abilities on the line. Recreations were challenges to be mastered, and Harriman invariably did: polo, rowing, skiing, bowling, croquet, and even backgammon. “He went into any game lock, stock, and barrel,” Robert Lovett later recalled. “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.”

“I like the kind of play that is as strenuous as work,” the young Averell told an interviewer. “I like to go into each, in its turn, as hard as I know how.” It was an approach he learned from his parents. “Father,” Averell once recalled, “could not imagine doing anything just for fun.” His mother used to carry a rule book while she played croquet, citing it often to insist that the finer points be followed.

E. H. Harriman, short and stern, was hardly a doting father, but he took a great interest in his children, taking them on his far-flung excursions and playing childhood games with them in his study after dinner. He insisted they look him straight in the eye during all conversations and rewarded them with pennies for performing self-improvement chores such as keeping a daily diary. “In everything he did he took command, no matter what was going on,” Averell later recalled. “Even if we went for a walk, he’d tell us where he wanted to go. He knew what he wanted to do.”

On one of the cross-country tours E. H. took with his older son, their private train started swaying out of control as it sped along a stretch of rough track. After almost derailing, it screeched to a halt. The Union Pacific president, Horace G. Burt, explained to Harriman that a construction crew had been working on the roadbed and failed to send a flagman out to signal oncoming trains. “Fire everyone on that gang,” said Harriman as Averell listened in awe. “That’s really rather cruel on these people,” Burt replied. Said Harriman: “It may be cruel, but it will probably save a lot of lives. That sort of thing won’t happen again.”

The elder Harriman imparted his wisdom through oft-repeated adages. “A good workman can work with poor tools,” he would tell his children. “Whatever you have anything to do with, your first thought should be to improve it.” And his favorite maxim: “Great wealth is an obligation and responsibility. Money must work for the country.”

His children took these sayings to heart. When his daughter Mary made her debut in 1901, she balked at the expenses that were being lavished on the extravaganzas of her friends. Even though she was a vivacious partygoer, she felt that such displays were unnecessary. So she put part of the money to better use and helped found the Junior League. Its first project, even before it was formally an organization, was bringing the flowers from lavish parties to local hospitals and seeing that they were properly distributed. This sense of social obligation, of noblesse oblige, was something she often urged on her brother, who respected her enormously.

Averell’s reserve resembled that of his mother. “Her rather formal pattern of living provided, in a sense, a shield against intrusion,” her biographer wrote. Some people, because of their style and grand bearing, tacitly command attention simply by entering a room. Mary Averell Harriman had such an air, and so too at times did her older son. She managed her households, which included up to a hundred servants and retainers, with the same authority and attention to detail her husband brought to running the railways. Her diaries, studded with biblical sayings and meticulous financial accounts, reveal a shrewd outlook which was only rarely apparent in public.

During Averell’s childhood, the Harrimans owned a series of elegant town houses on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The grandest was a cavernous Georgian pile of marble that overlooked the site where the St. Regis Hotel was being built. Averell would stare from its windows for hours, fascinated by the horse-drawn trucks and steam-powered pulleys and the marvel of human construction they were slowly creating. E. H. Harriman kept a string of trotters in the city to pull his sons through Central Park and later was driven about by one of the country’s first automobiles, one he had imported from Germany.

Averell dutifully attended Miss Dodson’s dancing school and other such Social Register rites of passage, but he stonily avoided the young social set whenever possible. He was more in his element at Arden, the Harrimans’ baronial estate fifty miles up the Hudson where the family spent spring and summer.

Begun as a modest wooden cottage on the shore of a lake, Arden was gradually expanded by the Harrimans into a rambling three-story mansion with squash courts, billiard room, and separate guest quarters. For E. H. Harriman, even his home was a potential industry: iron mines on the property were reopened, dairy cows were raised to sell milk to the military academy at West Point, and electricity plants were built at Arden and neighboring Turners Village (now Harriman, New York) to sell power throughout the area.

The Harriman household formed a world unto itself, self-contained and self-sufficient. When it came time for Averell and Roland to learn how to row, their father hired the Syracuse University crew coach, Jim Ten Eyck, to provide private lessons on a course set up on their 150-acre lake. An island in its midst was outfitted with special wood-floor tents for camping trips. As his boys would swim or canoe to their little island, old man Harriman would sit in a camp chair on the dock, watching and thinking.

When Averell was ten, he spent many mornings riding with his father, while the rest of the family followed in carts pulled by trotters, surveying their property for the perfect place to build a new mansion. The search was somewhat moot: Mrs. Harriman had decided early on that it should be built on the summit of Mount Orama, the highest point between New York and the Catskills. It was a desire that required the full might of the Union Pacific to fulfill: the top of the mountain was sliced off to provide a level foundation and a funicular railway was stretched up one slope to haul material.

The “new” Arden was the grandest of palaces, but a distinctly American one. Other wealthy barons of the time were building imported castles, shipping them stone by stone from Europe. But E. H. Harriman, with no less ostentation, told his architect, Thomas Hastings, that he wanted everything in the house, from the granite to the art, to be American. Six hundred workmen labored three years on the mansion, which was completed just six months before Harriman died in 1909.

Arden, which remained in the Harriman family until Averell donated it to Columbia University in 1951, had more than a hundred full rooms, including forty bedrooms and a hotel-size kitchen. There were a tennis court, a croquet lawn, forty miles of bridle paths, and later a set of bowling alleys. A private polo ground was built, and there the Harriman children and their friends would challenge the cadets from West Point.

Arden’s voluminous hall was dominated by an organ, for which Mrs. Harriman retained a full-time musician. When he was not performing, the children would work the majestic instrument by attaching player rolls and pulling on the various stops. Mrs. Harriman dedicated herself to collecting the finest of American art, tapestries, and furnishings. The only imported items in the house were the linens; they came from Ireland because she could find no domestic ones that suited her standards. The servants were ordered to keep every room ready for occupancy, bedizened with fresh flowers, to encourage the children to invite friends to their isolated castle. On some summer weekends the table would include as many as twenty guests.

The community of retainers and servants at Arden provided Averell with his steadiest playmates. At one of Mrs. Harriman’s annual staff Christmas parties, there were 65 men, 25 women, and 188 children. Averell and his siblings worked with their mother’s secretary to choose small gifts for every child, such as skates and mittens, and distribute them at the party. At the end of the party one year, Averell remarked on the absence of a young boy who lived with his drunken father in a shack about four miles from the main house. It turned out that the child had been mistakenly left off the list. Averell and his father rode out into the night and found the forgotten boy, presenting him with a sturdy new sled.

In 1899, when Averell was not quite eight, his father was advised by his physicians to take a restful vacation. “His idea of a rest was to charter a steamship out of Seattle and take a group of distinguished scientists on a three-month jaunt along the Alaskan shore,” Roland recalled. The party included sixty-five crew members, twenty-five scientists, eleven woodsmen, three artists, two photographers, and a cow to produce milk for Averell and Roland.

E. H. Harriman’s primary ambition on the trip was to shoot a Kodiak bear, and he did: a huge seven-footer whose skin thereafter graced his parlor floor. When both the captain and pilot balked at exploring an uncharted inlet, the brazen industrialist personally took the helm. As a result, the fiord and glacier they found were named Harriman. In addition, the scientists discovered thirteen new genera and six hundred new species of flora and fauna, took five thousand photographs, and published thirteen illustrated volumes and eleven monographs in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution.

Among those aboard was the renowned conservationist John Muir. One evening, the scientists on the forecastle were praising Harriman for the benevolence of his wealth. “I don’t think Mr. Harriman is very rich,” Muir interjected. “He has not as much money as I have. I have all I want, and Mr. Harriman has not.” Harriman heard about the remark and raised the matter at dinner. “I have never cared for money except as a power to put to work,” he said. “What I enjoy most is the power of creation, getting into partnership with nature and doing good, helping to feed man and beast, and making everybody and everything a little better and happier.”

That self-appraisal, although hardly a precise one of the railway baron’s career, deeply impressed Averell. The expedition came just as he was beginning to comprehend his family’s enormous wealth and power, and the burdens as well as benefits it brought. As an awkward socializer, Averell had already become uncomfortable with the frivolous society life of many of his friends; his father’s belief that money was a tool rather than a goal burned a lasting impression.

The trip also gave Averell his first glimpse of a country that would figure prominently throughout his life. His mother insisted that the voyage not end at the Seal Islands, as scheduled, but instead cross the Bering Sea to the coast of Russia. “Very well,” replied Mr. Harriman, “we will go to Siberia.” Upon landing at Plover Bay, the family spent the day buying artifacts from the natives, taking photographs, and picking the unusual wild flowers. For the next nine decades, Averell was to return to Russia at regular intervals, his last visit coming in 1983. During World War II he was able to tell Stalin that on his first trip to Russia he had entered without a passport. “Well,” Stalin replied, “you could not do that now.”

With the acquisition of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, E. H. Harriman began to have visions of completing an around-the-world transportation system. So with his family in tow, he headed for the Orient in the summer of 1905. Japan had just wrested control of the South Manchuria Railway from Russia, and Harriman wanted to add it to his empire. A preliminary agreement for a lease was reached with the Japanese government, but it was scuttled a few weeks later amid the anti-Americanism that erupted in Japan after President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the peace terms for the Russo-Japanese War. All Harriman got from the Japanese were some cases of captured Napoleon brandy, a supply ample enough that Averell, then thirteen, would savor it years later.

The Harriman family then proceeded by chartered steamer to Port Arthur, on the Manchurian coast. Averell, however, was unable to accompany them. Although Averell’s father had moved mountains, he was unable to move Endicott Peabody, the immutable rector of Groton School. The rail baron had cabled from Japan an urgent request that Averell be excused from the first two weeks of classes so that he could tour the Asian mainland. Any student, Peabody replied, absent from the first day of term would be “fired” from the school. In order to extend Averell’s stay by three more days, Harriman rerouted a Pacific Mail liner.

• • •

“The experience released me from the Groton rigidities and perhaps contributed to my becoming something of a nonconformist,” Harriman later said about the Rector’s refusal to let him tour Manchuria. Although the school was just twenty-one years old, those rigidities were already firmly entrenched. Modeled after an English public school, Groton was New England’s new Eton. It was Episcopalian (one founder was Phillips Brooks) and amply endowed (another was J. P. Morgan). “Ninety-five percent of the boys came from what they considered the aristocracy of America,” wrote George Biddle, a 1904 graduate. “Their fathers belonged to the Somerset, the Knickerbocker, the Philadelphia or the Baltimore Clubs. Among them was a goodly slice of the wealth of the nation.”

The school’s purpose, according to its first brochure, was to develop “manly, Christian character.” Life was strictly regimented and ascetic. Students lived in six-by-nine-foot bare wood cubicles in which no ornamentation, except family pictures, was allowed. They arose at 6:55 A.M., attended chapel seven d...