Review by Choice Review
Abramson, long a Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, has produced a fine biography that is both a detailed portrait and an interesting story of Harriman's long career as railroad executive, banker, governor, presidential adviser, and diplomat. The picture that emerges is balanced, noting Harriman's numerous and significant contributions and ideas, as well as his ego, "still robust" in his 80s, his lack of generosity, and his ineffectiveness as a campaigner and speaker. "No matter how carefully labored over," Ambramson writes, "the speeches came out the same: careful, earnest, detailed and paralytically boring." Similarly balanced and engrossing are the author's discussions of such subjects as Harriman's father, Harriman's amorous adventures, and his associates and opponents in government circles. The author has done extensive research in the voluminous Harriman papers, has read widely in the published works, and conducted more than 200 interviews, most notably with Averell Harriman himself. Indeed, the selected bibliography and the list of interviewees will be useful in themselves for undergraduate students of 20th-century US history. There is, however, little indication that other manuscript collections were consulted. Highly recommended, both as biography and as an addition to collections of works by and about George F. Kennan, Dean Acheson, WW II, and the Cold War era. General; undergraduate; graduate; faculty. P. L. Silver; Johnson State College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Indexed in nearly every treatise, serious or otherwise, on American government from the New Deal to the Great Society, the name of Harriman here gets its debut biographical billing. Well known from infancy as the scion of the railroad baron E. H. Harriman, W. Averell inherited a humorless, patrician reserve to go with one of the largest fortunes piled up by buccaneer capitalism--which was reflected in his reticent, phlegmatic personality. In a pointed remark, his private secretary of 10-years service recalled, "He was just no good at human relations--naturally aloof." Freed from financial anxieties, Harriman led a life that, as Abramson reports it, seems to have been a series of hobbies. Just like dear old dad in 1862, he ducked the colors in 1917 to tend to moneymaking. He spent the 1920s playing polo and croquet and chasing skirts (a lifelong hobby), and the 1930s as a player in the first anti-Depression organization, the National Recovery Administration. His resume continues with other posts he held during the long Democratic sway over the White House: Lend-Lease order taker, ambassador to Russia, secretary of commerce, Marshall Plan man, assistant to President Truman, assistant secretary of state for Kennedy, and roving diplomat emeritus at most points in between. But only with his forays into grubby electoral politics in the 1950s does Harriman come alive in these pages. A competent though not a great figure, he deserves this yeomanly summary from Abramson, who faced a rather cheerless task in writing up his life. ~--Gilbert Taylor
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Short-tempered, humorless, intolerant and not especially articulate, Harriman nevertheless made himself useful to several presidents as an expediter, fixer and diplomat. Best remembered as FDR's wartime emissary to Churchill and Stalin, he went on to serve as secretary of commerce under Truman and roving ambassador under Kennedy and Johnson. He was governor of New York from 1954 to 1958, and an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1956. In this authorized, deeply researched and candid biography, Los Angeles Times reporter Abramson presents new material on Harriman's difficult relationship with his father (railroad baron E. H. Harriman), his struggle to overcome shyness and stuttering, his formative experiences at Groton and Yale, his business career and management of the Harriman fortune, his adventures as an international polo star, his three marriages and, late in life, his central role in concluding a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviets. Abramson succeeds in bringing this enigmatic figure, one of the most important of the Cold Warriors, to vivid, three-dimensional life. Photos. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Here is the first full biography of a man whose diplomatic contacts spanned Stalin and Le Duc Tho, who served presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson and sought the office himself, and who was governor of New York and inherited a great family fortune. Although Harriman is best remembered for his diplomatic missions during World War II, journalist Abramson, using interviews with associates, family members, and Harriman himself, fills out other aspects of his public and private life, from business career to later diplomacy, from polo games to his wartime affair with Churchill's daughter-in-law, who years afterward became Harriman's third wife. Unfortunately, the story often proceeds in a manner too plodding for most general readers, who remain adequately served by Harriman's memoir, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin ( LJ 10/15/75. o.p.) and by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's biography The Wise Men ( LJ 10/15/86). Still, given Harriman's importance, many academic libraries will need this book. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/92.-- Robert F. Nardini, North Chichester, N.H. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An absorbing account of the life of W. Averill Harriman, one of that remarkable group of ``wise men'' whose lives were so closely linked to the foreign policy of the postwar US as it emerged to world power; by a Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Harriman was the son of Edward Henry Harriman, one of the great railroad pioneers--some say robber barons--of the Victorian era. For much of his life, he lived in the shadow of his father, and--though Abramson does not say so directly--his efforts as international banker, railroad executive, early pioneer of aviation, and assembler of America's largest merchant fleet hardly showed the remarkable prescience that characterized his father's reign; moreover, in the Soviet Union during the 1920's and early 30's, Harriman was taken for a ride in business dealings. It may have been his lack of financial acumen that drove him into politics; in any case, FDR found this former Republican a useful weapon against the outraged financial community. Harriman's most glorious days came during WW II, initially as Lend Lease administrator in London, where he worked closely with Churchill to bring the US into the war. Later, this taciturn, often inarticulate man served as ambassador to Moscow and, in the 1950's, as a one- term governor of New York. In the 1960's, Harriman negotiated the neutralization of Laos and headed the American delegation seeking peace with North Vietnam. Abramson deals frankly with Harriman's contributions; his stinginess; his years as a playboy and his adulterous affair with Pamela Churchill, whom he later married; and his sycophantic, even groveling attempts to curry favor with successive Presidents and to secure interesting diplomatic and other assignments. An unusual perspective that conveys an impression sometimes closer to the court intrigues of the past than to the supposedly more rational politics of the present. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs--not seen.)
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Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
