W. Averell Harriman

W. Averell Harriman mattered to the story of Harry S. Truman’s presidency as both a highly placed diplomatic witness to Soviet policy and an early interpreter of its dangers for a president who had inherited office without foreign-policy experience. His reports and face-to-face advice helped give Truman a framework for dealing with Joseph Stalin: cooperation remained possible, Harriman believed, but only if the United States stood firm on essential questions. The relationship also reveals how the new administration formed its policy through the counsel of experienced officials whom Truman had scarcely known before becoming president.

Identity and Background

Harriman brought unusual wealth and social standing to public service. Heir to a great American fortune, he had grown up on a Hudson River estate covering twenty square miles, with forty miles of bridle paths and a hundred-room stone château. He attended Groton and Yale, inherited a leading role in the Union Pacific after his father’s death, and became its chairman. An art collector and accomplished polo player, he also built a shipping enterprise and helped found the banking firm Brown Brothers, Harriman. His background embodied the kind of concentrated private power that Truman’s Jacksonian populist outlook had often treated with suspicion. Yet Harriman’s record as a tenacious worker and public official complicated that opposition: he became a consequential adviser to the very president whose earlier politics had attacked powerful business interests.

By the time Truman met him, Harriman had served as ambassador to the Soviet Union since October 1943. He was known for working eighteen to twenty hours a day, and his long, detailed dispatches were familiar at the State Department. He had spent more time with Stalin than any American or other diplomat. When he arrived to brief the new president, he appeared tired and worried, with a slight twitch in his right eye. These physical details register the strain of an assignment that had made him an unusually close observer of Soviet leadership.

Counsel to an Unprepared President

Harriman’s importance emerged sharply in Truman’s first weeks in office. Truman had not met him before and had little experience in international relations. He did not know the principal foreign leaders or the officials gathered around him, and Franklin D. Roosevelt had not given him a confidential account of the war or plans for the peace. When Harriman came to Washington with Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., Under Secretary Joseph C. Grew, and Soviet specialist Charles Bohlen, the introductions were made by Stettinius; the other visitors said little during the half-hour that followed.

Truman asked Harriman to explain the most urgent problems involving the Soviet Union. Harriman described a government pulled between cooperation with the United States and Britain, on the one hand, and expanding control over neighboring states in Eastern Europe, on the other. In his analysis, some members of Stalin’s circle mistook American generosity and willingness to cooperate for weakness. Harriman nevertheless judged that the Soviets would avoid a break with the United States because they would need American financial assistance after the war. That dependence, he argued, gave Washington room to stand firm on vital matters.

Truman answered that he was not afraid of the Russians and intended to be firm but fair. He also took up Harriman’s point about Soviet dependence, concluding that the Russians needed the United States more than the reverse. The exchange was a first meeting between two men of very different backgrounds, but it immediately placed Harriman in the role of a candid adviser. His account offered Truman not certainty about Soviet intentions but a way to reconcile the need for cooperation with the need to resist pressure.

Warnings About Soviet Power

Harriman had begun pressing for a firmer policy even before Roosevelt’s death. On April 6, 1945, he sent the State Department a lengthy cable arguing that the time had come to make clear that the Soviet Government could not expect American cooperation on terms of its own choosing. In another forceful report, he said Soviet policy was being shaped by self-interest. His concern was not confined to diplomatic influence: he warned Truman that Soviet control in Poland or Romania could mean secret police rule and the end of freedom of speech. He described the danger as a barbarian invasion of Europe, a phrase that Truman would remember.

Harriman’s assessment was severe but not a call to abandon relations with Moscow. He believed workable relations remained possible if both sides made concessions. He urged Truman to give up the assumption that the Soviet Union would necessarily follow accepted principles of international conduct, while continuing to distinguish between realistic cooperation and misplaced trust. Truman, for his part, accepted that total cooperation from Stalin was unattainable and said he would be satisfied with eighty-five percent. The exchange captured the guarded pragmatism of their early discussions: the objective was neither perfect accord nor immediate rupture, but cooperation bounded by clear expectations.

A first diplomatic opening appeared when Stalin agreed to send Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to the San Francisco Conference. Until then, the Soviets had refused to send him. Stalin presented the change as a gesture in memory of Roosevelt, urged by Harriman, and made it conditional on a request from the new president. Truman promptly made that request. The move seemed to be an early breakthrough, but Harriman cautioned that it settled none of the basic disagreements. The gesture demonstrated his access and influence; his warning against mistaking a symbolic concession for a solution demonstrated the discipline of his analysis.

Influence and Limits in the Truman Administration

Harriman’s influence continued as the administration debated how openly to confront Soviet policy. He approved of Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech and, with William D. Leahy, James Forrestal, and Dean Acheson, would have welcomed a strong endorsement from Truman. Instead, Truman disavowed advance knowledge of the speech and described himself publicly as having been put on the spot. At the same time, he told Harriman that Soviet refusal to withdraw from Iran might mean war. The contrast exposed a president pulled between private alarm and public hesitation, while Harriman stood among advisers who wanted a clearer signal of resolve.

Harriman’s views overlapped with George F. Kennan’s influential analysis of the Soviet regime, but the narrative distinguishes their effects. After leaving Moscow, Harriman sent Truman a copy of Kennan’s long telegram. Forrestal circulated the document widely through the administration, and Truman read it. Yet it did not produce an immediate transformation in Truman’s thinking: he had already heard a similar argument from Harriman, including the warning about Soviet expansion in Europe. Harriman’s importance therefore lies not in a single report that suddenly converted the president, but in the continuity of his counsel across successive discussions.

His subsequent appointments widened his place in the administration. After leaving the Moscow embassy, he was urged by Truman to become ambassador to Great Britain; he later returned from London to replace Henry A. Wallace as Secretary of Commerce. His presence alongside James F. Byrnes, George C. Marshall, Acheson, Bohlen, and Clark Clifford also undercut the charge that Truman had surrounded himself only with provincial incompetents. In Truman’s early diplomacy, Harriman joined substantial expertise to a readiness to challenge assumptions. His role was to make the Soviet problem legible to a president who had begun with little preparation, while reminding him that apparent cooperation could leave the underlying conflict untouched.