W. Averell Harriman

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Born in New York City, William Averell Harriman (1891–1986), the son of the wealthy railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman, attended the Groton School and graduated from Yale University in 1913. He inherited a large fortune following his father’s death in 1909 and engaged in high-profile business ventures in shipbuilding, aviation, and mining. Harriman was chairman of the board of the Union Pacific Railroad (1932-1946) and an active partner of Brown Brothers Harriman and Co., the investment banking firm into which his own Harriman and Co. had merged.

Harriman’s government career started in 1933. During World War II, he was FDR’s special envoy to Great Britain and the Soviet Union, helping coordinate the Lend-Lease program and military and diplomatic affairs between the allies. He was US ambassador to Moscow (1943-1946) and under President Truman, ambassador to London, Secretary of Commerce, and European coordinator of the Marshall Plan.

Harriman was Ambassador-at-Large under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, negotiating the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1963 and heading the US delegation to the Paris peace talks on Vietnam. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 and 1956 and served as Governor of New York (1955-1958). After 1969, Harriman was affiliated with various organizations, including the Club of Rome and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Peace With Russia?, America and Russia in a Changing World and with Elie Abel, of Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946.

Elie Abel
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Born in Montreal, Canada, Elie Abel (1920–2004) graduated from McGill University and earned a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1942. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, started as a journalist in Canada and then worked for the North American Newspaper Alliance in Europe, covering the Nuremberg trials. He joined The New York Times in 1949, served as a foreign correspondent in Europe and India and was part of the Times staff awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for reporting on the Hungarian uprising. He joined NBC News in 1961, becoming diplomatic correspondent for The Huntley-Brinkley Report and serving as London bureau chief.

Abel left active journalism to become the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University (1970–1979). He later joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he chaired the Communications Department and directed the Stanford in Washington program.

His book The Missile Crisis was considered for many years the definitive account of the 1962 Cuban standoff. Abel coauthored Roots of Involvement: The US in Asia 1784-1871 with Marvin Kalb and Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946 with Averell Harriman.


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