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The U.S. political scene is thickly populated by men who rose from one-mule farms, little houses beside the tracks, and fruit-and-vegetable markets along the main highways just outside of town. But few have struggled up to the political heights from a 190-ft. steam yacht, a 100-room house on a 20,000-acre estate, and a fortune of $100 million. New York's William Averell Harriman is one politician who has overcome such handicaps to become the most important governor in the U.S. and to be mentioned frequently, if not yet very ponderably, as a candidate for President of the U.S. And he is still struggling up the steep slopes of polities' Magic Mountain.
Averell Harriman wants to be President, wants the office so much that it is hard for him not to seem too anxious. Not many politicians give Harriman much chance to get what he wants. But even the most skeptical, stopping to think, remember that only a year before the 1954 election in New York hardly any professional politicians thought that Harriman had a chance to be nominated and elected governor. While the politicians were doubting, Harriman was eminently confident that his hour had struck. Now he thinks of himself as exactly the right man to move into the White House on Jan. 20, 1957.
His mood has spread to some of the men closest to him. They make comparisons between Averell Harriman and Adlai Stevenson, and are inclined to look a long way down on Stevenson. Says a Harriman advocate: "I don't suppose there is anyone around who has had more experience in Government than Averell has had. The country needs someone with a thorough grasp of foreign affairs. Averell has it. During World War II, he may have met Adlai Stevenson [who was an assistant to the Secretaries of Navy and State], but he is not likely to recall it. The fact is that Averell was working on a much higher level. The people he saw were Leahy and Marshall and Hopkins and Roosevelt."
Waiting for the Blowout. Harriman's partisans look upon Stevenson as a political retread, done over from 1952, and they are watching and waiting and predicting the day the retread wears thin and blows out. Their campaign strategy is based on the hope that Democratic leaders next spring will come to believe that they have on their hands a tired figure that has lost as much of the old luster and appeal as Wendell Willkie had lost by 1944. An important Harriman supporter says of the 1952 nominee: "He hasn't made a good speech since early 1954."
Obviously, the Harriman forces are playing a long shot, and playing it negatively. They hope to stay on the sidelines, out of primaries, busy in New York (Harriman will have to cope with a Republican-controlled legislature from January into June next year). As he has said, he will not be an "active candidate."
But let anyone say that this means he is not a candidate, and Tammany Hall Boss Carmine De Sapio, Harriman's secretary of state and political mastermind, gently but firmly weaves that word "active" back into the sentence.