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Candidate Harriman's 1952 showing was one reason so many politicians and observers yawned when he announced last year that he would seek the Democratic nomination for governor of New York. Then there suddenly appeared at Averell Harriman's side the dark-spectacled visage of the grand sachem of Tammany Hall. With Carmine De Sapio's force behind him, Harriman ran over Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. and stood facing U.S. Senator Irving Ives for the governorship of the Empire State. Since election night 1954, in New York, there have been long and painful post-mortems about how Averell Harriman managed to skin past Irving Ives by 12,000 votes. Whatever the reasons, Harriman and De Sapio took control of the state government of New York for the Democratic Party after twelve years of Republican rule. On election night Harriman made a mistake he has since bitterly regretted. Over TV he said: "I am for Adlai Stevenson in 1956."
Eyes West. Governor Harriman had barely taken the oath before he began to change his mind. At his first press conference in Albany, he got into the national political picture with a blast at the Eisenhower Administration's economic policies.
Harriman apparently caught himself in the trap of his own propaganda. Because he did not expect the economy to flourish, he seriously underestimated the state's revenue for the year, angrily pushed aside Republican protests and increased state income taxes 11%. Now that the year is drawing to a close with the U.S. economy at an alltime peak, Harriman's finance aides admit that state income will run $50 million to $60 million above their estimates. Republicans promptly charged that he had saddled the taxpayers with an unnecessary increase.
When he moved into Albany, the new governor faced a serious political problem. Even Harriman partisans would admit, privately, that Republican Thomas E. Dewey had given New York a good administration for twelve years, and that about all the progressive legislation that could be asked for had been enacted under Harriman's predecessors—Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman and Dewey. There was no genuine way for Harriman to make a big move toward a new era. So he decided to make a big noise. He cried that Dewey, by tricks of bookkeeping, had covered up the fact that he was leaving the state in dire fiscal straits. Harriman says: "I'm trying to put a little atomic bomb under the myth that Dewey was a good administrator."
The Hairsplitter. Harriman went to Albany with a reputation as a hard-driving but somewhat spastic administrator. He is likely to start calling aides as early as 7 a.m. (expecting them to be fully informed at that time on what is in the morning papers). He will assign a task to one aide, and a few hours later will ask another, who knows nothing about the project, how it is going. In Washington, this sort of operation, and a preoccupied manner, had earned him a nickname: "Misty Bill." It is misleading. Harriman is not vague. Rather, he tends to concentrate on details. He tries to describe with elaborate precision any situation he has studied; often his hearers cannot follow his fine distinctions. This led to another and better name: "Honest Ave, the Hairsplitter."