National Affairs: THE OTHER MILLIONAIRE

NEW YORK'S Democratic Governor William Averell Harriman, 66, is another multimillionaire who took the high road to politics. His famed father, E. H. Harriman, a onetime messenger boy, parlayed imagination and aggressiveness into a $5 billion empire (Union Pacific Railroad, Wells-Fargo Express Co., etc.), died in 1909, and left about $100 million to his wife and five children. Averell grew up at the zoo-room family mansion located on 20,000 acres near Arden, N.Y., learned to ride, shoot, swim, row, and play polo, prepped at fashionable Groton (average student), graduated from Yale (B.A. '13), was a bridge player (very good) and oarsman (topnotch). In 1921 he formed an investment banking firm with his brother Roland (who is still a Republican). His reported personal fortune: between $75 and $100 million.

Harriman abandoned the Republican Party in 1928 to vote for Al Smith, four years later pushed for the presidential election of his fellow squire, Franklin Roosevelt. After a series of Washington jobs in the NRA '305, Harriman spent 1941 to 1943 in London and Moscow as F.D.R.'s special-missions contact and Lend-Lease expediter, was Ambassador to Russia (1943-46), then to the Court of St. James's (1946), and Truman's Secretary of Commerce in the same year. Two years later, he was Marshall Plan ambassador in Europe, then Special Assistant to the President (1950-51), director of Mutual Security (1951-53), early predicted the onrush of Russian and Chinese imperialism.

Twice-married (his first wife divorced him in 1929), he occupies, apart from the Albany Governor's mansion, an elegant, five-story Manhattan townhouse, a summer place on Long Island, a Florida hideaway, the caretaker's cottage at the Arden estate (he gave the big house to Columbia University, which uses it for special conferences). Beneath his placid, patrician bearing, he flexes long-toughened sinews of a first-rate, determined administrator and an autocrat of the timetable, is a stickler for details ("Honest Ave, the Hairsplitter"). He badgers aides at all hours, once sent state police searching for a commissioner who had failed to check out properly. Intense, he can work his staff to exhaustion, still feel fit himself, takes pride in making fast judgments and quick decisions ("It's just like tennis"). Says a close adviser: "He's found his greatest love in being Governor."