| | | Heir of a major railroad fortune, he founded the Harriman bank with his brother Roland, later merging with Brown Brothers to become Brown Brothers Harriman. Both of course were in Skull And Bones at Yale and were early members of the Council On Foreign Relations, if that matters. Averell left the business side primarily to his brother and went into "public service". From his first visits to the UK he was always it seems close to Clementine and Winston Churchill, even before he married their daughter Pamela. This was in marked contrast to John Foster Dulles, for whom Churchill had, according to his biographer Roy Jenkins, "an almost chemical dislike".
This is said because, on the surface, and to the outsider, the Dulles and the Harriman brothers seem to have been in much the same game, working closely together and allied to the same interests. Certainly the apparent $6 billion taken out of Union Banking Corporation by Roland at the end of the War, despite the earlier attentions of the Alien Property Custodian, has not been highly publicised. Is it possible that his brother knew nothing of this windfall? Or how it had come about? If he did know, how much would Churchill have known?
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