Wealth & Money Quote by W. Averell Harriman

What reads like harmless resume-padding is really a power move in miniature: Harriman is laundering influence through understatement. “Actually” is doing quiet combat here, a verbal correction aimed at an implied skeptic. He’s not claiming expertise; he’s reasserting it, with the patrician ease of someone used to being presumed competent until proven otherwise.

The phrase “a certain amount of experience” is almost comically modest given the stakes of “Europe in the inter-war period,” a time when banking wasn’t just finance but geopolitics by other means: reparations, debt crises, currency collapses, and the fragile scaffolding of post-WWI order. Harriman’s subtext is that he saw the machinery up close, not as a tourist or idealist but as a practitioner in the rooms where numbers become leverage.

Then he adds the second credential like a seal: “Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.” This isn’t name-dropping; it’s signaling a specific kind of legitimacy, the kind that travels across borders without needing democratic permission. In the early 20th century, the ICC was part of a rising architecture of transnational capitalism, where “commerce” could sound neutral while shaping policy, labor conditions, and diplomatic priorities.

Context matters: Harriman’s later political identity - diplomat, governor, Cold War operator - is often framed as public service. This line insists on continuity between private capital and statecraft. It’s a reminder that for a certain class of American statesmen, the path to governing the world ran through the bank before it ran through the ballot box.