He was seventy at the time. “Averell looks terrific,” a friend told Marie Harriman that year. “You’d look terrific too,” she answered, “if you did nothing but play polo until you were forty years old.” He was unique in many ways; he brought with him so much history, so many ties to great figures of the past that the young men who had taken office could not imagine that he would be able to function at their level and speed. They soon learned that it was they who were hard pressed to function at his level and speed and intensity.
