‘Churchill’s secret weapon’ in the fight against the Nazis

Six Name: Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman – British aristocrat who eventually became a power player in Washington and the US ambassador to France, and touched many famous lives in 20th century politics and culture . When she was 20, her stepfather Winston Churchill engaged her as “his most driven and devoted secret weapon” (as a new biography puts it), and during World War II She wined, dined, seduced, and won over important Americans. over to the British cause against the Nazis. And from then on, her influence expanded even further. She interacted with public figures such as Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, and Truman Capote.

More than 27 years have passed since Pamela Harriman suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage while swimming in the pool at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, but Sonia Pannell’s new biography, The Kingmaker: The Incredible Pamela Harriman She remains a divisive character, as evidenced by her varied reactions to life. Power, Seduction, and Intrigue.For some, this book reads as an acknowledgment of an influential life lived boldly, richly, and ambitiously in Britain, Europe, and other parts of the United States. . Others find it unduly praising of a woman who used sex to advance herself and whose political impact, they say, is overstated.

Born in 1920 to a cash-strapped baron and raised to “marry well,” Pamela fails to find a husband in her first London “season” in 1938.

all It happened. “Nobody ever had a chance to see politics as much from the inside as I did,” she said later.

Britain at that time stood alone against the Nazi war machine, and Churchill urgently needed transatlantic aid, which was not forthcoming. After the fall of Paris, polling revealed that the US electorate was even less keen than before to join the Allied cause.

Pamela knew the stakes. “If and when America came into the war, then the war would be safe. As long as they weren’t in the war, it was precarious,” she later I remembered. Churchill doted on his cheerful, dewy-skinned daughter-in-law. He negotiated that a winsome portrait of Pamela with her infant son (taken by

Under review During the Kingmaker era, Roger Lewis dismisses the idea that Pamela provided her stepfather with significant intelligence, describing her as “the sexual obsession of a mercenary”.

Frank Costigliola, a history professor at the University of Connecticut and author of Roosevelt’s Lost Alliance: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, told the BBC: is to be ignorant of the history, and smacks of misogyny.”

, . So Pamela was hardly unusual in falling into bed with a new partner, though she was probably an outlier in the frequency with which it happened. The (partial) list of her lovers included Edward R Murrow, the CBS broadcaster (“this ), U.S. Bomber Command commander Maj. Fred Anderson, Os intelligence intelligence officer Col. Jock Whitney, and Murrow’s CBS boss Bill Paley, Maj. Gen. Bill Paley, who was on General Dwight de Eisenhower’s staff.

Divorced after the war, Pamela defected to Paris and became part of the Cosmopolitan set, with a rich roster that included Prince Ali Khan, Gianni Agnelli, and Elie de Rothschild. These paramours financed her luxurious lifestyle, but none would put a ring on her finger. Nearing 40, she asked Leland Hayward, a successful Broadway and Hollywood producer, to marry his attractive wife Nancy (“Slim”). ”) was persuaded to leave it for her.

Both Pamela Hayward, as she was called, and Mrs. Slim Keith, now married to British banker and aristocrat Kenneth Keith, counted. “Intercontinental Group of Swans

Hayward’s career and health declined precipitously in the decade after he married Pamela, but she remained loyal. accused of hugging with jewelry (among other misdemeanors); “Pamela had a great gift: she understood the men she loved. That was where she began and ended; it was the only life she had,” Hayward wrote.

And Pamela, the aging Harriman’s faithful and attentive wife, was culminated in her appointment as ambassador to France by a grateful Clinton. I was still labeled as someone whose politics was “between her legs.” Thomas Mallon, a historical novelist and essayist, reviewing Kingmaker He wrote that the book “does not address the uniqueness of death in such an obviously important subject.

Purnell felt the sometimes hostile reception of her book meant she was experiencing “a tiny fraction of what Pamela went through,” she told the BBC. And after reading her papers and letters, now kept at the Library of Congress, Purnell came to like her subject more and more.

Perhaps Pamela’s life is a kind of Rorschach test. How does the enduring double standard strike you? As Leamer points out, “It’s still true that if you sleep with a lot of people and you’re a woman…” Then you’re a “woman”, but if you’re a man you’re a “stud”. ” And on what terms should you judge a woman from another era? Pamela was clearly drawn to power from an early age and had little opportunity to pursue it for herself, as she did.

Pamela’s own self-evaluation is revealed. Speaking to Michael Gross in New York Magazine in 1992, and later quoted in The New York Times, she said: “Basically, I’m a backroom girl. I’ve always said this and I’ve always believed it. I prefer to push and scream at others. I like to push and scream at others. I really don’t like to propose. I was very happy to be the wife of the two husbands I loved.”