Pamela Harriman: 'Churchill's Secret Weapon' in the Fight Against the Nazis

BBC ^

[nickcarraway]

Winston Churchill's aristocratic daughter-in-law and confidante Pamela Harriman is considered "the greatest courtesan of her era". Decades after her death, she still divides opinion – was she a smart power player, or "shameless" and "repellent"?

You could call her by her six names: Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman – a British aristocrat who ended up a Washington power player and the US ambassador to France, having touched many famous lives in 20th-Century politics and culture. When she was just 20, her father-in-law Winston Churchill engaged her as "his most willing and committed secret weapon" (as a new biography puts it) and during World War Two she wined, dined and seduced important Americans, winning them over to the British cause against the Nazis. And later, her impact extended further, as she interacted with public figures including the Kennedys, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and Truman Capote – who eventually satirised her in his fiction, alongside his other "swans".

More than 27 years have passed since Pamela Harriman suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage while swimming in the pool at Paris's Ritz Hotel, yet she remains a divisive character, as evidenced by the varied reactions to Sonia Purnell's new biography, Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue. To some, the book reads as an appreciation of an influential life lived boldly, cannily and ambitiously in Britain, elsewhere in Europe, and the US. Others find it unduly praising of a woman who used sex to advance herself and whose political impact, they say, is overstated.

[wildcard_redneck]

courtesan /kôr′tĭ-zən/
noun
A woman prostitute, especially one whose clients are members of a royal court or men of high social standing.

[LRoggy]

Kind of like Kamala Wannalea

[John S Mosby]

A whore who PROMOTED Billy Cokenose Clinton of Arkansawwww!
For Prezeydent.

Unbelievable weasel female promotes the bent one with the dissolved nasal septum from vacuuming so much cocaine up his snout. These two were made for each other. Pamela Harriman was quite simply a whore. Pretty sure Winston wanted nothing to do with her as long as he was alive iirc.

[marktwain]

But during the final two decades of her life, Pamela became a power player in Washington. Backed by the Harriman millions, she began funding and championing candidates of the Democratic party after Republican Ronald Reagan won a landslide presidential election in 1980. Among her favourites: two future presidents, Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware, and Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas.

Wow.Pushed into prominence two of the most evil Presidents in our time.

[abb]

IIRC, she put up enough money to keep Bill Clinton afloat around the time of the 1992 New Hampshire primary. His campaign was struggling then.

[Brian Griffin]

“When her marriage to Randolph Churchill started to fall apart, she became romantically involved with Averell Harriman, who later became her third husband; Edward R. Murrow; and John Hay “Jock” Whitney.[citation needed] After her divorce from Churchill she was involved with Prince Aly Khan, Alfonso de Portago, Gianni Agnelli, and Baron Elie de Rothschild.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Harriman

[nwrep]

Nasty globalist whore.

[No name given]

Just like Hitlery and Commielaw.

[AndyJackson]

Oh for goodness sake. She was born into the British aristocracy. Swapping beds during country house sleepovers was pretty much de rigour.

[SunkenCiv]

[fella]

Spot On

[Grampa Dave]

My Birthday present is a hard copy of this book.

I can’t wait to start reading it.