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Article: Pamela Harriman, ambassador/socialite

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Pamela Harriman, ambassador/socialite

Pamela Digby was born in 1920 into an aristocratic family in Dorset, England.  Despite the family's lineage, the Digbys lacked prestige, power or the funds to continue their lifestyle - and they certainly never realized that their daughter would someday be one of the most politically powerful women in the world. At 16, Pamela was taken to Paris to further her education, where she met Winston Churchill's son Randolph.  At age 19, Pamela Bigby became Pamela Churchill, daughter-in-law of the Prime Minister of Great Britain.  Eventually, impressed by her grace and charm, Winston asked her to be one of his assistants, giving Pamela entree into one of the most powerful inner circles of the century.

Pamela did not lack for hobbies and fun in wartime London.  Her activities included the entertainment of a high-powered array of lovers that included CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow and American millionaire and land-lease administrator W. Averell Harriman.  Harriman, middle-aged and married at the time, concealed the affair by inviting his 24-year-old daughter to live at with him at his home along with the 22-year-old Pamela.

The post-war period brought the newly-divorced Pamela back to her beloved, and now liberated, Paris - but the Parisian life was not to last forever.  On a trip to New York, Pamela Churchill met and fell in love with Broadway producer Leland Hayward (The Sound of Music), who divorced his wife and married Pamela in 1960.  The marriage brought Pamela stateside, and it lasted until Hayward's death by stroke in 1971.  At a dinner party five months after the funeral, Pamela again encountered her former lover, the recently-widowed millionaire W. Averell Harriman.  A month later the 51-year-old Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward became Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman when she wed the 79-year-old.

~ Together the Harrimans focused their energies on supporting Democratic Party.  During the Reagan reign in the 1980s, the luxurious Harriman home became the place for the opposition party to sulk and plan for the future.  Among the Washington elite, Pamela was considered the elite of the elite.  Her parties became an important political social fixture, held together by her charisma and social grace, and her choice to back Bill Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 1992 proved fortuitous.  Clinton rode all the way to the Oval Office, fueled greatly by the tremendous fundraising effort Harriman made for his cause.  Clinton was so thankful, in fact, that he threw first his triumphant celebration at the Harriman home and after being inaugurated, awarded her with the ambassadorship to France.  Pamela Harriman died of a brain hemorrhage while swimming laps in a Paris pool at the age of 76, a popular and powerful ambassador who had used the socializing techniques she had developed over a lifetime to represent a nation.