Oh no, here we go again. The Donald Trump admirer Laura Loomer makes claims that Kamala Harris used sex to advance her career and reach striking distance of the White House, and it all feels horribly inevitable. A vile sexual joke comparing Harris and Hillary Clinton appears on social media. Trump quickly reposts it.
Now 59 and happily married to a lawyer, Harris’s relationship with the former San Francisco mayor and California power-player Willie Brown was in the mid-90s when she was barely 30. But then, the sex life of a woman in public life is always fair game to her detractors, even decades later.
This playbook of attack on an accomplished, ambitious and attractive woman goes back a long way. And it always seeks to reduce female success against the odds to an insinuation; notable achievements to a nod and a wink.
It is hard enough for women to break through in politics, but when they do, misogyny is never far away. We like to think that after countless female leaders, not to mention three female prime ministers in the UK, the sting would have been drawn, but it has never gone away. It is low politics, but it works.
Harris is the target now, but in another age, the prey was Pamela Harriman, a notable Democrat of the 1980s and 90s who never ran for elected office but scored numerous political triumphs. A famously sexy woman who had entertained multiple rich and powerful lovers in her youth, Harriman went on in her 60s to reinvent herself and her party after the near fatal blow of the 1980 Ronald Reagan landslide. She helped dozens of politicians to win office through novel ways of fundraising and campaigning, earning her the gratitude of such names as George Mitchell, the US senator who helped broker peace in Northern Ireland.
Even Bill Clinton put down his improbable rise to the presidency “in no small measure” to Harriman, who spotted him early, promoted and projected him around Washington and, by his own account, encouraged him to believe in himself. The one-time daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, she also counselled him on international statecraft so that he felt “ready to stand as president before America and the world”.
Her reward was to be his US ambassador to France, where Clinton and the former French president Jacques Chirac hailed her for helping to shape the efforts to stop the genocide in Bosnia.
On her death, Chirac described her as a “peerless diplomat” in the league of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and a grateful Clinton gave the eulogy at her funeral, describing her as “wise counsel, friend, a leader”. Even eight years later, Le Monde was writing that her work in defusing tensions between Washington and Paris had made the world a “safer place”.
And yet there were – and sadly, still are – plenty of voices who dismiss her as a “red-headed tart”, a conniving gold-digger who “saw the world laying on her back”. And still it goes on. One commentator in a prominent newspaper recently reduced her to a “frightful ratbag” and a “mercenary sex obsessive”.
Go back further. Consider Virginia Hall, a second world war spy whose exploits in Nazi-occupied France – despite having a wooden leg called Cuthbert – had earned the attention of the Gestapo, who declared her to be the “most dangerous of all allied spies”. Klaus Barbie became obsessed with killing her, yelling that he would give anything to get his hands on “that … bitch”.
Yet during three long years under cover behind enemy lines, the Baltimore socialite (who had lost her leg in an accident) escaped capture to rescue fellow agents through daring jail breaks, blew up bridges and railway lines to rid an entire department of Nazis, and sent back vital intelligence that helped the US liberate Paris.
And what happened next? Her application to become a diplomat was rejected by the Department of State in the US before the war because of her disability and gender. After peace broke out, Hall was sidelined by her envious male superiors at the CIA who had themselves not seen action – one even claiming in personnel files that she could not cope under pressure.
Hall died in obscurity largely unrecognised and unthanked. Her role was subsequently reduced to a line or two in many accounts – though not in the official papers, many of them until recently still classified, where her derring-do is detailed with “stupefaction”.
No less misunderstood was Clementine Churchill, Harriman’s first mother-in-law and wife to Winston. Until recently, this formidable woman had had virtually no public presence in popular history. Her husband is one of the most biographed figures in history, but she has often been cast aside as shrill and irrelevant. One 800-page biography of Winston, for instance, does not feature her once in the index. Another tome claimed that Clementine was a “nuisance” who merely added to rather than curtailed the pressures on her husband.
And yet Churchill himself recalled that his life’s work had been possible only because of her. Those working at the couple’s side during Britain’s struggle for survival noticed how she was vital not just to her husband, but to the entire war effort – not least through restraining her husband’s most trenchant instincts.
His chief of staff, Gen “Pug” Ismay, believed that without Clementine, the “history of Winston Churchill and of the world would have been a very different story”. The then US ambassador Gil Winant, a thoughtful and observant figure, wrote that “if the future breeds historians of understanding”, Clementine’s service to Britain would be “given the full measure it deserves”.
There is surely a duty on all of us to try to be a “historian of understanding” by researching and reading before reacting and judging. As a writer, I have made it my mission to put the story straight on all three women, with a trilogy of biographies pushing back on their vilification. I think it is vital work, but even today, it is hard work: as evidenced by the modern attack lines on Harris. The effort to correct tomorrow’s history must start now.
Sonia Purnell is the author of Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman’s astonishing life of seduction, intrigue & power
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