If ever anyone had a good war, it was Kathleen Harriman. Brought to London from America in 1941 at the age of 23 by her father Averell Harriman, the go-between for Churchill and Roosevelt and the man who directed US aid to Britain, she was given a job as a journalist with the International News Service, notwithstanding her inexperience. She had a whale of a time, although she fretted that no one trained her to write. Imagine an attractive girl, daughter of the man everyone wanted to woo (not least Churchill), at the heart of British politics in the middle of the war. As a journalist she visited ordinary families who had been bombed out of their homes and marvelled at their cheerful stoicism. It was a unique perspective on events which was reflected in the letters she wrote home, mostly to her sister Mary and her English nanny.
Then consider that, when her father was appointed US ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1943, he whisked her off to Moscow to preside over the embassy and entertain diplomats and politicians, and you have a first-class historical source: fun-loving but politically savvy, with a female eye for amusing detail and a keen concern with her wardrobe. So, her correspondents get the low-down on the political situation as well as requests for tennis skirts, blouses and more stockings. Hers is a marvellous take on history as it was being made.
Geoffrey Roberts’s edition of her wartime letters puts the author, rather than her father, centre stage, and provides useful explanatory notes on the personalities. She met everyone — Churchill, who liked her, Uncle Joe Stalin (“not much expression, very cold and distant”); Shostakovich (“he seemed a nice guy but definitely an introverted genius type”); Molotov (“a swell sense of humour”); and Tito (“very easy to talk to”). She sought out female friends. Sometimes her judgment was awry — she accepted the Soviet take on the Katyn massacre — but nonetheless, she remains a marvellous minor source for great events and her letters are a delight to read.
Wartime Letters: London and Moscow 1941-1945 by Kathleen Harriman is out on February 24 (Yale University Press, £30)
