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Subject: Pam Harriman, Loyal Democrat<By Donnie Radcliffe=Washington Post Staff Writer=
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 05:06:14 EST
Message-ID: <11.1992Nov6.050614@AmeriCast.com>

Pam Harriman, Loyal Democrat<By Donnie Radcliffe=Washington Post
Staff Writer= When Pamela Harriman woke up Tuesday at her home in
Georgetown the sun was shining, just as Al Gore had been saying
it would if they were going to win.  And later near her estate in
Middleburg, where she'd been voting since Richard Nixon ran for
reelection in 1972, people were actually waiting in line at the
polls. She'd never seen such excitement.

  That night in Little Rock, to which she'd flown in a chartered
jet, she watched the returns at Tipper and Al Gore's private par-
ty packed with the most faithful and generous of the Clinton-Gore
supporters from every state in the Union. Here, too, there was
excitement, but it was contained. Could this really be happening?
When the word came through that Kentucky had gone for Clinton - a
stunning development - the crowd was uncertain whether to cheer.

Then sometime after midnight, the cheering started and didn't
stop. By then the streets were filled with delirious Democrats,
and Harriman, on this most amazing night, was stuck inside.

 "If I'd stayed up until 4:30, I'd have gotten to see Bill at
another party," she says, in a tone that made clear that a 72-
year-old woman with a big bank account wasn't about to try. But
perhaps of all the well-wishers and supplicants in Little Rock
that night, she didn't need to.  Clinton and Gore both knew very
well what Pamela Harriman had done for them.  Robert Strauss,
U.S. ambassador to Russia but "Mr. Democrat" throughout much of
the 1970s and '80s, remembers the night right after the disas-
trous election of 1980 when he pooh-poohed Pamela Harriman's pro-
posal to save the Democratic Party - an idea that later turned
out to be "Democrats for the 80's." They were having dinner at
her home when she started talking about setting up a political
action committee "to revitalize the Democratic Party and promote
alternatives to right-wing Republican rule."

 The Reagan landslide had dealt the Democrats a knockout blow,
and the notion that there would be a Democratic president and a
Democratic Senate anytime soon seemed about as likely in November
1980 as the Communists tearing down the Berlin Wall. There were
those who might even say the notion was the fantasy of some
would-be Georgetown Joan of Arc.

 "I said, 'Pam, it's a very good idea,  but you ought to remember
that you're limited to how much it's going to amount to. I think
this organization will be useful but never a big deal, because
people want to give money directly to the party or to the candi-
date themselves. They don't want to filter it through you,' "
Strauss recalled in a telephone interview from Moscow this week.

Pamela and her husband, Averell, 88 then and  a grand old man
among Washington Democrats, had become close friends of Strauss
when they backed him for party chairman several years earlier.
Strauss says he and Averell often talked about getting Pamela in-
volved in more than political hostessing. "He was worried about
her being busy and having interests after his death, and he used
to talk to me about Pam having something to do." Pamela Harriman
remembers that she and her husband had been "outraged" that the
Democrats had lost the White House and the "backbone" of the U.S.
Senate.  Looking for the whys as well as hows for forging a come-
back for the party, they gathered remnants of the Democratic
hierarchy around them on several nights in their Georgetown draw-
ing room - big names like Strauss, former defense secretary Clark
Clifford, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, House Majority Leader Jim
Wright, Senate Whip Alan Cranston, Sens. John Glenn of Ohio, Dale
Bumpers of Arkansas, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina and
Gary Hart of Colorado.

 Besides grudging admissions that the Republicans had outmaneu-
vered, outstrategized and just plain outsmarted them, some of
them argued that the Democrats had lost touch with the middle
class.

  "You felt so impotent about what you could do," Harriman re-
calls. "But rather than just cry about it, it was important to
stand up and be counted and try and fight your way back."

 One way she was uniquely suited to fight was with money.  She,
or more precisely Averell, had plenty - close to $100 million by
some estimates - and they knew people with plenty more. A "labor
friend," she says, joked that she should start a PAC and call it
"Pam PAC."

 "I sort of laughed," she said. But she sort of thought about it.
And then she just went ahead and did it.

  Later, in discussions with Janet Howard, a tough former Hill
staffer who's now Pamela Harriman's senior adviser, the idea of a
PAC didn't seem so far-fetched after all. Three weeks after the
election, advised that there was still time for her PAC to col-
lect campaign contributions for 1980, Pamela Harriman filed the
papers legitimizing Democrats for the 80's.  "People laughed and
joked," says this much-traveled, much-married social hostess of
her unlikely new role as a political power broker. "But then, you
know, I expected it, I guess, because how did they know what I
know in my heart? They're always looking for hidden agendas, and
my life hasn't been a hidden agenda. To me anyway."

 So began the Harrimans' now-famous "issues evenings," affected
but effective gatherings where policy experts, like New York in-
vestment banker Felix Rohatyn speaking on the flaws of Reaganom-
ics or Sam Nunn on defense strategy, held sway over 30 or 40 pol-
icy makers, big contributors, labor leaders, elected officials
and would-be candidates. Coming along afterward, passing the hat,
so to speak, would be someone like Strauss.  "That's how Bill
Clinton came into my life," says Harriman. "He had just lost the
governor's race. He was so bright and one of the first people on
my board."

 Strauss admits now "I was dead wrong and she was right. It did
amount to something. And later, after she got it going, one of
those nutty organizations attacked her and the story about it got
into Time. She called me, terribly distraught. I told her, 'I was
wrong and the fact that this right-wing outfit has taken you on
means they put you in the big league. And, even more, that means
that you were right.' "

 If she was a lightning rod who stirred passions among critics,
she was more importantly a catalyst who helped make possible a
reshaping of the Democratic Party. Stuart Eizenstat, Jimmy
Carter's domestic policy chief at the White House, calls her "a
heroine divided party. It was much more than fund-raising. She

used those French
 as real opportunities to discuss problems of the party, policy
directions the party should take, what message we should give."

 Through the sheer force of her "leadership, presence, drive and
vision," according to Eizenstat, she pulled disparate pieces of
the party together - the House and Senate leadership, policy peo-
ple, big contributors, young people, labor leaders.

 "She was not just a pretty head. She rolled up her sleeves, got
her fingernails figuratively dirty, rebuilding from the ground
up, doing anything necessary," says Eizenstat. "I can't emphasize
how important that was in moving the party to center: a tougher
defense policy, the focus on the middle class, the self-
examination of where and why we'd gone wrong. It led to the kind
of direction Clinton took the party."

 Others portray her as the most sophisticated of cheerleaders,
giving disheartened Democrats a rallying point. If she didn't
formulate new ideas, she at least created a seductively comfort-
able forum for their discussion. Her salon was a way for rising
stars to meet each other, dine in splendor and refuel on the ul-
timate political sustenance: money.

  By the time Democrats for the 80's was disbanded a decade
later, with the Senate at least back in the Democratic fold,
Pamela Harriman had raised $12 million in the elegant surround-
ings of Picassos, Matisses and Degas, priceless Chinese por-
celains and authentic French antiques. And that figure did not
include the "never less than $100,000 an evening" that innumer-
able individual candidates collected for their own campaigns.

 Now, after 12 years as what Eizenstat calls the Democrats'
"voice in the wilderness" - albeit one with a British accent -
"the improbability of a British-born person who had deep roots in
British politics being able to become queen mother of the Demo-
cratic Party" is a reality.  "If there is, in effect, a corona-
tion, using Bill and Hillary Clinton as the king and queen," says
Eizenstat, "I'd certainly call her the queen mother." An Uncommon
Upbringing<Talk about name recognition.

 Hers - Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman - reads like a
table of contents in "Great Lives of the Twentieth Century."

 She began life as Pamela Digby, the daughter of the 11th Lord
Digby, seven of whose family members were either in the House of
Lords or the House of Commons. But her own political odyssey be-
gan 19 years later as Pamela Churchill, daughter-in-law of one of
the major figures of world history, Britain's World War II prime
minister, Winston Churchill.  She acted as Randolph Churchill's
surrogate to his parliamentary constituency.  Since he was away a
lot, she made thrice-monthly rounds to Lancastershire, holding
hands with people, listening to their problems, feeling some of
their wartime pain. She remembers christening a submarine only to
hear 10 days later that it had been sunk. "I was very young to do
that," she says, "but ignorance is bliss."

 She'd met Randolph in London on a blind date. The war hadn't yet
broken out, but Britain was mobilizing. Her father and mother
were generals, and her sister and brother were in the army.
Fluent in German and French, she got a job as a translator at the
foreign office in London.



 "I knew if I went home I'd be put in the army," she says.

  Young Churchill wasn't love at first sight, but she'd been at-
tracted to him by the confidence he conveyed about the days
ahead. All of her friends talked about "the end of everything,
their lives being smashed and everybody being killed," she
remembers.  Suddenly, there was Randolph, acknowledging that the
war would be long and bloody but without the slightest doubt that
Britain would win.

 She's had a knack for being in the front rows of history. "I've
come to the age when I'm one of the few people left who knew
these people," who saw them as more than historical figures.
"Winston was the most human human being I've ever known," she
says. "I think that was part of his greatness, that he felt
things so strongly. ... I was very lucky, but you know, when
you're 19, you don't sit back and say, 'Why am I here? How am I
here? How extraordinary!' You just are there."

 Years later, she was "there" again, this time as Pamela Hayward,
married to Broadway producer Leland Hayward for 10 years until
his death in 1970. She was perfecting something she would become
preeminent at - raising money, then for Jack and Bobby Kennedy by
playing political hostess in an otherwise theatrical milieu. Her
Kennedy ties reached back to pre-war England, where Joseph P.
Kennedy was the American ambassador and his daughter, Kathleen,
and she were presented at court together.

  Her upbringing in a totally Tory stronghold was "not the upbr-
inging of an average American," she concedes. Even now, 21 years
after she became an American citizen because it was the only
thing she could think to give Averell Harriman as a wedding
present "that would mean something," people ask how she could be
a Tory in England and a Democrat here.

"But people here don't understand that there's a big difference
between being a socialist in England and a Democrat here. I re-
late very easily to my Tory upbringing. If you were in a position
to be better off than others, it was your duty to take care of
them. It seems to me," she says, "that that relates very well to
what Democrats believe."

She solidified that affiliation when she married Harriman, whom
she first met in wartime England where he was an emissary to
Churchill. But Harriman's shadow was dense,  and few in American
politics took her as anything more than a dilettante, until, some
years after his death in 1986, they realized she was still plug-
ging away for the party.

 There were also those who looked at much of her life as a rich
girl's fling, not at all the sort of discipline supposedly re-
quired of those who are serious about politics. The end of her
marriage to Randolph coinciding with the end of the war, she de-
cided she wanted to educate herself for herself - in art, music,
in things that had been totally denied her. Settling in Paris
where she'd once been in school, she became a darling of Tout
Paris, linked variously with Ali Khan, Gianni Agnelli and one of
the Rothschilds. She was the darling of French intellectuals,
writers like Andre Malraux and Jean Cocteau, and artists like
choreographer Roland Petit. Her frivolous and pampered reputation
flourished. The gay divorcee was having a life at last.

She is still defensive about it, as she is about any suggestion
that she has not been dedicated to the world of politics. "We all
felt entitled to relax and enjoy and reeducate," she says.  Then,
too, her son Winston was for some years no help in the establish-
ment of political credentials. She laughs about how people used
to tell him "your mother's a politician and he'd say, 'My
mother's not a politician. She's married to a politician.' "



 Time takes care of so many things, she says.  "He laughs less
about it now."

 He calls her often about politics. Just the other day, he was
among those standing up to Prime Minister John Major's government
in a bruising fight over shutting down coal mines in England. It
reminds her of the time he confronted then-Prime Minister Mar-
garet Thatcher on Zimbabwe and its independence. "He didn't agree
with that. He was a shadow minister for defense, and she took him
out of that job and never gave him another. But I like that," she
says, "because what he believes he believes." She's reflective
about whether he'll ever follow in his famous grandfather's
footsteps. She admits he's "a bit of a rebel" among fellow Con-
servatives - others see him as not much of a force at all - but
maintains faith. "So much depends upon the difficult mode England
is going into. Maybe he'll emerge to do something for them."

  It's like she always says, in politics, timing and luck are
everything.

The Clinton Connection<She's known Bill Clinton and Al Gore for
more than a decade. She gives Averell Harriman the credit for
seeing them as future leaders. He was the one who sought them
out, she says, invited them to their home, talked to them about
past presidencies and the crises their generation faces.



Clinton was the first person she asked to serve on the board of
Democrats for the 80's. He'd lost his reelection bid for gover-
nor.

 "It's very important in life to have success," she says, "but
it's even more important to have failure. And to know how to han-
dle it." Clinton handled it by facing up to critics who saw him
as cocky and took him down a peg in the polling place. But he
worked hard on his comeback, cultivating his ties with the party,
exploring ways to revitalize it and eventually prevailing in the
centrist direction it took. The first time she ever went on net-
work television to talk about her PAC, Clinton went with her.
"He was the pro," she says. "I wasn't."

 There were other times she turned to him. "He has a very organ-
ized mind," she says, so she tapped it - for ideas about issue
evenings, ideas about the mixes of people they needed, ideas that
would lend the PAC substance.

 He didn't remain on her board long because in 1982 he ran again
for governor. A month after he won, he and four other governors,
one of them Nebraska's Bob Kerrey, were at the Harrimans as issue
evening panelists discussing "A View From the States - The 1982
Election and an Assessment of the Issues Facing Our Country To-
day."

  That evening stands out for yet another reason. When guests
went home, Kerrey and Clinton, who were spending the night at the
Harrimans, hung back. Upstairs in the sitting room, they talked
another three hours, drawing out Averell Harriman on Stalin and
Churchill and World War II, those critical years in modern histo-
ry that these Baby Boomers would never be able to do more than
read about. After he went to bed, around 1:30 a.m., they probed
her recollections of that period.  Finally, at 2:30, she asked
when they had to get up. One was leaving at 4:45, the other at
5:15, one going back to Arkansas and the other to Nebraska.  She
has a theory about what it means. Of all the political people
she's seen in her life - "and I've seen an awful lot" - none has
ever outdone the stamina of Bill Clinton. Candidates have gone
down to defeat for a number of reasons, but she thinks that basi-
cally - and she mentions Edmund Muskie and Walter Mondale here -
a lot of it has been physical.

 Clinton's stamina went beyond the physical, though.

 "Where Jack Kennedy was born to power, Bill Clinton got there
all by himself," she told a Loudoun County audience the other
day.  "The Kennedy script was written in advance. The Clinton
story was written as he went. It was the great American story of
enduring a tough childhood in a small corner of his country -
facing adversity, learning its lessons and moving beyond."

 It's exactly the kind of preseverance she's always admired.
Michael Dukakis didn't have it. And, despite his victory, neither
did Jimmy Carter. They had another problem, as well: True to
their promises, they were Washington outsiders,  and in the world
of Harriman - a world that recalls the elite Democratic network
of her husband's era - that's a sure way to fail in this town.

 "Dukakis didn't really seek out the kind of help he might have,"
notes one party insider. "He didn't have the kind of political
instincts that attracted others to him. His message was very
cloudy. Not the kind of centrist message Pam was trying to con-
vey."

 "Dukakis was sort of a fluke," she says simply. Of Carter, she
adds: "I have great admiration. He and Rosalynn are very dedicat-
ed citizens who work very hard. But it just didn't work for the
presidency."

 Al Gore did have the perseverance as well as the other creden-
tials she admired. She was devastated in 1988 when he didn't make
it past the primaries. Of all the young candidates who've courted
her, he was always the favorite. "But again," she says, "that's
the sort of thing I think gave him strength. In retrospect, he's
better here for not having succeeded in that."

 She's almost too quick in saying "no" to a question about wheth-
er she suggested him to Clinton as his running mate. "I mean,"
she teases, laughing, "you mustn't ask that question."

 However it came about, the result certainly was her all-time
dream ticket, recharging her energies, renewing her hopes and
vindicating the slogging, relentless work she's done for 12 years
now. "I hate to fund-raise," she grumbles; "there is nobody in
their right mind who would like it. But I think it's terribly im-
portant to combine fund-raising with substance, and that's what
we tried to do."

 Her fund-raising accomplishments were spectacular. At her Vir-
ginia farm this fall, Clinton reminded everybody that a year ago,
when DNC Chairman Ron Brown got them all down for what they
called "the Middleburg Meeting," the aim in the year ahead had
been to raise $3 million for The Candidate - whoever he was.
"But we raised $3.2 million in one night," she says, still a lit-
tle incredulous.

 For the first time in many years, the Democrats were able to
stay right behind the Republicans in spending, particularly the
"soft money" contributions that are spent on party advertising
and organizing. She also has been a force in congressional races,
dating back to a crucial loan she gave the party in 1983 to build
a media center where candidates could produce subsidized campaign
commercials.

 In one race this year, she helped bail out Wisconsin Rep. Les
Aspin, a party stalwart who faced a well-financed opponent.  "I
got a call that Les Aspin was really in trouble," she says. "I
was able to do about five calls to my friends and get real help.
After 12 years, we know each other so well, we can ask."

 Now the calls are coming in to her. The phones haven't stopped
ringing at her Georgetown offices, people calling to congratulate
her for having the passion, the commitment, the instincts that
brought the Democrats back from the dead. She was the one, they
keep telling her with unqualified praise, who had hung in there
so long.

 Her response?  "I'm suddenly feeling older than I even am,"
sighs Harriman, noting at another point that "Washington can be a
cruel town."

  Maybe it's because the woman they didn't take seriously is now
being taken too seriously. Washington, of course, takes nothing
at face value - and most of the time does nothing for nothing -
so aside from the public praise, the question people are asking
privately is what's in it for her? Why else would anyone devote a
dozen years of her life, not to mention energy and money, if she
didn't expect something in return?

 It is, Harriman agrees, "the sort of thing I'm up against. I
really hate that."

 "If you're someone like Pamela Harriman, it's easy to have de-
tractors," says Strauss of those "other" people. "Easy to be
jealous." The London papers are already speculating that Clinton
will send her to London as U.S. Ambassador. It's an intriguing
idea. Imagine the headline: Pam Packs for Home.

 But a decade ago she vowed that if and when the Democrats ever
took back the White House and the Senate, she would "retire." So
does she still mean that?

 "I think that's probably about right," she says in that careful
way she has of choosing her words. "I certainly don't want to
leave Washington. I mean, I haven't waited to get a president for
12 years to then leave Washington."

  It's going to be an administration of "young, talented, very
agressive, hard-working people who work 18 to 20 hours a day. And
rightfully and happily," she says. "And I will help if I'm asked
to - I can push and shove."

  Doing what? She pulls her cashmere sweater around her, arches
her still trim ankle, smiles ever so slightly and sighs, "I don't
know.  Bill and Hillary will know they can call on me if they
need me, and I'll be there."

 They may need all the help they can get if another Harriman
prediction comes true.

 "A hundred years from now," she says, "I'm sure this will be a
turning point in the lives of a whole generation."

 And at this moment, Harriman's predictions are not the sort
Washington is likely to bet against.<02:07 11-06C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
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