We don’t think of ‘the Harrimans’ as we think of, say, the Kennedys. But maybe we should. For serious students of Anglo-American relations there’s W. Averell Harriman, the diplomat (politician, financier; himself the son of a famous railroad baron) tasked with improving Roosevelt’s relations with Churchill and Stalin during World War Two. For those interested in less serious Anglo-American relations there’s Pamela Churchill Harriman who started out as Winston’s daughter-in-law and wound up (Averell, Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli and a good many others to the bad, or the bed) as Clinton’s ambassador to France. And now we have the Wartime Letters of Kathleen Harriman – daughter to Averell, friend and later stepdaughter to Pam.

A job as a war correspondent was wangled to allow her, in 1941, to accompany her father to London. Her letters back home shrewdly describe an admittedly privileged daily life – ‘War or no war, England hasn’t changed’ – and encounters with the great and good. Visiting Chequers, Churchill in his siren suit ‘looks rather like a kindly blue teddy bear’. (On a crucial later occasion, in 1944: ‘The P.M. is always at his best on the eve of great battles’.) Clementine Churchill has ‘got a mind of her own, only she’s a big enough person not to use it unless he wants her to.’ 

‘London is a gay place – nervously gay’, she writes, and that word, in its older sense, recurs a lot, because Kathleen’s own bent is always to take life gaily. When a pilot friend is shot down: ‘five instead of six for lunch on Sunday. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’

When Averell moved on to Moscow as US ambassador, she went with him and things got a little less gay. Not that the number of social engagements declined – the amount of alcohol consumed certainly went up! But Kathleen became known as an inadvertent apologist for the Soviets after the Katyn Forest massacre of almost 22,000 Polish POWs; she was persuaded that the Germans, rather than the Russians, had been responsible. Later information proved she was wrong. More positively she –  with Sarah Churchill and Roosevelt’s daughter Anna –  was one of the ‘little three’ supporting their fathers at the Yalta Conference.

Publication of these letters has been in question since Clementine Churchill first suggested a volume – ‘not, however, to be published just now!’. Editor and Soviet history expert Geoffrey Roberts interviewed Kathleen before she died in 2011, and was given access to her entire archive. The result is a wonderful, and mostly very readable, resource. Yes, Kathy’s chronicle of parties can get a tad repetitious over some 500 pages. One can, grumpily, tire of her perpetual cheer. But, in certain circumstances, cheerfulness can be an act of courage, and that’s clearly something Kathleen Harriman never lacked.