Kathleen Harriman Mortimer | |
|---|---|
 Harriman wearing a uniform when she was a war correspondent | |
| Born | December 7, 1917 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | February 17, 2011 (aged 93)[1] New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Spouse | Stanley G. Mortimer Jr. |
Kathleen Harriman Mortimer (December 7, 1917 – February 17, 2011) was an American journalist and socialite who played an important role in helping her father and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with behind-the-scenes management of the American delegation to the Yalta Conference.[2][3] Her father W. Averell Harriman was then the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and he played an important role in assisting Roosevelt, since the conference was held in Yalta, a Black Sea port part of the Soviet Union.
In 1941, her father was US ambassador to the United Kingdom, and he pulled strings to arrange for her a visa and a job as a reporter for Hearst's International News Service.[4] She managed to be a successful war correspondent despite a lack of experience. She would later work for Newsweek magazine.
In 1943, her father was made ambassador to the Soviet Union, and she went with him as an aide.[4] Mortimer found herself working with Roosevelt's daughter Anna, and Sarah, daughter of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who played similar roles, serving as hostess and babysitter to their temperamental fathers.[3] In her account of the behind-the-scenes roles the three women played at the Yalta Conference, Catherine Grace Katz wrote that her father delegated to Mortimer the task of breaking off a distracting affair her father Harriman was having with Pamela Churchill, then Winston Churchill's young daughter-in-law. Mortimer learned the Russian language during the three years she lived with her father there, and her wartime correspondence contains detailed descriptions of key Soviet leaders, and their wives.[5] Historian Geoffrey Roberts wrote that, after first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she was the second best well known American woman in the Soviet Union.
She married Stanley G. Mortimer Jr. in 1947.[2] They had three children.[6]
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