![cover image](https://wikiwandv2-19431.kxcdn.com/_next/image?url=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Kathleen_Harriman_wore_a_uniform_when_she_was_a_war_correspondent_-b.jpg/640px-Kathleen_Harriman_wore_a_uniform_when_she_was_a_war_correspondent_-b.jpg&w=640&q=50)
Kathleen Harriman Mortimer
American journalist (1917–2011) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
Kathleen Harriman Mortimer | |
---|---|
![]() Harriman wearing a uniform when she was a war correspondent | |
Born | (1917-12-07)December 7, 1917 New York City, U.S. |
Died | February 17, 2011(2011-02-17) (aged 93)[1] New York City, U.S. |
Occupation | Journalist |
Spouse | Stanley G. Mortimer Jr. |
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 most well-known American woman in the Soviet Union.
She married Stanley G. Mortimer Jr. in 1947.[2] They had three children.[6]