Kathleen Lanier Harriman

December 7, 1917 — February 17, 2011

Kathleen (Kathy) Harriman was the younger of W. Averell Harriman and Kitty Lanier Lawrence’s two daughters. A remarkable athlete, Kathy attended the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, VA, where she was a member of their elite equestrian team, and Bennington College. As a college student, Kathy spent school vacations at Sun Valley, the first ski resort in the American west and her father’s brainchild. While assisting her father at the resort, Kathy became a world class skier and alternate for the ultimately cancelled 1940 Olympics. When war broke out, she followed her father—FDR’s Lend-Lease envoy—to London, where she worked as a war reporter for the International News Service and Newsweek and was celebrating her 24th birthday with the Churchill family when news arrived that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. When Averell became the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Kathy went with him, learned to speak Russian, and spent more time with Stalin’s inner circle than any American woman in history.

Photograph: Courtesy of the Mortimer Family