Presswatch: A Place Called Pamelot
Corry, John
PRESS WATCH by John Corry A Place Called Pamelot The memorial service for Pamela Harriman, according to the New York Times, was "the closest thing to a state funeral Washington has seen in...
...Today I am here in no small measure because she was there...
...As the Times pointed out, she had re-introduced Mrs...
...I shall never forget how she was there for Hillary and for me in 1992—wise counsel, friend, a leader in our ranks...
...In Reflected Glory, her scrupulously researched biography of Mrs...
...Another was from Democrat Tom Harkin, who had gotten a $1o,000 contribution, as well as some fundraising help, when he ran for the Senate...
...President Clinton eulogized Mrs...
...Presumably a staffer ghosted his letter...
...Presumably the description was apt—big houses in Georgetown do affect people that way—although a remark in the transcript by Clark Clifford attracted the most attention...
...Clinton was an afterthought, and she almost gave up on him when she heard about Gennifer Flowers...
...The Post could find only a single Republican, Senator John Warner...
...Reporters were not invited, although press releases would announce the topics and names of guests...
...illustrated this nicely...
...Graham had brought them together again...
...At the same time, we are also bringing in people from our own team to work in each area...
...The ruling class is self-consciously egalitarian, but it helps if you have money...
...But pause now and reflect...
...We are in the process of making significant reductions in personnel...
...The Post and Newsweek, its subsidiary, have promoted it shamelessly...
...Certainly no one thought of her as a patriot and public servant, and drawing a parallel between her life and the lives of the young men who died on Omaha Beach was obscene...
...Harriman, however, was a self-promoter, who persuaded, let us say, many people to help her...
...Zelda Novak, "Paper Cuts" TAS, APRIL 1993 The American Spectator • April 1997 51...
...Graham, however, would be unlikely to see it that way...
...you may learn something about how this works in Personal History, Katharine Graham's memoir (Knopf, $29.95...
...50 April 1 9 9 7 • The American Spectator party...
...They were drawn from that place where liberal politicians, media big feet, and people who love to read about themselves in newspapers all join...
...It also noted the consultants, lawyers, and visiting celebrities—Gregory Peck, Donald Trump, and the designer Oscar de la Renta, among them...
...Harriman was absent, recuperating from a riding accident, and a member of her staff mistakenly gave a transcript of the discussion to a Wall Street Journal reporter...
...Their ghosting is demeaning, but it keeps them plugged in, and allows them to go on to bigger things...
...There was also the largesse she controlled through various Harriman foundations...
...Harriman gave at Georgetown University—the Washington Post called it her "diplomatic coming out" —and that he was assisted by, among others, Stuart Eizenstat The speech was banal, but excellence did not matter, and after the Post reported "scores of stifled yawns" in the audience, it received indignant letters...
...Graham and her husband were excited because "our friends" were now running the country...
...By the eighties the party was intellectually bankrupt, but she gave it the appearance of substance...
...It is therefore with great sadness that I must terminate your employment...
...Harriman had other things going for her besides the ghosts and consultants...
...Clinton's remarks about Mrs...
...One, insisting on Mrs...
...So, back now to Mrs...
...On the other hand, she has voted only once for a Republican presidential candidate, George Bush in 1988...
...Most of that, however, is incidental...
...Harriman had given her life for freedom...
...Harriman and her PAC...
...The "issues evenings" at her Georgetown house were famous...
...But she cast away doubt after he ran second in the New Hampshire primary, and offered herself as a fundraiser...
...Mrs...
...It had been unthinkingly liberal, and impressed by big houses...
...The characterization was picked up and repeated in other publications, usually in complimentary stories about Mrs...
...In fact, Mrs...
...During World War II, when Mrs...
...Harriman with "talking points...
...Republican ghosts also tend to be full-time, while important Democratic ghosts often have day jobs as lawyers, foundation executives, and academics...
...Dole was on to something, even if it was an election year...
...This is what he said: "There is a cultural and social affinity between the McGovernites and the Post executives and editors...
...Meanwhile, the Post story on the memorial service asked, rhetorically, "Who was there...
...They also know one another, as well as all their counterparts in other places...
...Harriman as "a patriot and public servant," and the service, at Washington National Cathedral, ended with four choruses of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic...
...Among the Senate, there could have been a party caucus...
...Mrs...
...Eventually he got the presidency, while she got the Paris embassy, and finally the equivalent of a state funeral...
...Then, when Rockefeller dropped out of the '92 race, she settled on Mario Cuomo...
...Graham was one of the mourners...
...Nonetheless, it is quite a good book, and Mrs...
...This separates her from44 Social distinctions matter, and Jay Rockefeller was more her type...
...She did not seem to like him that much, but Michael Dukakis made her uncomfortable...
...Most were in on the scam to begin with...
...The last piece of White House stationery they handled was a letter from Marsha Scott, now the Clinton director of presidential correspondence, asking them to make way for the Clinton loyalists...
...Many other journalistic sycophants have climbed aboard, too...
...She was not making a moral judgment, of course...
...In fact, she died after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while doing her daily laps in the Ritz pool in Paris...
...Graham apparently wrote it herself...
...41 BOY CLINTON FOUR YEARS AGO High on Clinton's hit list were nineteen "worker bee" employees of the White House Correspondence Office, mostly older women, some of whom have worked in the White House since the Nixon and Johnson administrations, and who worked for low wages "at the pleasure of the president," unprotected by the federal career civil service system....Their job was to sort the mail and send out letters following responses drafted by political appointees...
...they can be found living cheek-by-jowl in the same exclusive chic neighborhoods, and hobnobbing at the same Georgetown parties...
...The reporter then wrote a page-one story that described people of "affluence and influence" engaging in "constant stroking," while reminding one another that they were all "running on the fast track...
...Harriman wanted Jay Rockefeller for president...
...They belong to the same elite...
...The Times also reported that one of the officiating clergymen declared that "like the allied troops who died on D-Day almost 53 years ago, Mrs...
...she thought only that his candidacy might not survive the scandal...
...And yes, they are Democratic and liberal...
...Some of the 938 people who recently turned up on the now famous White House guest list had given more money than she had, but got only an overnight stay...
...Harriman, who was then the widowed Mrs...
...The Washington political and media elite had been party to another fiasco...
...Calling Reagan a dunce might have been a shade controversial, but the press thought that's what he was, too, and as Mrs...
...Moreover, the New York Times said her "issues evenings" obviously were "gems of the genre...
...history, while Clifford would help shrink Mrs...
...When John F. Kennedy was elected, Mrs...
...Harriman told Newsweek about the coverage, "It's better to be talked about than not talked about...
...Lifestyle and politics are bound up in a package...
...and answered it by saying "everybody, at least every Democrat...
...It chose to publish three...
...Clifford, one of the wise men of the Democratic Party, said Ronald Reagan was an "amiable dunce...
...Harriman's "high standards of statesmanship," was from a consultant who had received $10,226 in fees from her PAC...
...After Averell Harriman died, in 1986, she was worth some $115 million...
...Stuart Eizenstat, Smith writes, would develop the themes, choose the experts who spoke, and provide Mrs...
...Barry Goldwater, though, seemed menacing and left her in "a high state of alarm," but she realizes now she "had a very distorted view of him —and an unfair one...
...She came along in Democratic politics at just the right time...
...Harriman at a Washington dinner party in 1971...
...No one in the great cathedral cried out to protest this, however, and it would have been out of character if any of them had...
...The amiable dunce would launch the greatest peacetime economic expansion in U.S...
...She would invite thirty to forty guests—potential donors, union leaders, Democratic politicians—to discuss new ideas for the History is personal for the grand dames of Georgetown...
...Ghosts who hang in there get rewarded...
...other Washington memoirists, but more important than that, she is the doyenne of the capital's political and media elite...
...Surely no one would ask him to leave...
...Graham is smart and tough and likable, and she writes about the elite...
...It is unlikely Mrs...
...he said...
...Social distinctions matter, and he was more her type...
...Their principal job there is to applaud one another, and to look earnest when they do...
...Harriman's memorial service...
...Harriman was married to Winston Churchill's son Randolph, she and Mr...
...One issues evening, a 1981 discussion on the economy, was presided over by investment banker Felix Rohatyn...
...Cultural and socialaffinity now merge with political affinity among the elite...
...Harriman (Simon & Schuster, $30), Sally Bedell Smith notes that Sandy Berger, as the lead writer, worked for weeks on a 1988 speech that Mrs...
...Harriman JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...Harriman had had an affair when Randolph was shipped out of London...
...Liberalism is an identity...
...You suspect she was more at home with a Connecticut Anglican than a Massachusetts Greek...
...Harriman ever spoke a word for public consumption that did not come from a speech writer or consultant, and her pieces on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post were all ghosted...
...Think of all this as evidence of our cultural and political decline...
...Meanwhile, Berger is now the head of the National Security Council, and Eizenstat is the State Department's under secretary for economic affairs...
...Leland Hayward, to Mr...
...PRESS WATCH by John Corry A Place Called Pamelot The memorial service for Pamela Harriman, according to the New York Times, was "the closest thing to a state funeral Washington has seen in years," and surely that was true...
...Harriman did quite well...
...Thus everyone in it seems to have money, not necessarily Harriman size, but still considerable...
...Substantive matters were discussed...
...The critics have emphasized her post-feminist awakening, and stressed the difficulties she had as a woman when she took over the Post...
...Apparently she found Dole's accusation groundless...
...Harriman was a famous courtesan and Democratic fundraiser, and while it was always fun to read about her in the gossip columns or Women's Wear Daily, few people took her seriously...
...She quotes from a speech that Bob Dole made when Woodward and Bernstein were all over Watergate during the 1972 election...
...Everyone in Washington employs ghosts—Pat Moynihan and one or two others excepted—but Republican ghosts tend to be colorless sorts,while Democratic ghosts are more flashy...
...Harriman's $115 million to $ro million, and be sued for his bad counsel...
...He does not vote the right way, but he is very rich and he once was married to Elizabeth Taylor...
...M rs...
Vol. 30 • April 1997 • No. 4
