The Daughters of Yalta

It was not the first time Averell – always Averell or Ave, never Father or Daddy – had left Kathy to fend for herself in a remote place. During her four years at Bennington College in Vermont, Kathy spent her winter vacations at Sun Valley, Averell’s ski resort in Idaho. It was the first of its kind in the United States. When Americans caught the ski craze following the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, Averell realised that an enormous opportunity lay before him. As chairman of Union Pacific Railroad, he was looking to increase business on western railway lines. People needed a reason to go west, and a glamorous ski destination rivalling the Alpine resorts of Europe would be just the thing. A ‘seaside ranch in the mountains’, as it was billed, Sun Valley was an instant success – especially after Averell directed his engineers to invent and install the world’s first chairlift. Sun Valley quickly became as much a home to Kathy as the Harrimans’ city residence in Manhattan or their country estate, Arden House, in the Hudson River Valley. Kathy’s parents had divorced when she was ten, and her mother, Kitty, had died of cancer when Kathy was just seventeen. Averell had remarried in 1930, to Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney’s ex-wife, Marie Norton, and Marie naturally assumed the role of mistress of Arden. Though Kathy and her stepmother were on good terms and Arden House was surrounded by glorious grounds for riding and shooting, two of Kathy’s most serious pursuits, Sun Valley was the place that truly connected Kathy with her father.

While Averell chased across the world, attending to his various endeavours, first in business, then increasingly in government, he left Kathy as his deputy for weeks at a time to assist with the day-to-day operations of the resort: assessing slope conditions, seeing to publicity, and looking after celebrity guests such as Ernest Hemingway, who soon called Sun Valley home. She even performed the occasional bit of reconnaissance on rival resorts, which had begun to spring up in the West. Though the family was remarkably wealthy, the Harrimans were not ostentatious and held something of a Spartan attitude. Kathy had attended the Foxcroft School, a boarding school in Virginia known for its fox hunts, its multi-day horseback expeditions to the Luray Caverns, and its requirement that its girls sleep on unheated outdoor porches every night, regardless of the weather. Embracing a life among the elements, at Sun Valley, Kathy quickly developed a passion for skiing. Before her father had chairlifts installed, she often made the five-hour trek up a mountainside – fashionably clad in a monogrammed jacket and cashmere sweater, her skis encased in sealskins – all for one run down the untouched Idaho powder. Her friends and family started calling her ‘Puff’ for the sound of her ragged breaths at high altitude, as, unyielding, she trudged higher and higher. But the precious weeks Kathy spent at Sun Valley meant so much more than athletic thrills. They served as a proving ground for a daughter determined to show herself worthy of standing at her father’s side as an equal.

In many ways, helping to manage Sun Valley was the ideal preparation for the work Kathy now faced. But nothing could truly ready a person for the overwhelming amount of labour that had to be done before Roosevelt and his party arrived at Livadia Palace. Under Lavrentiy Beria’s direction, the Soviets were frantically restocking the villas with whatever could be spared from Moscow’s luxury hotels. More than fifteen hundred railcars, laden with building supplies, tools, furnishings, rugs, light bulbs, art, dishes, cookware and food, had heaved along on the thousand-mile journey to the Crimea. It seemed as if every moveable object within Moscow’s renowned Hotel Metropol had been packed up and transported. Even the maids’ uniforms for the conference were embroidered with the Metropol’s distinctive ‘M.’ In addition to the obvious beds, tables and chairs, the more mundane items of daily life, such as coat hangers, shaving mirrors and ashtrays, had to be supplied. Kathy presumed some of these things were ‘just being “requisitioned” out of homes’ from the war-battered towns nearby.

There was also the problem of evicting the current residents, who had moved in when the Nazis moved out: bugs. The palace was infested with lice and bedbugs. As the motley team of Beria’s NKVD forces, Red Army soldiers, local peasant labourers and the Romanian POWs scrambled to put everything in order, the U.S. Navy Medical Corps arrived to delouse the palace. They sprayed the furniture with a 10 per cent solution of DDT in kerosene and dusted all the linens with DDT powder, but even that draconian dose did not get rid of the bugs entirely. Kathy herself was all too well acquainted with Russian insects. On the train from Moscow to Yalta, something had bitten her near her eye. Her skin had swollen so badly that for a day or two she could barely see. International wartime diplomacy could be distinctly unglamorous, but Kathy remained unfazed.

It was because of her stalwart and unflappable nature that Kathy had become a fixture in her father’s world. Thanks to her fifteen months in Moscow and the two prior years in London, where she had worked as a war reporter, Averell Harriman’s attractive, opinionated daughter was well known to the military and civilian leadership of all three Allied nations gathering at Yalta. Her presence at Livadia Palace would come as no surprise to any of them, not even to Roosevelt. ‘As this is her department, have arranged to take Kathleen along,’ Averell had informed FDR by wire on January 17. ‘I will leave her at Yalta to assist in the details of the arrangements there.’ Roosevelt did not object.

It was ironic that this advance work in living arrangements and hospitality had become Kathy’s domain. She had moved to London at the beginning of the war to work as a journalist – not, as she insisted multiple times, to be her father’s housekeeper. In fact, one of the last things she had written to her sister, Mary, before moving to Moscow was ‘I only hope there’ll be no entertaining.’ Kathy was woefully disappointed. Life in Moscow seemed to be one lavish caviar- and vodka-fuelled banquet after another. By now she knew to expect that supervising an enormous household staff and entertaining guests would be part of her work at Yalta, but over time she had come to realise that her role as her father’s hostess and deputy was much more complex than simply organising parties and managing the house. Though never officially given a title, she was essentially serving as the Americans’ protocol officer, a role often overlooked and underappreciated yet vital to international diplomacy. Overseeing protocol encompassed everything from observing and respecting the rituals and customs of foreign nations to making sure that the seating arrangements at a state dinner did not exacerbate petty grievances. Now it was up to Kathy to anticipate and eliminate all potential sources of cultural confusion, irritation, or distraction before the delegates arrived. Even something as seemingly innocuous as accidentally mistyping a deputy secretary’s name on a place card could annoy that delegate, who would then take his irritation with him into the conference room. The follow-on effects could be damaging.

Important as the rituals of protocol were, Kathy was sometimes charmingly oblivious to them. Once, during a night out in London with her best friend, Pamela Churchill, the prime minister’s daughter-in-law, she happened upon the king of Greece. Kathy greeted him with a simple American ‘How do do!’ Pam, by contrast, dropped to a deep curtsy. Kathy also was not inclined to defer to those who considered themselves her superiors. She had once caused a kerfuffle with Adele Astaire, the sister and former dance partner of the American movie star Fred Astaire, who had married Lord Charles Cavendish, after writing a rather sarcastic Newsweek article about Adele’s contributions to the war effort. As a war reporter, Kathy had met and covered countless women who worked in factories, served as transport pilots, or nursed soldiers just behind the front lines. Adele’s efforts as an ‘amanuensis’ – making improvements to the love letters soldiers sent home – could not compare (though Adele did make for good copy). In the article, Kathy observed that Adele ‘still [wore] silly bows atop her graying hair’. Newsweek had also printed Adele’s age – a generous forty-four – but Kathy could blame that on her editor. Unsurprisingly, Adele, a friend of Kathy’s stepmother, had not taken kindly to this portrayal. When the former starlet next saw the younger woman at a restaurant in SoHo, she shrieked at her, calling Kathy a ‘bitch to end all bitches’ and threatened to ‘break’ her in London. Kathy was visibly amused, which made Adele all the more furious.

Now, much as Kathy might have liked to laugh at the Russian maître d’hôtel as he worked out the optimal arrangements of china and crystal place settings, she refrained from sharing her frank opinions. A war was raging; a diplomatic approach was essential. Among people who cared deeply about protocol, it was imperative that everything was done just right. It was a thankless job. If she executed everything correctly, no one would notice her work; if, however, she made a mistake, her father would take the blame for failing to make every provision for cross-cultural harmony. Helping the myriad challenging personalities in Roosevelt’s entourage adapt to Russian customs would be difficult, even without the added complication of the trying physical environment. The Soviets had done their best to ensure the comfort of their guests, but nonetheless, the navy medical team had to warn the American contingent to lower expectations and encouraged ‘a little good naturedness’ from all parties.

As Kathy went from room to room at Livadia, inspecting the living arrangements, the ever-present NKVD officers in tow, she put her Russian-language skills to use. FDR’s suite, once the tsar’s private chambers, including his office and private dining room, was one of Kathy’s chief concerns. The room now serving as the president’s bedroom had an ambience of overbearing darkness. It was like a Pullman car carved from a heavy block of wood. The walls were panelled in mahogany; paintings in enormous gold-leaf frames lined the walls; orange-fringed silk lampshades abounded; plush green harem cushions were scattered across the floor. And in the middle was a massive wooden bed frame, an imposing style of furnishing the Soviets imagined that a visiting dignitary would desire. In pursuit of perfection, they had several times changed their minds about which Bokhara rug would best suit the room. Each change in opinion surfaced only after workers had moved the behemoth of a bed back into place.

But Kathy could be every bit as demanding and attentive to detail. When she found that painters in FDR’s bathroom could not understand her Russian, she was undeterred. Catching their attention, Kathy pointed to the window and the sea beyond and then back at the walls. Back and forth, back and forth. The wall colour, she tried to explain yet again, had to match the colour of the water. Nearby, a plumber, who was supervising the repairs to the bathroom fixtures the Nazis had ripped from the wall, watched her. He did not seem amused. Perhaps this was because she had ordered the painters to change the colour at least six times already.

Kathy had more important issues to worry about than the slighted feelings of the plumbers and painters. A battalion-sized contingent of Cabinet members, State Department officials, and top-ranking military officers – not to mention the president of the United States – was about to arrive on the palace’s doorstep. Bathrooms, or the lack thereof, were proving a particular nightmare, and Kathy did what she could to forestall ablution chaos. A mere nine toilets and four bathtubs were available to accommodate several hundred people, and only Roosevelt’s suite had a private bath. Everyone else would either have to wait in line or use the latrines that had been hastily constructed in the garden. Even with the added nineteenth-century-style privies, thirty-five officers would be shaving in buckets beside their beds.

Rooming assignments also required strategic thinking. There were not enough private bedrooms in the palace to accommodate everyone whose credentials would have warranted the finest suites in New York’s or London’s most exclusive hotels. As it was, sixteen colonels would have to share one room as if in a barrack; junior officers would be stuffed in the eaves. The bedrooms on the first floor, nearest the president, Kathy reserved for his closest government advisers: his special adviser Harry Hopkins, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, the Soviet expert and Russian interpreter Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen, the director of the Office of War Mobilization and elder statesman James Byrnes, and Averell. Top-ranking military leaders she assigned to the second floor. As army chief of staff, General George Marshall outranked everyone. Kathy awarded him the tsar’s imperial bedroom. Admiral Ernest King, the second most senior officer in the U.S. Navy, would have to be satisfied with the tsarina’s boudoir.

When Kathy could spare time, she fled to the outdoors. After a long Moscow winter, capped by the three days she and her father had spent inside a pest-ridden train en route to the Crimea, it was a relief to walk the sloping paths of the palace gardens, the cypress trees piercing the horizon, the snowcapped, craggy mountains looming in the background. The scenery reminded Kathy of Italy. Exploring the gardens was not the strenuous exercise she was used to, though the walkways naturally graded uphill. Still, the warm sun was welcome. During the previous, seemingly endless Russian winter, she had come down with a terrible bout of scurvy, which made her gums swell and bleed so dramatically, she thought her teeth would fall out.

These outdoor explorations provided insights and inspiration for an additional assignment Kathy had to complete before the guests arrived. Together with Eddie Page, one of the young Foreign Service officers at the embassy in Moscow, she was writing a pamphlet to assist the Americans with their brief immersion in local culture. As most of the American delegation had never set foot in the Crimea, nor in fact any other part of the Soviet Union, this pamphlet was meant to be a useful diplomatic instrument, full of information about the geography, history and significance of this unfamiliar part of the world. The task lacked the journalistic challenge of the hard-hitting reporting about developments on the fighting fronts that Kathy had begun to write for Newsweek just before Averell was called to Moscow, but at least it was something.

When Kathy first moved to London, she had no journalistic training beyond a general education in international affairs at Bennington College and experience assisting with public relations for Sun Valley. But journalism had been her ticket to London – and to Averell’s world. It was only after her mother died that Kathy had truly come to know her father. Shortly after Kitty’s death, Averell had written to his two daughters. In this letter, he told them that he had somewhat radical notions about parenting. He would never be able to replace their mother, as he simply was not the warm, affectionate type who showered his children with outward signs of love. He could, however, offer them something different.

After Averell’s father, the self-made railway tycoon E. H. Harriman, died when Averell was seventeen, Averell’s mother inherited the entirety of her husband’s vast fortune. ‘The Richest Woman in the World’, as magazines dubbed her, became a formidable force in American philanthropy. Independence ran deep in the Harriman women. Averell’s sister Mary Harriman Rumsey was a force in her own right. As a student, she became known for driving herself to Barnard College in a coach-and-four and for founding the Junior League, a national organisation inspired by the work of the settlement movement and the social reform leader Jane Addams. Mary Rumsey went on to become a key appointee in Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, a New Deal organisation meant to stabilise business and employment opportunities after the tumult of the Great Depression. With such women as examples, Averell wanted his own daughters to be as independent as they desired – a rare sentiment among fathers of their class. In time, he hoped they would join him in his business affairs to whatever degree it suited them. If they could be patient with him and maintain an open mind, he was sure that, soon enough, they would become ‘the finest & best of friends’. While Mary ultimately sought a more traditional life of marriage and family, Kathy eagerly took up Averell’s offer.

When Averell wrote this letter, he could not have foreseen that in addition to working alongside him in Sun Valley, Kathy would spend four years at his side, navigating diplomacy in two European capitals embroiled in war. Averell’s second wife, Marie, should have been the one to accompany him, but because of trouble with her eyesight she had elected to remain in New York. Averell encouraged Kathy to go in her place. To Averell, the idea of bringing his daughter to London was not some revolutionary concept. It was more like continuing a family tradition. When Averell was a boy, his father had insisted on taking the entire family – wife, sons and daughters – on his travels around the world. In 1899, when Averell was seven years old, the family embarked on the Harriman Expedition, a major exploration of the Alaskan coast that Averell’s father organised and sponsored, alongside America’s pre-eminent scientists, artists, writers and photographers. Other summers, they drove across Europe in brand-new automobiles. Later, in 1905, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, Averell’s father took the family to Japan, where he was looking to develop an around-the-world railway network.

Kathy was thrilled by Averell’s invitation. Her childhood governess, Mouche, was English, and nearly every summer the Harriman girls had travelled to Britain or France. The experience had instilled in Kathy a natural kinship with Europeans and a sense of adventure. But at first, the American government refused to permit Kathy to join her father in London as she was not considered essential personnel. Averell contacted his friend Harry Hopkins, FDR’s longtime colleague, adviser, and the person closest to the president. Hopkins secured a visa for Kathy to work in London as a war reporter, despite her lack of experience. Undaunted, Kathy wrote to Hopkins, ‘Someone opens the door or passes the butter at the table – “thank you” is the polite result … But teaming that same “thank you” with the opportunity you’ve made possible for me just doesn’t make sense … I’m extremely grateful & will continue being so for a hellova long time.’ She flew from New York to Bermuda to Lisbon on a luxury ‘flying boat’, the Dixie Clipper, and arrived in London on May 16, 1941, less than a week after the worst air raid of the Blitz. More than five hundred Luftwaffe planes had bombarded London for nearly seven hours, leaving the historic chamber in the House of Commons a smouldering pile of char.

While in London, Kathy worked first for the International News Service and later for Newsweek, one of a number of businesses in which Averell had an ownership stake. But moving to the USSR with Averell meant resigning from Newsweek just as she was angling for a posting to cover the war in North Africa. ‘I am thrilled at what you have done – and very proud. Don’t worry about your future plans,’ Ave assured her in a note. Once in Moscow, however, her journalistic endeavours had been largely limited to clipping and mimeographing articles to include in the daily embassy news bulletin, a task she compared to ‘paper doll cutting’. Now, compiling this pamphlet on the Crimea, Kathy found that information about local history, both ancient and from the nineteenth century, was abundant. But she was having much more difficulty learning about the Crimea’s more recent past. One afternoon, she decided to pay a call on an elderly local woman, Maria Chekhova, sister of the famed Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Seeking relief from tuberculosis, Chekhov had moved to Yalta with his mother and sister in 1898, and it was there that he composed two of his most famous works, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The writer had died in 1904, but his eighty-three-year-old sister still lived up the road from Livadia Palace, in his elegant white dacha, with views of the sea; somehow she had managed to save it from Nazi wrath. Kathy’s visit to Miss Chekhova seemed to hold potential: who could have a better view of the past half-century of Russian history and culture? But though Miss Chekhova was ‘charming, full of life and thrilled to be meeting some Americans’, as Kathy wrote to Mouche, Kathy was ‘having a hellova a time finding out about the pre-revolutionary history of this part of the coast, as the Soviets seem very reticent on the subject’. Chekhova also refused to tell Kathy anything ‘about what happened during the year and a half of occupation’. As Kathy soon discovered, Maria Chekhova was hardly unique. At the palace, she found the same restraint. ‘The natives who work around the place here at Livadia don’t seem to know anything either,’ she told her former governess.

When Kathy moved to Moscow in October 1943, people had warned her that daily life in Russia would be unlike anything she had ever known, even compared to London in the immediate aftermath of the Blitz. ‘I thought coming over here – starting to work for the Press and all that, would be the last time in my life that I’d be scared,’ Kathy wrote to Mary just before leaving London. ‘Now crashing London seems like chicken feed.’ She had expected to find Moscow a city of ramshackle buildings made of wood and occupied by coarse, unsmiling people, but that was not the case. In some ways, Moscow looked much like any modern western city. American Lend-Lease trucks rumbled down wide boulevards, and streetcars were so completely crammed with people rushing around the city that they reminded Kathy of the trains returning to New York from New Haven after the Harvard-Yale game. But for all their hustling, Muscovites seemed to be in a perpetual rush to nowhere. All but the oldest citizens outpaced the young and athletic Kathy on the streets in their great hurry to join queues for food or drink, only to stand and wait in line for hours. Kathy might have asked them about these paradoxes, but she was not allowed to socialise with them. She was permitted to mingle only with the diplomatic community or the men in the American press corps, many of whom had Russian girlfriends who were ‘out and out prostitutes’. Often, the only friend she had was her father. In a bustling city of millions, life was remarkably insular.

By 1945, the American people still knew very little about their eastern ally. There had been no diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States between 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power, and 1933, when President Roosevelt finally recognised the Soviet Union. During that time, limited business or academic exchange occurred between the two countries; but even before the 1917 revolution, Russia held little interest for Americans. Few learned Russian as a foreign language. It was not until a professor at the University of Chicago adapted a French-Russian grammar book in the early twentieth century that a Russian-language textbook became available in America. By the time Kathy went to Moscow, there was still only one reliable English-Russian phrasebook for beginners: Bondar’s Simplified Russian Method. Kathy had no idea such a thing existed, so she had to borrow a Bondar from a fellow American diplomat when she arrived.

Learning the language was only the first barrier to overcome when attempting to understand the Soviet Union. Kathy found the Soviet citizens with whom she had incidental contact in Moscow or on the ski slopes of the Lenin Hills ‘friendly and frank’, but on an official level, it was nearly impossible to get to know anyone other than the most senior leaders in government, and not in any personal way. Kathy was far from the only person who encountered this difficulty. In the weeks before the Yalta Conference, the State Department had submitted a request to the American embassy, asking for biographical profiles of the Soviet bureaucrats with whom they would be working. George Kennan, Averell’s chargé d’affaires at the embassy and one of the few Russian experts in the Foreign Service, responded that the request was impossible to fulfil. The Soviets never shared any kind of personal information about their bureaucrats with outsiders, except in obituaries, when ‘they can no longer be of use to the foreign world’. Friendship, expressions of mutual interest, or acts of kindness counted for nothing. As Kennan explained, if a Soviet bureaucrat ‘does a kind or obliging act, it is because he finds it in the interests of his government to do so’, as ‘the personal views of a Soviet official have little or no influence on his behavior … The views of a Soviet official are manufactured for him.’ When it came to shaping policy, ‘individual relations could therefore not possibly have – except possibly in the case of Stalin himself – much effect on such decisions.’ As much as Kathy and even Kennan knew about the Soviet Union, there remained expanses of ambiguity and oblivion, as vast as the Soviet Union itself, which lay beyond the grasp of even the most informed outsider.