“Pamela’s strategic sex life is now recognized by scholars of diplomacy and war as “politically significant.”

Power. Pamela Harriman’s power was sex and intrigue, and Kingmaker tells Harriman’s global impact spanning from World War II through the Clinton administration. I appreciated Sonia Purnell’s use of recently unveiled primary sources because this book reads like historical fiction. Harriman is larger than life. 

She grows up in an English family of “aristocratic entitlement,” but she is overweight and unattractive during her teenage years. She marries Winston Churchill’s awful son, Randolph. Her first marriage opened doors and allowed her to become a confidant of Winston Churchill during World War II. 

Pamela consistently attracted high status men throughout her life (3 marriages), and she convened and hosted audiences that gave her behind-the-scenes power and influence across England and the United States. 

I appreciated this unique lens on WWII history. Purnell speaks to the ways women stepped up during the war effort, and she documents how difficult it was for women to step away from significance and a workplace where they thrived while men were away at war. Purnell also documents the tension between the workplace and motherhood, and Harriman is largely an absent mother.

I really enjoyed the second half of the book where Harriman reinvents herself and drives significant change in the Democratic Party in the United States. Through “PamPAC,” she fundraises (over $12M in the 1980s), bankrolls policy research, handpicks favorable and moderate candidates, and ultimately plays a meaningful role in Bill Clinton’s election as President. 

Quotes

“Pamela was handling information of huge global significance that could affect millions of lives. Her pillow talk was reaching the ears of leaders and influencing high-level policy on both sides of the Atlantic. Far from trying to stop Pamela’s affair with Averell, the Churchills contrived to thrust them together: the national emergency took precedence over all else, including the ruins of their son’s marriage.”

“Of the multitude of attractive Americans in town, she as the fabled Pamela Churchill could take her pick. There was strategic purpose in her selection—each one was a man with clout in the war effort and soon she had developed an astonishing collection of bedfellows.”

“Her detractors were wrong” that her charms were a “substitute for intellect and insight,” says Bob Shrum. “She was widely read and mostly self-educated.” Pamela read up on her donors as she had once studied lovers and they were unutterably flattered.”

“I can’t emphasize how important she was in moving the party to the center: a tougher defense policy, the focus on the middle class, the self-examination of where and why we’d gone wrong.”