Historian: The Untold Story of WWII's Most Fascinating Person - Geoffrey Roberts
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Who is Kathleen Harriman and why is her story significant?
the nature of Stalin's power which wasn't just about he was a dictator he was brutal he had all his coercive power at his disposal he had people shot and stuff like that his power rested on his personality and on his charm and the social capital which he parlayed into politics you see the charming Stalin in action and you can see the power he exerts it's very revealing about the nature of the Stalinist system and Stalin's power in that system and where that power lies. And the roots of that power, the sources of power, which is tremendous, are actually much more interesting and complex than people might think.
Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci, and joining us today is Jeffrey Roberts. Jeffrey Roberts is a renowned historian, a brilliant author. He's also a commentator, but a book that is absolutely fascinating to me, which is called Wartime Letters. Kathleen Harriman, who I think is one of the understudied, by the way, historical figures from the Second World War. And you've obviously spent decades studying the Second World War and the Soviet Union, sir. And we loved your book, Stalin Wars, et cetera.
What inspired Geoffrey Roberts to write about Kathleen Harriman?
And I didn't really understand Soviet strategy until I met your writing. But what drew you to Kathleen Harriman? As I was saying to you before we started the podcast, so I met young Kathleen Harriman through the work of Sonia Purnell, who wrote the book on Pamela Harriman, who was Pamela Digby Churchill and the intersection of their lives. But this young woman is absolutely fascinating to me. And so why don't we start there? Why did you write about her?
Well, I met Kathy through her letters, yeah? And I'll tell the story in the book, because my first trip to the United States, September 2001, I was in Washington, D.C., working in the Library of Congress on a file of Avril Harman's papers in the Library of Congress. And in those papers, dispersed throughout those papers in hundreds of different files, copies of some of Kathy's letters.
How did Kathleen Harriman contribute during WWII?
So that's what I came across. I can't remember whether or not I discovered her letters before the terror attacks or after the terror attacks. But what I do remember is that throughout that month, I was scurrying around the Library of Congress, the Avril Harman Papers, collecting all of Cathy's letters together, making copies of them, because I had this idea, these letters were so interesting, so captivating, fascinating, that they had to be published. They had to be read by other people. So that was my idea. I was going to publish a book of these letters. So that's September 2001. Okay, so I returned to Ireland. And then it occurred to me, something which hadn't occurred to me in the previous few weeks, maybe Kathy was still alive.
Because she was born in 1917, which made her early 80s, and she was alive. So what happens was a few months later, March 2002, I actually... traveled to New York and met Kathy. We had lunch. We had a long afternoon conversation in which, you know, I talked to her about the letters and also about her wartime experiences. So I met Kathy through her letters. Then I met her, much to my surprise, in person. Now, there isn't... I traveled to do it. The reason I've talked to her, my kind of goal here, I wanted to get her permission to publish the letters in a book, right?
What insights do Kathleen's letters provide about Stalin and Churchill?
The problem was she refused to give that permission because she didn't want to take any undue credit. She was very critical of... people who after the war wrote various memoirs claiming that they'd been present at great events with great people. The person she had in mind in particular was Kaye Summersbee. Kaye Summersbee was Eisenhower's assistant driver during the war. And Kaye wrote a memoir just after the war in which there were hints she had an affair with Eisenhower. Well, Eisenhower was Kathleen Harriman's hero for sure. So she, she, she said to me, she said, she wrote to me, she swore that she would never, never do the same thing. So, so basically she vetoed, um, publication of her letters by me.
Right. And that veto held until she died in 2011.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Kathleen Harriman and why is her story significant?
0:00–1:11
2
What inspired Geoffrey Roberts to write about Kathleen Harriman?
1:11–2:09
3
How did Kathleen Harriman contribute during WWII?
2:09–3:44
4
What insights do Kathleen's letters provide about Stalin and Churchill?
3:44–5:08
5
How did Avril Harriman's diplomacy impact WWII?
5:08–6:24
6
What was the nature of Kathleen Harriman's relationship with her father?
6:24–7:30
7
How did Kathleen Harriman's experiences shape her perspective?
7:30–8:48
8
What lessons can we learn from Kathleen Harriman's life today?
8:48–25:29
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci
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