She was a reporter with wealth that few if any journalist could or can match. Plus adventurous. Kathleen Lanier (Kathy) Harriman was a granddaughter of E. H. Harriman, who amassed a fortune between $70 million and $100 million as head of Union Pacific Railroad. She graduated from Bennington College in 1940 with a degree in social science.
The next year at age 23, she joined her father, W. Averell Harriman, in London, where he was the U.S. ambassador. In London, she reported for International News Service and later for Newsweek. Her roommate was Pamela Digby Churchill, daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill. In 1943, Kathy’s father was named ambassador to the Soviet Union, and she joined him in Moscow.
She learned Russian, was the official hostess at her father’s diplomatic functions and traveled with him to the 1945 Yalta conference at which President Roosevelt, Churchill and Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin planned Europe’s postwar reorganization. In 1944 as her father’s representative, she accompanied more than a dozen foreign correspondents into the Katyn forest where more than a thousand Polish officers had been massacred early in World War II to witness autopsies of exhumed bodies. After the war Stalin gave her and her father two cavalry horses which she rode.
Harriman was an accomplished skier and equestrienne. In 1947 at 29, she married Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, on her family’s 25,000-acre estate. He died in 1999, 30 years after he shot himself in an apparent suicide attempt. Kathleen Harriman Mortimer died February 17 at her cottage in Arden, New York, at age 93.