Pamela Harriman was one of the remarkable women of the twentieth century.  Her designation in 1993 as the United States ambassador to France was the culmination of a varied and vivid career.

       Relations between France and the United States were sometimes prickly in the nineteen-nineties.  Mrs. Harriman prepared for her appointment by spending long hours with our best academic specialists on France.  This was typical of the disciplined and conscientious approach that, accompanied by linguistic skills, unflagging energy and remarkable charm, made her an effective representative of her adopted country.

       "She made herself," wrote the commentator William Pfaff from Paris in the International Herald Tribune, "the most successful American political ambassador of the decade."  After her death in 1997, the French president Jacques Chirac, calling her "a great ambassador of the United States and a grand lady,"  conferred on her posthumously Frances's highest award, a Legion of Honor medal.  President Clinton and Vice President Gore spoke at her funeral in the National Cathedral in Washington.

       Pamela Harriman had long appreciated the importance of public service.  She felt that foreign service in particular offered young people a unique opportunity to inform and fulfill themselves while serving their country.  That is why the College of William and Mary, an institution Pamela Harriman had long befriended, honored her by establishing the Pamela Harriman Foreign Service Fellowships.

       History had educated Pamela Harriman in the transcendent significance of public service in a democracy.  She was born in 1920 to an old English county family.  Marriage to Randolph Churchill in 1939 thrust her into the center of the British government during the Second World War.  Winston Churchill encouraged Pamela's genuine absorption in public affairs, intelligent curiosity, an instinct for people and a steely determination to do any job.

       In the late nineteen fifties she came to the United States and in 1960 married Leland Hayward, the theatrical agent and producer.  After his death she married Averell Harriman, whom she had first met in London during the war.  Harriman, a leading diplomat of his generation as well as a former governor of New York and a force in the Democratic party, completed her education in diplomacy and politics.  Accompanying her husband on his foreign travels until his death in 1986, Pamela Harriman met world leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

       Acquiring American citizenship and established in Washington, Pamela Harriman was a founder and chairman of Democrats for the 80s, a political action committee.  As an influential political activist, she was among the first to bring to Washington a then little known governor of Arkansas, William Jefferson Clinton.

     Her abiding concern was foreign affairs and world peace.  And she believed in the young.  "It is you," she once said, "the young people just entering public service, to whom we look to forge new paths of understanding among the nations of the world."