Pamela Harriman

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This was all so long ago, and it’s never fun to badmouth a woman, but Pam did get away with as much as one can without landing in the pokey. Only last week there was a brouhaha over here because the letters of David Harlech were being auctioned off. The one the media concentrated on was his cri de coeur to Jackie Kennedy once she had informed him that she was going to marry Onassis. Will these men never learn? Did he really expect someone of Jackie’s mold to prefer him and his leaking roof over the yacht, the private jet, and the private island?

Back in 1953, in Rome, the most intelligent American woman ever, the beautiful playwright, editor, writer, congresswoman, and ambassador to Rome, Clare Boothe Luce, analyzed the Trieste problem between Tito and the Italian government in a manner that left the chauvinistic Italians, as well as Eisenhower and Dulles, openmouthed with admiration. She then had too much to drink at the reception and blurted out: “I could have said all this in a few words rather than the 480-page analysis I have just presented you with: All men are idiots. After all, women are not interested in sex. All they want is babies and security from men. Men are just too stupid to know it.” Eat your heart out, feminism.