PAMELA HARRIMAN, LIFE OF THE PARTY

That night in Little Rock, to which she'd flown in a chartered jet, she watched the returns at Tipper and Al Gore's private party packed with the most faithful and generous of the Clinton-Gore supporters from every state in the Union. Here, too, there was excitement, but it was contained. Could this really be happening? When the word came through that Kentucky had gone for Clinton -- a stunning development -- the crowd was uncertain whether to cheer.

Then sometime after midnight, the cheering started and didn't stop. By then the streets were filled with delirious Democrats, and Harriman, on this most amazing night, was stuck inside.

"If I'd stayed up until 4:30, I'd have gotten to see Bill at another party," she says, in a tone that made clear that a 72-year-old woman with a big bank account wasn't about to try. But perhaps of all the well-wishers and supplicants in Little Rock that night, she didn't need to. Clinton and Gore both knew very well what Pamela Harriman had done for them.

Robert Strauss, U.S. ambassador to Russia but "Mr. Democrat" throughout much of the 1970s and '80s, remembers the night right after the disastrous election of 1980 when he pooh-poohed Pamela Harriman's proposal to save the Democratic Party -- an idea that later turned out to be "Democrats for the 80's." They were having dinner at her home when she started talking about setting up a political action committee "to revitalize the Democratic Party and promote alternatives to right-wing Republican rule."

The Reagan landslide had dealt the Democrats a knockout blow, and the notion that there would be a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate anytime soon seemed about as likely in November 1980 as the communists tearing down the Berlin Wall. There were those who might even say the notion was the fantasy of some would-be Georgetown Joan of Arc.

"I said, 'Pam, it's a very good idea, but you ought to remember that you're limited to how much it's going to amount to. I think this organization will be useful but never a big deal, because people want to give money directly to the party or to the candidate themselves. They don't want to filter it through you,' " Strauss recalled in a telephone interview from Moscow this week.

Pamela and her husband, Averell, 88 then and a grand old man among Washington Democrats, had become close friends of Strauss's when they backed him for party chairman several years earlier. Strauss says he and Averell often talked about getting Pamela involved in more than political hostessing. "He was worried about her being busy and having interests after his death, and he used to talk to me about Pam having something to do."

Pamela Harriman remembers that she and her husband had been "outraged" that the Democrats had lost the White House and the "backbone" of the U.S. Senate. Looking for the whys as well as the hows for forging a comeback for the party, they gathered remnants of the Democratic hierarchy around them on several nights in their Georgetown drawing room -- big names like Strauss, former defense secretary Clark Clifford, House Speaker "Tip" O'Neill, House Majority Leader Jim Wright, Senate Whip Alan Cranston, and Sens. John Glenn of Ohio, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Ernest Hollings of South Carolina and Gary Hart of Colorado.

Besides grudging admissions that the Republicans had outmaneuvered, outstrategized and just plain outsmarted them, some of them argued that the Democrats had lost touch with the middle class.

"You felt so impotent about what you could do," Harriman recalls. "But rather than just cry about it, it was important to stand up and be counted and try and fight your way back."

One way she was uniquely suited to fight was with money. She, or more precisely Averell, had plenty -- close to $100 million by some estimates -- and they knew people with plenty more. A "labor friend," she says, joked that she should start a PAC and call it "Pam PAC."

"I sort of laughed," she said. But she sort of thought about it. And then she just went ahead and did it.

Later, in discussions with Janet Howard, a tough former Hill staffer who's now Harriman's senior adviser, the idea of a PAC didn't seem so far-fetched after all. Three weeks after the election, advised that there was still time for her PAC to collect campaign contributions for 1980, Harriman filed the papers legitimizing Democrats for the 80's. "People laughed and joked," says this much-traveled, much-married social hostess of her unlikely new role as a political power broker. "But then, you know, I expected it, I guess, because how did they know what I know in my heart? They're always looking for hidden agendas, and my life hasn't been a hidden agenda. To me anyway."

So began the Harrimans' now-famous "issues evenings," affected but effective gatherings where policy experts, like New York investment banker Felix Rohatyn speaking on the flaws of Reaganomics or Sam Nunn on defense strategy, held sway over 30 or 40 policy makers, big contributors, labor leaders, elected officials and would-be candidates. Coming along afterward, passing the hat, so to speak, would be someone like Strauss.

"That's how Bill Clinton came into my life," says Harriman. "He had just lost the governor's race. He was so bright and one of the first people on my board."

Strauss admits now, "I was dead wrong and she was right. It did amount to something. And later, after she got it going, one of those nutty organizations attacked her and the story about it got into Time. She called me, terribly distraught. I told her, 'I was wrong and the fact that this right-wing outfit has taken you on means they put you in the big league. And, even more, that means that you were right.' "

If she was a lightning rod who stirred passions among critics, she was more importantly a catalyst who helped make possible a reshaping of the Democratic Party. Stuart Eizenstat, Jimmy Carter's domestic policy chief at the White House, calls her "a heroine ... who became the rallying center for tattered troops in a dispirited, divided party. It was much more than fund-raising. She used those French 'soirees' as real opportunities to discuss problems of the party, policy directions the party should take, what message we should give."

Through the sheer force of her "leadership, presence, drive and vision," according to Eizenstat, she pulled disparate pieces of the party together -- the House and Senate leadership, policy people, big contributors, young people, labor leaders.

"She was not just a pretty head. She rolled up her sleeves, got her fingernails figuratively dirty, rebuilding from the ground up, doing anything necessary," says Eizenstat. "I can't emphasize how important that was in moving the party to center: a tougher defense policy, the focus on the middle class, the self-examination of where and why we'd gone wrong. It led to the kind of direction Clinton took the party."

Others portray her as the most sophisticated of cheerleaders, giving disheartened Democrats a rallying point. If she didn't formulate new ideas, she at least created a seductively comfortable forum for their discussion. Her salon was a way for rising stars to meet each other, dine in splendor and refuel on the ultimate political sustenance: money.

By the time Democrats for the 80's was disbanded a decade later, with the Senate at least back in the Democratic fold, Pamela Harriman had raised $12 million in the elegant surroundings of Picassos, Matisses and Degas, priceless Chinese porcelains and authentic French antiques. And that figure did not include the "never less than $100,000 an evening" that innumerable individual candidates collected for their own campaigns.

Now, after 12 years as what Eizenstat calls the Democrats' "voice in the wilderness" -- albeit one with a British accent -- "the improbability of a British-born person who had deep roots in British politics being able to become queen mother of the Democratic Party" is a reality.

"If there is, in effect, a coronation, using Bill and Hillary Clinton as the king and queen," says Eizenstat, "I'd certainly call her the queen mother."

An Uncommon Upbringing

Talk about name recognition.

Hers -- Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman -- reads like a table of contents in "Great Lives of the Twentieth Century."

She began life as Pamela Digby, the daughter of the 11th Lord Digby, seven of whose family members were either in the House of Lords or the House of Commons. But her own political odyssey began 19 years later as Pamela Churchill, daughter-in-law of one of the major figures of world history, Britain's World War II prime minister, Winston Churchill.

She acted as Randolph Churchill's surrogate to his parliamentary constituency. Since he was away a lot, she made thrice-monthly rounds to Lancastershire, holding hands with people, listening to their problems, feeling some of their wartime pain. She remembers christening a submarine only to hear 10 days later that it had been sunk. "I was very young to do that," she says, "but ignorance is bliss."

She'd met Randolph in London on a blind date. The war hadn't yet broken out, but Britain was mobilizing. Her father and mother were generals, and her sister and brother were in the army. Fluent in German and French, she got a job as a translator at the foreign office in London.

"I knew if I went home I'd be put in the army," she says.

Young Churchill wasn't love at first sight, but she'd been attracted to him by the confidence he conveyed about the days ahead. All of her friends talked about "the end of everything, their lives being smashed and everybody being killed," she remembers. Suddenly, there was Randolph, acknowledging that the war would be long and bloody but without the slightest doubt that Britain would win.

She's had a knack for being in the front rows of history. "I've come to the age when I'm one of the few people left who knew these people," who saw them as more than historical figures. "Winston was the most human human being I've ever known," she says. "I think that was part of his greatness, that he felt things so strongly. ... I was very lucky, but you know, when you're 19, you don't sit back and say, 'Why am I here? How am I here? How extraordinary!' You just are there."

Years later, she was "there" again, this time as Pamela Hayward, married to Broadway producer Leland Hayward for 10 years until his death in 1970. She was perfecting something she would become preeminent at -- raising money, then for Jack and Bobby Kennedy by playing political hostess in an otherwise theatrical milieu. Her Kennedy ties reached back to pre-war England, where Joseph P. Kennedy was the American ambassador and his daughter, Kathleen, and she were presented at court together.

Her upbringing in a totally Tory stronghold was "not the upbringing of an average American," she concedes. Even now, 21 years after she became an American citizen because it was the only thing she could think to give Averell Harriman as a wedding present "that would mean something," people ask how she could be a Tory in England and a Democrat here.

"But people here don't understand that there's a big difference between being a socialist in England and a Democrat here. I relate very easily to my Tory upbringing. If you were in a position to be better off than others, it was your duty to take care of them. It seems to me," she says, "that that relates very well to what Democrats believe."

She solidified that affiliation when she married Harriman, whom she first met in wartime England where he was an emissary to Churchill. But Harriman's shadow was dense, and few in American politics took her as anything more than a dilettante, until, some years after his death in 1986, they realized she was still plugging away for the party.

There were also those who looked at much of her life as a rich girl's fling, not at all the sort of discipline supposedly required of those who are serious about politics. The end of her marriage to Randolph coinciding with the end of the war, she decided she wanted to educate herself for herself -- in art, music, in things that had been totally denied her. Settling in Paris where she'd once been in school, she became a darling of Tout Paris, linked variously with Ali Khan, Gianni Agnelli and one of the Rothschilds. She was the darling of French intellectuals, writers like Andre Malraux and Jean Cocteau, and artists like choreographer Roland Petit. Her frivolous and pampered reputation flourished. The gay divorcee was having a life at last.

She is still defensive about it, as she is about any suggestion that she has not been dedicated to the world of politics. "We all felt entitled to relax and enjoy and reeducate," she says.

Then, too, her son Winston was for some years no help in the establishment of political credentials. She laughs about how people used to tell him "your mother's a politician and he'd say, 'My mother's not a politician. She's married to a politician.' "

Time takes care of so many things, she says. "He laughs less about it now."

He calls her often about politics. Just the other day, he was among those standing up to Prime Minister John Major's government in a bruising fight over shutting down coal mines in England. It reminds her of the time he confronted then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Zimbabwe and its independence. "He didn't agree with that. He was a shadow minister for defense, and she took him out of that job and never gave him another. But I like that," she says, "because what he believes he believes."

She's reflective about whether he'll ever follow in his famous grandfather's footsteps. She admits he's "a bit of a rebel" among fellow Conservatives -- others see him as not much of a force at all -- but maintains faith. "So much depends upon the difficult mode England is going into. Maybe he'll emerge to do something for them."

It's like she always says, in politics, timing and luck are everything.

The Clinton Connection

She's known Bill Clinton and Al Gore for more than a decade. She gives Averell Harriman the credit for seeing them as future leaders. He was the one who sought them out, she says, invited them to their home, talked to them about past presidencies and the crises their generation faces.

Clinton was the first person she asked to serve on the board of Democrats for the 80's. He'd lost his reelection bid for governor.

"It's very important in life to have success," she says, "but it's even more important to have failure. And to know how to handle it."

Clinton handled it by facing up to critics who saw him as cocky and took him down a peg in the polling place. But he worked hard on his comeback, cultivating his ties with the party, exploring ways to revitalize it and eventually prevailing in the centrist direction it took. The first time she ever went on network television to talk about her PAC, Clinton went with her. "He was the pro," she says. "I wasn't."

There were other times she turned to him. "He has a very organized mind," she says, so she tapped it -- for ideas about issue evenings, ideas about the mixes of people they needed, ideas that would lend the PAC substance.

He didn't remain on her board long because in 1982 he ran again for governor. A month after he won, he and four other governors, one of them Nebraska's Bob Kerrey, were at the Harrimans as issue evening panelists discussing "A View From the States -- The 1982 Election and an Assessment of the Issues Facing Our Country Today."

That evening stands out for yet another reason. When guests went home, Kerrey and Clinton, who were spending the night at the Harrimans, hung back. Upstairs in the sitting room, they talked another three hours, drawing out Averell Harriman on Stalin and Churchill and World War II, those critical years in modern history that these baby boomers would never be able to do more than read about. After he went to bed, around 1:30 a.m., they probed her recollections of that period.

Finally, at 2:30, she asked when they had to get up. One was leaving at 4:45, the other at 5:15, one going back to Arkansas and the other to Nebraska.

She has a theory about what it means. Of all the political people she's seen in her life -- "and I've seen an awful lot" -- none has ever outdone the stamina of Bill Clinton. Candidates have gone down to defeat for a number of reasons, but she thinks that basically -- and she mentions Edmund Muskie and Walter Mondale here -- a lot of it has been physical.

Clinton's stamina went beyond the physical, though.

"Where Jack Kennedy was born to power, Bill Clinton got there all by himself," she told a Loudoun County audience the other day. "The Kennedy script was written in advance. The Clinton story was written as he went. It was the great American story of enduring a tough childhood in a small corner of his country -- facing adversity, learning its lessons and moving beyond."

It's exactly the kind of perseverance she's always admired.

Michael Dukakis didn't have it. And, despite his victory, neither did Jimmy Carter. They had another problem, as well: True to their promises, they were Washington outsiders, and in the world of Harriman -- a world that recalls the elite Democratic network of her husband's era -- that's a sure way to fail in this town.

"Dukakis didn't really seek out the kind of help he might have," notes one party insider. "He didn't have the kind of political instincts that attracted others to him. His message was very cloudy. Not the kind of centrist message Pam was trying to convey."

"Dukakis was sort of a fluke," she says simply. Of Carter, she adds: "I have great admiration. He and Rosalynn are very dedicated citizens who work very hard. But it just didn't work for the presidency."

Al Gore did have the perseverance as well as the other credentials she admired. She was devastated in 1988 when he didn't make it past the primaries. Of all the young candidates who've courted her, he was always the favorite. "But again," she says, "that's the sort of thing I think gave him strength. In retrospect, he's better here for not having succeeded in that."

She's almost too quick in saying "no" to a question about whether she suggested him to Clinton as his running mate. "I mean," she teases, laughing, "you mustn't ask that question."

However it came about, the result certainly was her all-time dream ticket, recharging her energies, renewing her hopes and vindicating the slogging, relentless work she's done for 12 years now. "I hate to fund-raise," she grumbles; "there is nobody in their right mind who would like it. But I think it's terribly important to combine fund-raising with substance, and that's what we tried to do."

Her fund-raising accomplishments were spectacular. At her Virginia farm this fall, Clinton reminded everybody that a year ago, when Democratic National Committee Chairman Ron Brown got them all down for what they called "the Middleburg Meeting," the aim in the year ahead had been to raise $3 million for The Candidate -- whoever he was.

"But we raised $3.2 million in one night," she says, still a little incredulous.

For the first time in many years, the Democrats were able to stay right behind the Republicans in spending, particularly the "soft money" contributions that are spent on party advertising and organizing. She also has been a force in congressional races, dating back to a crucial loan she gave the party in 1983 to build a media center where candidates could produce subsidized campaign commercials.

In one race this year, she helped bail out Wisconsin Rep. Les Aspin, a party stalwart who faced a well-financed opponent. "I got a call that Les Aspin was really in trouble," she says. "I was able to do about five calls to my friends and get real help. After 12 years, we know each other so well, we can ask."

Now the calls are coming in to her. The phones haven't stopped ringing at her Georgetown offices, people calling to congratulate her for having the passion, the commitment, the instincts that brought the Democrats back from the dead. She was the one, they keep telling her with unqualified praise, who had hung in there so long.

Her response?

"I'm suddenly feeling older than I even am," sighs Harriman, noting at another point that "Washington can be a cruel town."

Maybe it's because the woman they didn't take seriously is now being taken too seriously. Washington, of course, takes nothing at face value -- and most of the time does nothing for nothing -- so aside from the public praise, the question people are asking privately is what's in it for her? Why else would anyone devote a dozen years of her life, not to mention energy and money, if she didn't expect something in return?

It is, Harriman agrees, "the sort of thing I'm up against. I really hate that."

"If you're someone like Pamela Harriman, it's easy to have detractors," says Strauss of those "other" people. "Easy to be jealous."

The London papers are already speculating that Clinton will send her to London as U.S. ambassador. It's an intriguing idea. Imagine the headline: Pam Packs for Home.

But a decade ago she vowed that if and when the Democrats ever took back the White House and the Senate, she would "retire." So does she still mean that?

"I think that's probably about right," she says in that careful way she has of choosing her words. "I certainly don't want to leave Washington. I mean, I haven't waited to get a president for 12 years to then leave Washington."

It's going to be an administration of "young, talented, very aggressive, hard-working people who work 18 to 20 hours a day. And rightfully and happily," she says. "And I will help if I'm asked to -- I can push and shove."

Doing what? She pulls her cashmere sweater around her, arches her still trim ankle, smiles ever so slightly and sighs, "I don't know. Bill and Hillary will know they can call on me if they need me, and I'll be there."

They may need all the help they can get if another Harriman prediction comes true.

"A hundred years from now," she says, "I'm sure this will be a turning point in the lives of a whole generation."

And at this moment, Harriman's predictions are not the sort Washington is likely to bet against.