DIGNITARIES PAY LAST RESPECTS TO HARRIMAN.

Byline: R.W. Apple Jr. The New York Times

Before a high-powered assembly of almost 1,200 people, drawn from the worlds of politics, diplomacy, show business and high finance, President Clinton led a memorial service for Pamela Harriman on Thursday morning, praising her as a woman of elegance and indomitable will.

Clinton recalled Harriman's role in rallying the Democratic Party in its dark days in the 1980s with her fund-raising and her organizational skills. ``Today, I am here in no small measure because she was there'' then, the president said.

Born into the British aristocracy, Harriman lived a vivid life that took her from wartime London as the wife of Sir Winston Churchill's only son to Paris as the intimate friend of the rich and powerful of half a dozen nations before she came to the United States, where she married theatrical producer Leland Hayward and then Averell Harriman, the politician and diplomat.

But the emphasis Thursday was on Pamela Harriman the ``patriot and public servant,'' as President Clinton described her, rather than Pamela Harriman, the scintillating denizen of the postwar international haute monde.

At her death in Paris a week ago Wednesday at the age of 76 of the aftereffects of a cerebral hemorrhage, she was the U.S. ambassador to France - a naturalized U.S. citizen whom President Jacques Chirac hailed this week as a representative of the United States in Paris on a par with her 18th-century predecessors Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

``Her country bids her farewell with profound gratitude,'' Clinton said. ``She felt to her bones America's special leadership role in the world. Today we see her legacy in the growing promise of a Europe undivided.''

In the soaring, neo-Gothic National Cathedral, Harriman was given the closest thing to a state funeral Washington has seen in years. The church was bathed in television lights, and the pews and extra chairs were crowded with the famous, the wealthy and the important - the sorts of people she had mingled with all her life.

Katharine Graham, chairwoman of the executive committee of The Washington Post Co., who reintroduced the widowed Hayward, as she then was, to Averell Harriman at a Washington dinner party in 1971, was among the mourners at the cathedral this morning.

The ambassadors of France, China and Britain were there, as were the luminaries of her party: most members of the Cabinet; the wife of Robert F. Kennedy; legislators like Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Paul Sarbanes of Maryland and John Glenn of Ohio; veterans of administrations past like Theodore Sorensen from the Kennedy years, Harry C. McPherson Jr. and Jack Valenti from the Lyndon B. Johnson era and Anne Wexler from the Jimmy Carter White House; former ambassadors like Sol Linowitz; and political pros like Peter Hart, the pollster, and Robert Squier, the filmmaker and strategist.

Among the honorary pallbearers were former House Speaker Thomas Foley, an old friend; younger friends whose careers she had helped to advance, like Richard C. Holbrooke, who negotiated the Bosnian peace settlement, and Samuel R. Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, as well as Donald Bandler, her No. 2 in Paris, and Vernon Jordan, the powerhouse Washington lawyer and behind-the-scenes counselor to the president.

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Photo: President Clinton, his wife and the Gores attend a memorial service for the former U.S. ambassador.

Associated Press