FRANCE BIDS `FINAL ADIEU' TO HARRIMAN AT CEREMONY : CHIRAC BESTOWS FRENCH LEGION OF HONOR CROSS.

Byline: Daily News Wire Services

Conferring France's highest distinction on Pamela Harriman posthumously for her service as U.S. ambassador, President Jacques Chirac of France placed the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on Harriman's flag-draped coffin Saturday morning.

As trumpets plaintively played ``Taps'' and birds chirped in the cold but sunlit garden of the U.S. Embassy residence, Chirac and others paid warm tribute to Harriman, who died Wednesday at the age of 76. Gathered around the coffin were several hundred French and U.S. officials, friends, relatives and staff from the embassy where she had presided since May 1993.

Chirac said he had told Harriman a month ago that he would award her France's highest civilian distinction when she left the embassy, as she had planned to do in spring.

``I regret infinitely that this ceremony today takes the form of a final adieu,'' he said.

He was the last to speak at a solemn ceremony that began with a prayer by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, and ended with a martial dirge played by the French Presidential Guard Band in red and blue uniforms, much like those of the embassy Marines who Saturday included one woman.

``She was elegance itself. She was grace,'' Chirac told the assembled guests in French, placing Harriman in the proud lineage of ambassadors to France that began with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Both her son from her first marriage, British Parliament member Winston S. Churchill, and Chirac said Franco-American relations might have been a lot more turbulent the last 3-1/2 years without Harriman, who had lived and studied in France before World War II.

``This great lady was also a peerless diplomat,'' Chirac said. ``In the impassioned debates that regularly pepper our friendship, she was, for President Clinton as well as for me, an irreplaceable interlocutor, perfectly attuned to our thoughts and expectations as well as to the respective constraints on us, which she always faithfully interpreted.''

She was ``an invaluable bridge of communication between our leaders and our peoples,'' said President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel Berger.

``We have come to take her home where a saddened and grateful president and people will pay her their deepest respects,'' Berger said.

After the ceremony, Churchill, grandson of Winston Churchill, flew with the coffin in a special U.S. Air Force plane from Orly Airport to Washington, D.C., where Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met him at Andrews Air Force Base, Md.

Through a wind-blown snow, Harriman's coffin was carried by a military honor guard from the jet into a heated aircraft hangar for a ceremony led by Churchill and Albright. Churchill said his British mother loved becoming a U.S. citizen.

``She fought tenaciously for the interests of her adopted country and of the Western alliance,'' Churchill told about 100 of his mother's friends, including former House Speaker Tom Foley and several of President Clinton's top aides.

``Ambassador Pamela Harriman served her country with skill, grace, eloquence and elegance,'' Albright said. ``Throughout her years among us, she seemed often larger than life. Her experiences entwined with the power, tragedy, challenge and triumph of this turbulent century.

``Today Ambassador Pamela Harriman returns to our shores, having crossed the Atlantic for the last time. She was not born an American. She became an American. It was a question of choice, and nobody loved this country more,'' Albright said.

``She was always the source of light, not the reflection of it. So with the passing of an American star this week the City of Light is a little dimmer and America is diminished.''

A memorial service will be held Thursday in the National Cathedral in Washington. President Clinton will deliver the eulogy, aides said. Harriman will be buried next to her husband, Averell Harriman, former governor of New York, on the family estate in the Hudson Valley. Pamela Harriman acquired American citizenship when she married him in 1971. He died in 1986.

Donald Bandler, a career diplomat, is interim charge d'affaires at the embassy where he served as Ambassador Harriman's deputy. He said she would have appreciated the farewell from Chirac and his wife, Bernadette.

``Nothing would have made her more happy or more proud than to know you were here,'' he told them as they sat on the marble veranda behind the 19th-century mansion the U.S. government bought from the Rothschild family after World War II.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) A ceremony Saturday at the U.S. Embassy in Paris honored Ambassador Pamela Harriman.

(2) French President Jacques Chirac puts the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on the coffin of U.S. diplomat Pamela Harriman.

Associated Press