Researching Susan Williams

Susan was the daughter of Benjamin Williams, a native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who became a prominent Baltimore merchant; and his wife, Sarah Copeland, widow of Nathaniel Morton. In 1827, Williams helped found the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the first railroad company in the United States, in response to the opening of the Erie Canal and its competition with the port of Baltimore.

In November 1829, Susan married Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte-Patterson, the son of Elizabeth Patterson, an American heiress, and Jérôme Bonaparte; their marriage had been annulled after three years on the orders of Napoléon himself, so that his brother could make a more advantageous marriage. Jérôme Napoleon too had been offered an arranged marriage, but rejected the idea in favour of the $200,000 fortune that Susan had inherited. In the following year, the groom's maternal grandfather, William Patterson, one of the wealthiest men in Maryland, gave the couple Montrose Mansion as a wedding gift.

Their sons were the soldier Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte II (1830-1893) and the lawyer and government official Charles Joseph Bonaparte (1851-1921).

General Lew Wallace described Susan as:

...staunchly Union, a tall, handsome, black-eyed, Franco-American woman, decidedly masculine in mind, but true to her woman's place

She competed at the second Olympic triathlon at the 2004 Summer Olympics. She was the first U.S. triathlete to win an Olympic medal by taking the bronze in 2004 in Athens. She placed third with a total time of 2:05:08.92. Her split times were 19:02 for the swim, 1:08:58 for the cycling, and 0:37:08 for the run.

Williams obtained a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering Sciences and was working toward becoming an astronaut when her success at triathlon convinced her to give it a try.

Her book Who Killed Hammarskjold? (2011), about the death in 1961 of the then-United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, triggered a new UN investigation in 2015.

In Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War II. she tells the intricate tale of a special unit of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, that was set up to purchase and secretly remove all the uranium from the unique uranium mine in Katanga province Shinkolobwe in Belgian Congo that the US could get its hands on and keep out of the hands of the Axis powers. The uranium was to be used in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Williams is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.