On arriving, she reviewed mail with Isabel Hill, her superefficient, Wellesley-educated secretary for the past eight years.17 Then, after discussing important calls with her staff, she would retreat to her private sanctum with its two couches, one armchair, electric kettle, and small, carved figure of a Chinese god whose stomach she scratched every morning for luck. Maps of Atlantic and Pacific war theaters hung alongside pictures of George Washington and Douglas MacArthur, as well as a plaque of Abraham Lincoln, her most admired President. On her desk were photographs of her mother and daughter, orderly stacks of letters, carefully clipped newspapers, press releases, and an upturned, ceramic Uncle Sam hat holding sharpened pencils. Shelves housed books on topics ranging from government and economics to sociology and war. A side table with a large globe and surmounted silver airplane symbolized her interest in aviation.
After dealing with urgent matters, Clare usually attended committee meetings or met with other Representatives on legislative affairs. At noon, she crossed over to the House and lunched there, sometimes with constituents. When not on the floor for votes and debates, she spent the rest of the day in her office, usually working past 9:00 P.M. Though she suffered from persistent neuralgia and anemia, the pace she set exhausted her employees, who often looked paler than she did. She most often dined in the Wardman Park restaurant, either alone or with friends or business acquaintances.18 Afterward, she sat in her sitting room with its historic prints of Connecticut and the District of Columbia, reading office documents or a book. Her personal library included Arnold Toynbee’s six-volume A Study of History, as well as How to Reach the Top in the Business World and How Never to Be Tired.19
Having a low boring point, Clare likely could not have endured the tedium of much of her congressional work without Albert P. Morano, her executive assistant. A tireless, astute Italian Catholic of thirty-five, he had performed the same job for her stepfather. It was he who had persuaded her to run for the seat Dr. Austin narrowly lost in 1940, saying, “You can’t miss.”20 After her election, she had given him a watch inscribed with those optimistic words.
Morano proved to be worth every cent of his $5,000-a-year salary. A Washington radio station rated him the best House aide, in recognition of his meticulous scouring of forty newspapers a day, while keeping track of the status of numerous bills. Clare owed her coveted suite to his willingness to stand in line for it in last December’s cold. He managed her other staff, monitored her schedule, and never forgot a name—an essential attribute for one who hoped to run for public office himself someday. (His middle initial, he liked to joke, stood for “Politician.”) With his swarthy build and thick dark hair, Morano reminded Clare so much of her brother, David, that she told him to call her “Sis.”
Though married, he was obviously a little in love with his employer. He said her mind “worked better than a man’s,” and that by using her wily instincts and uncanny ability to predict the future, she “might even get to be President.”21
Less than a month after settling in Washington, Clare wrote a letter to Alice Basim, a young nurse who had married Dr. Austin shortly before his death. Depressed by a four-day blizzard, she admitted to being disillusioned with her new job. “It’s hard and dreary and thankless and I only half guessed … what the life of a ‘public servant’ was. They do shove you about, whittle away at you.… A creeping paralysis of the brain seems to set in.”22
Clare considered herself a loner, but loneliness did not suit her, particularly now that she was living less stylishly than she was used to, with fewer sophisticated friends to see. Being thespian by nature, she needed to perform for appreciative audiences. Yet even in congenial company, she could switch in a flash from enchanting extrovert to gloomy introvert. Her attacks of what she called “the dismals” were frequent, and she admitted to uncontrollable mood changes.23 Even in New York, soul mates who shared her myriad interests were few. In Washington they were practically nonexistent, given that most of the people she encountered were politicians or journalists.
She had the gift—or curse—of instant intimacy, tending to unburden herself indiscriminately on strangers, regaling them with hilarious or tragic stories from her life, so that they soon came to feel they had known her always. But then they were puzzled when the solid relationship they thought they had established with her evaporated. This happened the moment anybody presumed a closeness she did not reciprocate. Even old friends fell victim to her quixotic temperament, and were desolate after she withdrew from them, either temporarily or, in some cases, permanently.
Clare’s husband and daughter suffered most of all. In her absence, they missed her common sense, decisiveness, organizational skills, and love of fun, not to mention her creative and athletic abilities. It seemed to them that she could do everything except sing and cook. In turn, she regretted not having Harry as a sounding board during her solitary evenings at the Wardman Park, and with Ann now in college on the West Coast, she also felt the lack of someone young to impress and instruct.
As an antidote to her current gloom, she looked forward to showing off the gift for oratory she had discovered in herself at a Wendell Willkie rally in Madison Square Garden in 1940.24 At some point soon, she would have to deliver her first congressional speech.
The initial prompting for Clare’s headline-capturing debut on the House floor came from Sam Pryor, chief assistant to the president of Pan American Airways. He alerted her to a new magazine article by Henry Wallace, in which the socialist-minded Vice President suggested that after the war there should be an international “Freedom of the Air,” similar to the prewar policy of “Freedom of the Seas.”
Pryor’s boss, Juan Trippe, had been a contemporary of Henry Luce at Yale. The two CEOs often dined together in the Chrysler Building’s Cloud Club, where they talked about their separate careers. As self-made men, they shared Clare’s dislike of the kind of governmental utopianism espoused by idealists like Wallace, particularly the notion of unrestricted civil aviation. Trippe in particular was afraid that the United States, which had never ratified the prewar Convention Relating to the Regulation of Aerial Navigation, would allow its territory to be crisscrossed at will by foreign carriers, even those flying to neighboring countries such as Mexico or Canada. Clare knew she was being lobbied, but asked Speaker Rayburn to allot her time to address the issue.25
Late in the afternoon of Tuesday, February 9, at the close of legislative business, Clare rose in the House and was recognized. Customarily at that hour, a Congresswoman making her maiden speech would have spoken to an almost deserted chamber, with only the presiding officer and a representative of each major party there to forestall any unplanned parliamentary move. But about a third of the Representatives were curious about her, and stayed to listen. They had no idea what subject she wanted to address, although some Democrats anticipated a plea for aid to China.26
“Mr. Speaker,” she said, “may I take this occasion to thank the people of Fairfield County in Connecticut who elected me to this body?”27
Since beginning her public career, she had learned it was more effective not to scold, clench a fist, or wag a finger when addressing a crowd, but rather to be witty and smiling. She had worked to keep high frequencies out of her voice, knowing that female orators could be hard on the eardrums. One of the greatest assets a woman could have, she believed, was to speak in mellow, low-pitched tones. “The drone of the bee is easier to bear than the whine of the mosquito.”28
There was a resolution before the House, Clare reminded her colleagues, “to form a permanent standing committee on civil and commercial aviation, domestic and overseas.” She admitted that she knew little about how such a group would organize and operate, but stressed what she did know: that the airplane was “the most dynamic instrument” of the war, and surely would be of the peace. If the United States did not address itself to the question of its present and future place in the civilian air world, it might lose that peace.
In January 1939, she recall
ed, President Roosevelt had declared that “an economically and technically sound air transportation system” was the backbone of national defense. But now, four years later, she felt that his administration had become shortsighted in favoring “the total militarization of our airlines.” Meanwhile, Great Britain continued to operate its civil and military air networks as separate entities. At war’s end, Churchill’s ministers would be ready “to put muscles and flesh on their international airways system.”
Waxing rhetorical, Clare continued.
Make no mistake. Our far-sighted British cousins have already clearly seen the vision of the air world of tomorrow. They have seen that the masters of the air will be the masters of the planet, for as aviation dominates all military effort today, so will it dominate and influence all peacetime effort.… Perhaps the Russians have seen this too, although we have no way of knowing. Certainly the Chinese know, because I have discussed it with many of them, that when peace comes it will then be too late to plan America’s future role in the air.
The shape of all postwar air policy is being beaten out now on the anvil of war.
Clare pointed out that the policy of “sovereignty of the skies,” sanctioned at the Versailles Treaty of 1919, had allowed the United States to protect itself strategically by denying free access to its air lanes and airports. Yet it had also profited from the exchange of reciprocal landing agreements and become the foremost commercial airpower, in terms of mileage routes and total passengers. Now she saw that American preeminence was being challenged by the advocates of “Freedom of the Air.” Unleashing skills honed in her Broadway scripts, she identified the main culprit.
I call your attention to a recent article written by the Vice President of the United States, Mr. Henry Wallace, which has just appeared in the American magazine.… It is called “What We Will Get Out of the War.” Now, in passing, I would like to say that I am a great admirer of some of Mr. Wallace’s ideas. He has a wholly disarming way of being intermittently inspiring and spasmodically sound.… However, one usually finds that the higher the plane he puts his economic arguments upon, the lower, it turns out, American living standards will fall.
Mr. Wallace’s article … is on a very high plane indeed. In it he does a great deal of global thinking. But much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney.
Clare’s coinage of the flippant last word shocked her audience and delighted reporters in the press gallery.29 Unfortunately, its zing deflected attention from her reasoned follow-up. She quoted Wallace’s words, “Freedom of the Air means to the world of the future what Freedom of the Seas meant to the world of the past,” and said that neither principle guaranteed peace, much less fairness in international trade.
Freedom of the seas, Clare declared, had nearly killed American merchant shipping after World War I, due to competition from “all the cheap-labor, low-operating cost, government-subsidy countries of the world.” She speculated that freedom of the air would have the same effect. Giving full rein to fantasy, she imagined herself standing one day in some great Midwestern terminal, watching the arrivals of “the airliner Queen Elizabeth … the Stalin Iron Cruiser, the Wilhelmina Flying Dutchman, the Flying De Gaulle, the airships of all the nations on earth—perhaps even those of the German and Jap,” while looking in vain “for an American Clipper against the clouds.”
She conceded that she might be going too far in pressing an analogy between the freedoms of air and sea. But she drew it only because “Mr. Wallace himself had seen fit publicly to slice another piece of globaloney off the apparently inexhaustible ration he keeps in his mental larder.”
Clare ended her forty-minute address with a paraphrase of Winston Churchill. Members of the House of Representatives, she said, were not elected “to preside over the liquidation of America’s best interests, either at home or abroad.”30
Although a Senate committee reiterated Clare’s misgivings about freedom of the skies the following day, press reports of her speech focused disapprovingly on the gibe of “globaloney.” Even Fortune, Harry’s most sedate magazine, dubbed it “an ill-mannered crack.” Time gave space to her detractors, including Henry Wallace, who huffed, “I am sure the vast bulk of Republicans do not want to stir up animosity against either our Russian or English allies.” Eleanor Roosevelt weighed in with, “Well, are we going to have a peaceful world or aren’t we? All nations should have free access to the world’s travel lanes.”31 The writer Dawn Powell, who had depicted Clare as a ruthless self-promoter in her 1942 novel, A Time to Be Born, remarked in her diary that Mrs. Luce, in attacking the Vice President, had “made such evil use of her new Congressional power.”32
Of 183 nationwide press clippings about the speech gathered by Clare’s staff, only 70 were favorable.33 A friendly columnist lamented that “it had to be left to a pretty woman to make the most-needed he-man speech on foreign policy that has been heard from either floor of the House since the war began.” Mrs. Luce, he wrote, was so well-known “for pulchritude, chic, wit and wisecracking that these got the headlines instead of the sound doctrines expounded and the grave warnings sounded.”34
Congresswoman Luce makes good “copy.” (illustration credit 2.3)
Forty-seven periodicals criticized her for creating disunity, or for being an imperialist as well as an isolationist. Perhaps the most damning reaction was that of the Saturday Review. Under the headline LUCE THINKING, it declared that the word globaloney was worse than a lapse of taste. It was “an unforgivable insult to Americans who happen to be fighting and dying in a global war.”35
Clare’s own reaction was that she had “rocked a lot of people back on their heels.” Criticism notwithstanding, “What I said … did a whale of a lot of good to the cause of postwar aviation.”36 She would have to wait for proof of that claim.
President Roosevelt made no comment about Clare’s oratorical debut, but neither did he publicly support Wallace’s air plans. The administration, however, appointed one of its top defenders in the House, Representative J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, to refute the new member from Fairfield County. He began by saying that Mrs. Luce had “inferred” that the Vice President’s proposal would endanger America’s security. She had also “inferred” that planners were working secretly on a new air policy.
In her response, Clare gave the Rhodes scholar and former university president a grammar lesson. “The gentleman said that I had inferred this or that. I inferred nothing. I implied, and the gentleman from Arkansas did the inferring.”37
Fulbright’s face turned red. Far from being amused at his discomfiture, most of Clare’s male colleagues agreed that she had “a tongue like a dragon’s.”38
3
TURNING FORTY
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
On February 12, 1943, three days after her controversial address, Congresswoman Luce had lunch at the Louis XIV restaurant in New York with John Billings and two other Time Incers. Life’s dyspeptic editor recoiled from Clare’s “overpowering perfume.” He noted that she ate only scrambled eggs, and looked “thinner and bonier than ever.” The purpose of the meeting soon became plain. She boasted about the success of her maiden speech, then offered him an article on “modernizing Congress.” He silently wondered how after just five weeks in such an “ancient and honorable institution,” she could criticize it without jeopardizing her political career. But Clare insisted that American lawmakers should be as efficient and up-to-date as captains of commerce, industry, and communications. She said she would propose that automatic voting machines be installed in the Capitol, to speed up legislation, and that the standard of debate in the House would be improved if it was wired for broadcasting. Billings felt such ideas showed her to be “pretty ignorant of Congressional history,” and did not commit to an article.1
Unfazed, Clare treated the newsmen to her views on
the next presidential election. Many Republicans, she said, thought that even a “Chinaman” could beat FDR in 1944. But she was not so sure. The only potential candidates worthy of the GOP nomination, in her view, were Herbert Hoover and General Douglas MacArthur, and both would be “politically impossible.”
Once in full monologue mode, Clare brooked no interruption. She was, Billings concluded, “theatrical in essence—and talks more like an actress than a politician.”2
In Washington on February 15, Congresswoman Edith Rogers of Massachusetts spoke at a ceremony marking the birthday of Susan B. Anthony. “With women in every phase of war work,” she said, “from the WAACs and WAVES to welders, it is only justice that they should have equal rights with men.”3
To do her part in the celebration, Clare put before the House a list of Anthony’s feminist precepts. Among them were the pioneer’s last publicly spoken words, “Failure is impossible.” She did not add that Anthony privately, just before her death, had sounded disenchanted with the results of her sixty-year struggle for justice: “Young women who are benefitting from the changes haven’t the least idea of how they came about.”4
This could not be said of the young Clare Boothe. Exactly twenty years earlier, she had come to Washington to lobby Congress alongside Alice Paul and Alva Belmont for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.5 She had even scattered leaflets from an airplane over New York State. After her divorce in 1929, with ample means to settle for the life of a socialite, she had chosen to capitalize on her own abilities in the workplace, and had done so ever since. She had seen opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment—first offered in the Senate by a man in 1923—grow. Ironically, female trade union organizations had balked at it, insisting that women in industry needed special protections that would vanish with equality. Joining them was the League of Women Voters, which held that the business of curbing discriminatory laws should be left to the states. The amendment’s chief promoter remained the National Woman’s Party, or NWP.6
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