Price of Fame
Page 11
Clare countered by campaigning doggedly in every corner of her constituency, with its blend of plush “bedroom” communities, blue-collar industrial towns, and remote farms. She made more than one hundred appearances at rallies, factories, country fairs, firehouses, restaurants, and private homes, and shook hands with some twenty thousand people. Taking Roosevelt’s bait, she denounced the twelve years of his administration as a period “of humiliating failure,” and derided the “carpetbagging celebrities” rounded up to distort her record.56
Alarmed by the numbers of eminent Democrats touring Connecticut and railing against Clare, the Republican National Committee offered to send in big names of its own. But she said she preferred to “slug it out single-handed.”57
As in 1942, Bill Brennan drove her hard. On some days the candidate had no more nourishment than a cup of hot milk, because he would not stop at roadside diners unless he saw a sizable number of cars parked outside. Clare seldom arrived home in Greenwich until the small hours.58
One potentially formidable campaigner for her died on October 8. Wendell Willkie, only fifty-two, was the victim of fourteen successive heart attacks. His loss stunned both Luces. Al Morano was at their house when the telephone rang. He noticed that Harry, who took the call, asked Clare to issue a statement for him. It was evident to Morano, as she wrote eight or ten quick lines for the Associated Press, “who the writer in the family was.”59
Congresswoman Luce campaigns for reelection in Connecticut, 1944 (illustration credit 9.2)
Evidence of Clare’s literary talent infused her epigrammatic campaign speeches, although the most quotable lines were usually the most aggressive ones. She also had the disarming gift of spontaneity. One reporter noted that she frequently “talks straight at you, either from memory or extemporaneously. At such times she removes the harlequin glasses that she wears when reading, and gestures gracefully with them.… She is as pretty with them on as with them off.”60
In her capacity as one of the party’s oratorical stars, Clare spent four weeks out of state. She stumped in St. Louis, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Newark, Worcester, and Boston, pulling in greater audiences than any but the nominees themselves.61
On October 13, appearing for Dewey in Chicago, she leveled her most devastating accusation yet against FDR. History would never forgive him, she said, for being “the only American President who ever lied us into a war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it.… The shame of Pearl Harbor was Mr. Roosevelt’s shame.”62
This indictment caused an uproar among Democrats. The left-wing journalist Quentin Reynolds, addressing a “Broadway for Roosevelt” gathering, said, “Representative Clare Boothe Luce’s charge that President Roosevelt lied us into war is not the first time a person named Booth treacherously assaulted the President of the United States.”63
One typical campaign day late that month, Clare stood in a biting wind on a truck outside the Bridgeport Brass Company. She played down her glamour image by wearing a black coat and sweater, with a simple shoulder bag. Speaking into a microphone to no audience at all, she defended her labor record in Congress. As workers streamed out of the factory, nineteen out of twenty passed her by. A group of girls paused briefly. One said, “Her hair is a lot lighter than in her pictures.” A freight train roared past. Drowned out, Clare climbed down to shake hands with stragglers. Then Brennan, smiling determinedly, whisked her off to a conference in Stamford and a rally in New Canaan.64 She was still in her daytime outfit after dark, appearing at Darien High School. A large crowd welcomed her and sang “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Clowning for them, she took out a mosquito gun and mimed an attack on Sidney Hillman and his Communist committee.65
Despite powerful opposition, Clare remained optimistic and intent on continuing as the first woman to represent Connecticut in Congress. She wrote her uncle Charles Boothe that she looked forward to “seeing quite a bit of that Dome in Washington during the next two years.”66
But she was not sanguine about the electoral prospects of her party as a whole. Earlier in the year, she had thought the country was veering away from a fourth Roosevelt term. Now she told Harry that the young and able Dewey would probably lose to the old and ailing incumbent. She said that the GOP was running a “well-planned and efficient” campaign, but had failed to show that it liked people as well as power.67
On October 31, Margaret Connors sought to score a knockout blow by sending Representative Luce an open telegram that asked six tough questions. Each was likely to lose Clare votes, no matter which way she answered. Did she stand on the record of the Republican Party in foreign policy? Did she support its pledge to end rationing and price control next January? What agricultural program did she propose to replace incentive payments, crop insurance, and soil conservation? What alternative to the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which she voted against, did she recommend? And why had she been absent from the roll call vote on the GI Bill?
Clare hedged for time, saying she had already addressed these subjects, and would do so again in a series of radio broadcasts in the week remaining.68 This lame response did her little good. Fairfield County’s so-called station-wagon voters began to desert her. She redoubled her courtship of Bridgeport factory workers. On Wednesday, November 1, she took Bernard Baruch’s advice and held a dinner for six hundred Connecticut women who had published an advertisement supporting her. “Hundreds more wanted to sign,” she wrote Baruch, “but there just wasn’t room.”69
Yet her polling numbers continued to languish, and the outcome remained in doubt through election eve. President Roosevelt, speaking at Hyde Park, gloated that Clare Luce was way behind his candidate, and declared that her defeat would “prove a mighty good thing for the country.”70
All Clare’s grinding days on the trail paid off on November 7, when she defeated Margaret Connors by the narrowest of margins: 102,043 votes to 100,030. The rank and file of Hartford, Stamford, and Bridgeport labor unions ignored the advice of their bosses, and the apple growers of upstate supported her, as in 1942, with another crucial bloc of votes. She became the first Connecticut member of Congress to recapture the Fourth District since 1930.71 Four out of six other state Representatives running for reelection lost.72
Magnanimous in victory, Clare telephoned reporters to say that she bore no “rancor or malice” toward the President for his efforts to oust her. On the contrary, she would support the administration in working for peace, and hoped that all in government “may be given greater wisdom and courage to meet the task ahead.”73
She was also gracious with her opponent: “I wasn’t running against Miss Connors but against the New Deal and the PAC.” To her mind, she said, the latter was short not for Political Action Committee, but for “Party of American Communism.”74
Clare received a congratulatory telegram from former President Hoover: “That was a grand victory. I wish we had more men like you.”75
10
TO THE FRONT
Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons but perceivers of the terror of life.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Henry Luce was in good spirits when he returned to work the day after his wife’s two-thousand-vote win. He told staff members it was a “personal slap at FDR,” and proposed that Time end its taboo and do a story on her campaign.1 An article duly appeared, noting that “in two years Clare Luce [has] risen from the position of an interesting novelty … to an eminence as a main target of the Roosevelt administration.”2 Dewey’s defeat by three million votes showed how closely divided the country was, as she had foreseen.3 The President had benefited from wartime fear of leadership change.
Still tired two weeks after her reelection, Clare had curiosity enough to embark on something new in congressional history: a foreign junket. The House of Representatives authorized seventeen members of the Military Affairs Committee to visit the battlefronts of Western Europe.4
It was known on Capitol Hill that Gener
al Mark Clark’s five-hundred-thousand-man Fifth Army in Italy felt neglected after the June D-Day landings in France.5 Clark had the onerous task of fighting alongside British forces in order to secure airfields from which to bomb Germany, while also pinning down thousands of Hitler’s soldiers on another front. But after the fall of Rome, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, had shifted his priority to ousting the Wehrmacht from France, and then taking Berlin. Clare and her colleagues hoped that by focusing most of their fact-finding mission on the Italian Front, they might draw attention to Clark and his struggling contingent. They also intended to tour bases in England and France, and assess what might be done to improve conditions and boost morale among American servicemen.
The committee delegation took off in a C-47 transport plane from Andrews Air Force Base at noon on Thanksgiving eve, Wednesday, November 22. Representative John M. Costello, a California Democrat, acted as chairman for the trip. Clare was the junior member, but as press reports noted, she had more battlefield experience by far than her fellow members.6 She wore a forest-green traveling suit and WAC-style matching beret. Honoring a sixty-five-pound luggage limit, she had packed a pair of fleece-lined boots, battle pants, an evening suit, and six scarves that she could alternate on her head or around her neck, waist, and shoulders to give the illusion of multiple outfits.7
The C-47 flew south and then east across the Atlantic, with refueling stops in Bermuda and the Azores, before landing in London on Saturday. An official from the U.S. Embassy met the group, and all members except Clare were dispersed to hotels. She and a female military aide assigned to her by the War Department were treated to luxurious accommodations in Lord Beaverbrook’s well-appointed apartment, with servants to run them hot baths and serve drinks. Almost ten years before, Bernard Baruch had urged Max to meet “America’s most fascinating beautiful and intelligent woman,” and they had bonded.8 Beaverbrook was now Lord Privy Seal, but was best known for having been the Minister of Aircraft Production, who built a third more planes than the Luftwaffe in 1940, ensuring victory for the RAF in the Battle of Britain.
A Time writer, Noel Busch, was in town and invited Clare to dine at the Savoy. Hearing that she was going on to France, he warned her she would find Paris short of food, cigarettes, transport, and heat.9 The last was particularly bad news. She felt the cold intensely, and was already shuddering in England’s penetrating damp.
Beaverbrook sent a car and driver the next morning to show her the extent of London’s destruction. What she saw was a city sadly different from the one preparing to protect itself with sandbags that she had described in Europe in the Spring.10 Some twenty of the East End’s financial and residential districts had fallen to air attacks, and the severity of the raids was compounded by the Nazis’ latest diabolical weapons, the V-2 rocket and V-1 flying bomb, locally nicknamed “the Doodlebug.” Clare came across a site where diggers were looking for bodies, and she expressed admiration for the stoic Britons, beleaguered not only by blackouts and bombing, but shortages of food, clothing, furniture, and housing.11
After seeing enough of London’s destruction, Clare went in search of Julian Simpson, the handsome British Army officer she had fallen for in her late teens. In her lingering fantasy, he remained “the only man I ever loved.”12 As far as she knew, he had not married and would be fifty now. Attempts to locate him at his club were unsuccessful, so she had to postpone her search.13
The delegation was assigned a luxury train for a two-day journey around American bases in England. Fleets of cars were on hand for side trips at Bristol, Liverpool, and Cambridge, as well as secret locations where GIs were stockpiling ordnance for shipment to the fronts. Clare and her colleagues inspected depots, hospitals, training bases, and prison camps.
Her overwhelming impression, she wrote Harry, was of “the vast prodigious power of the USA, its men [and] matériel being flung in unbelievable quantities and with great order to every corner of the globe.” But what she saw also buttressed her long-held suspicion that most American servicemen were bewildered by the war. “They do not quite know what we intend to accomplish … beyond beating the enemy to a frazzle, with that power.”14
Reporters in London quickly sensed Clare’s headline potential, only to find she had little to say. Committee members were under orders not to give individual opinions. However, she could not prevent newsmen from following her as she toured servicemen’s camps, laughing and photogenic in the dreariest of weather. At one air force base, while her less enterprising companions plodded through mud, she took off for an hour-long flight in a B-17 bomber, tucking herself into the co-pilot’s seat and the belly gunner’s bay. She got back in time to see a squadron land after a raid over Germany.15
Unable to control her natural tendency to voice her opinions, Clare forgot about the delegation’s press ban. “Every civilian ought to give up smoking to let the GIs have cigarettes,” she announced one day. “And the women ought to be the first to do it … I’m a heavy smoker myself.”16 Colleagues, peeved at her penchant for the limelight, attempted to muzzle her but failed. Upon arriving in Paris on December 1, Clare gave an interview. It took place in the same room at the Ritz Hotel she had occupied in May 1940, as Germans neared the city.17 She urged the United States government to give more aid to the long-suffering British, and accused the Roosevelt administration of “not making the supreme effort to finish the war soonest.”18
This was hardly a fair indictment of her country’s cornucopian industrial and military outpouring, now reaching its peak. In the last three years, sophisticated machinery coupled with government expenditures of $300 million a day had sent United States productivity soaring beyond the most optimistic predictions. The first quota of one hundred thousand airplanes had taken 1,431 days to build, the second 369 days. All of this brought an end to America’s ten-year Depression far more effectively than the President’s faltering New Deal.19
By December 6, Clare was in the Saar Valley, perilously close to the German border, to keep a committee appointment at Third Army headquarters with the most controversial of all U.S generals, George S. Patton. He had been assigned this new command by Eisenhower, after apologizing publicly for having slapped shell-shocked GIs in Sicily and calling them “cowards” in front of fellow servicemen.
Patton was waiting as the delegation’s transports drew up, with his splendidly uniformed, six-foot-two charisma on full display. Newsreel cameras began rolling as he chivalrously removed his shiny black helmet to shake hands with the radiant Congresswoman. He then posed for a series of photographs with individual members. Predictably, only the one with Clare would appear in newspapers across America. The general, an obsessive manager of every detail, even supervised seating arrangements at a lunch he had organized. He noticed that Clare’s name had been mistakenly left off the guest list, and announced that in that case he would sit with her at a separate small table.20
A visit to an army hospital followed. Clare managed to attract attention among the seriously sick and wounded by complaining of a sore throat and having it swabbed. The congressional group then climbed into a convoy of muddy cars for a tour, conducted by Patton, of military installations immediately behind the lines. Again Clare delighted reporters by seizing the chance to fire a round from a 155-millimeter howitzer directly at a German position. She yanked the lanyard so vigorously that she accidentally knocked Representative Matthew Merritt (D-NY) to the sodden ground.21
On December 10, her spartan traveling wardrobe was mysteriously augmented by a luxurious fur coat as she posed for photographs with General Eisenhower outside Supreme Allied Headquarters near Versailles. Inside, Ike received the lawmakers in a large room hung with detailed maps of the Western Front, and accepted a bottle of bourbon and a jar of his favorite dish, pork sausage and hominy grits. Asked about rumored shell shortages, he blamed fluctuating conditions of warfare, and confirmed he needed more ammunition fast. He also wanted Congress to increase combat pay for medics se
rving with fighting battalions. Already looking ahead to peacetime, Eisenhower volunteered the information that the defeated French would share with other Allies in the eventual occupation of the Reich.22
Reporters accosted Clare afterward and asked her how she found the war fronts. “Oh,” she said, “I knew where they were.”23
After flying to Naples and proceeding to Rome on December 14, the delegation checked into the Grand Hotel on the Via Veneto, where high-ranking Fifth Army officers were also billeted. Sergeant Bill Mauldin, a twenty-three-year-old cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, dropped in “looking for something to satirize.” He was famous for his mordantly humorous sketches of dog-faced grunts, which had swelled the service newspaper’s daily circulation to half a million copies in Italy alone. But the only potential tableau he saw down one corridor was unpublishable: a portly Representative in underwear and socks, attempting “a frontal assault on a chambermaid.”24