In the first roll call of states on Friday, Eisenhower registered 595 votes to Taft’s 500. Then a last-minute switch of Minnesota votes put him over the top, and he was nominated with a final majority of 845 to 280. MacArthur’s support shrank from 10 to 4.
On the advice of GOP stalwarts, Ike chose Richard Milhous Nixon, a thirty-nine-year-old Senator from California, as his running mate. A smart lawyer, Nixon had first won nationwide recognition by nailing Alger Hiss as a Communist subversive, and was recognized in Congress as being well versed in both foreign and domestic issues.
Many years later, Nixon speculated that if the idea of women in high office had been more advanced in 1952, Clare Luce could well have been nominated instead of him.
She had the brains, the drive, the political acumen, the judgment, and she was the first really interesting woman to make a major mark in American politics. She also had a well-honed ability to engage in the cut-and-thrust of political conflict and she was identified as a strongly-committed anti-Communist—two of the specific qualities for which Eisenhower chose me.6
Oratorically, the Democrats did better at their Chicago convention in the last week of July, where Adlai E. Stevenson, the witty, intellectual Governor of Illinois, became the nominee, and chose to run with Senator John J. Sparkman of Alabama. Harry recognized the verbal superiority and message of the opposition, and stepped up his support of Eisenhower. He reacted in fury when T. S. Matthews, a Princeton classmate of Stevenson’s, took advantage of his absence to run an adulatory Time cover story on the Governor.
In the course of the campaign, Luce magazines relentlessly portrayed the Democratic ticket negatively. While Eisenhower was described as purposefully striding into a room, Stevenson merely “shambled.” Picture editors featured unflattering photographs of the Democrat’s disheveled clothes and balding head, even snapping a hole in the sole of his shoe. Nixon was described as good-looking, modest, and smart, while Sparkman was caricatured as “a Southern connoisseur of cough drops.”
Thousands of letters poured in complaining of extreme bias, and canceling subscriptions. Harry defended his pro-Ike stance. “A political campaign is not a sporting event requiring polite neutrality,” he told his staff.7 A disillusioned Matthews concluded that Luce “had come to the point of believing that the Republic was in danger whenever the Republicans weren’t running it.”8
After returning to Hollywood Clare worked on studio revisions for Pilate’s Wife, but soon became “disgusted and depressed” over them.9 On July 28, she was presented with a possible way out. News came from Connecticut that Senator Brien McMahon had died of cancer at age forty-eight, only two years into his current term. Newspapers reported that Governor Lodge was expected to appoint Clare Luce to the seat until November, when she would have a good chance to win the unexpired four years of McMahon’s term.10 She called Lodge, and said she was interested only if he did not want the seat for himself. Lodge disconcertingly replied that before making the temporary appointment, he needed to consult with party leaders. He would then wait to see who emerged as the nominee of the state convention in September.
A week later, Clare went to Los Angeles Airport to greet Eisenhower, who was to make the opening speech of his campaign. She bumped into Al Morano, who had at last followed her as Representative of Fairfield County “You’ve got to come back, Sis,” he said, insisting that the Senate race in Connecticut “is wide open.”11
Clare at once told reporters she was available for McMahon’s vacant post, “if the people want me.”12 On August 11, she wrote the Governor. “I think as a Senatorial candidate I could help Ike with various groups of voters—most especially the women, since in the national picture there are so few women running for important office.” She repeated that her availability depended on “your not wanting to fill the vacancy yourself.”13
Those familiar with Lodge’s patrician background knew that his burning ambition was to emulate his brother, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, and his esteemed grandfather of the same name, who had represented the state in the same capacity for thirty-one years. The main dilemma for him now was that if he ran for the Senate and won, he would be succeeded for the next two years by his Lieutenant Governor, a Democrat, thus incurring the wrath of Connecticut Republicans. He could avoid such ire only if the state convention drafted him. Speculation was rife that secretly this was what he hoped might happen.
Clare received many letters, telegrams, and phone calls urging her to run. She announced that having turned down two chances in the past, she was about to exercise a woman’s privilege to change her mind and fight alongside General Eisenhower.14
Her RKO contract came to an end on August 20, and she returned East with only sixty-six pages surviving of her original script for Pilate’s Wife.
Three days later, the Bridgeport Post reported that the Governor was hoping for a deadlock at the convention between Mrs. Luce and Prescott S. Bush, a Greenwich banker, so that delegates would turn to him. But The New York Times stated that Clare had “moved into the lead” for McMahon’s seat. Simultaneously, an aide close to Eisenhower asked certain Connecticut GOP leaders to support her candidacy.15 Three Republican caucuses, irked by this outside interference, pressured Lodge to make his temporary appointee William A. Purtell, a forceful-speaking Catholic from Bridegport, who, confusingly, was already the party’s nominee for the junior seat held by Senator William Benton.16
Clare and Richard Nixon, c. September 1952 (illustration credit 30.1)
On August 26, Clare met in New York with Eisenhower and then Nixon. Both meetings proclaimed the national campaign’s desire to have her back in Washington, now that Ike was widely seen as the next President. Clare issued a statement confirming that she had asked Lodge to back her for the nomination, and he “flatly and finally told me he would not extend me any support, so I must believe that he is supporting Prescott Bush under the guise of neutrality.” She refused, at least publicly, to believe whisperers who claimed the Governor surreptitiously sought the nomination for himself. “An honorable man must be taken at his word.”17
Lodge’s outraged response was to appoint Purtell to hold McMahon’s seat through the end of the year.
Politicking among party leaders continued as Clare trekked around every Connecticut county, advertised widely, and made radio and television speeches. On Thursday, September 4, she joined hundreds of delegates at Bushnell Memorial Hall in Hartford for the two-day Connecticut State Republican Convention. Richard Nixon gave the keynote address, his presence reaffirming the Eisenhower campaign’s support of Clare’s candidacy. But as she canvassed the floor, her optimism faded. Prescott Bush was obviously favored to win in the next day’s ballot, unless a movement to draft Lodge succeeded.
At that night’s reception, Clare, dressed in the same navy-blue polka-dot crepe outfit she had worn all day, ate nothing. She was the only candidate who continued pleading her case after the function ended at midnight. Going on to the Bond Hotel where delegates congregated, she traipsed from room to room until 4:30 A.M. Cheerful despite rejections, she was gratified when at least one Fairfield County delegation said it would vote for her.18
Friday’s proceedings began ominously for Clare, as Lodge was duly drafted to run for Senator McMahon’s seat. But the Governor garnered a mere five votes. Four main candidates remained on the ballot: Clare, Bush, J. Kenneth Bradley of Westport, and John Lupton of Weston. At the last moment, Congressman Antoni Sadlak of Rockville, Joseph Talbot of Naugatuck, and Mansfield Sprague of New Canaan put their names forward. In the subsequent polling, with 616 delegates voting, Clare was chastened to receive only 50 votes (most from her old constituency) to Bush’s 412 and Sadlak’s 54. The other five candidates got 100 among them.
With the roll call complete, Lodge went to the rostrum and said that the ticket comprising Bush and Purtell would “command great support” on Election Day. Clare followed to make the nomination unanimous. “I stand before you as a defeated candidate,
but no battle is worth fighting that is not worth losing.” She appealed for party unity to elect Eisenhower and Nixon in November, and in a hint of personal disappointment quoted lines from an ancient English ballad.
I am hurt, Sir Andrew Barton said; I am hurt but I am not slain.
I lie me down and bleed awhile, and then I’ll rise and fight again.19
Apparently, her dithering over a Senate run in previous years, when she could have won handily, had lost her the support of local party leaders and most delegates. Another reason for her defeat was the reluctance of Governor Lodge and the state party chairman, Clarence Baldwin, to have two Roman Catholics—Clare and Purtell—run for the Senate at the same time, especially when a third, Al Morano, was up for reelection to the House.
Harry, who had been standing in the wings during the voting, made only one comment to the press about his wife’s part in the proceedings: “I am proud of her today as I have always been proud of her.” As they drove away, he turned to her and smiled. “Look at all the money we’ve saved.” Two weeks spent vying for the nomination had cost them $6,000, with little more than $1,000 coming from others. Two months of further campaigning would have been vastly more expensive.20
Lord Beaverbrook wrote sympathetically to say he had hoped to see “Senator Luce” continue “the most brilliant career” of his female acquaintance. “Oddly enough,” Clare replied, “I was responsible for getting Lodge into politics.” He had been a movie actor, hardly an obvious qualification for Congress, but she had supported him for her own House seat when many said he had no chance, and later urged him to run for the governorship.
“No good deed,” she concluded, “goes unpunished.”21
By now, Carlos Chávez was resigned to Clarita and himself living in different worlds. He had telephoned her just before the convention, but she had cut him short, sounding rushed. He wrote later to say he did not resent her lack of time to talk.
I love your intensity in things you take up and your definiteness.… At our age, you and I have to grow; and not only that, but grow together, how together and apart? Bah! That is our particular characteristic, and don’t you think that is what we have been doing for the last three years?22
Sadly for him, Clare no longer felt as intensely as during their idyllic days in his Acapulco aerie.
Taking a short break before the Republican presidential campaign began in earnest, Clare compiled and edited a book for Sheed & Ward called Saints for Now. She persuaded twenty eminent authors to contribute short biographical essays—in effect hagiographies—of a saint they admired. Among them were Thomas Merton writing on John of the Cross, Robert Farren on Thomas Aquinas, Paul Gallico on Francis of Assisi, Sister Madeleva on Hilda of Whitby, Whittaker Chambers on Benedict, Wyndham Lewis on Pius V, Rebecca West on Augustine of Hippo, and Evelyn Waugh on Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine. Clare also commissioned illustrations by André Girard, Jean Charlot, and Salvador Dalí.23
In her introduction, she cited Augustine, among her favorite saints, for abandoning a life of “lust and sophistry” for one of religious devotion. She also admired Thomas Aquinas for “the glory of his intellect” and Joan of Arc for dying in defense of political principles. Most of her choices had a spiritual ideal that eluded her. “Saints give little thought to changing the world around them. They are too busy changing the world within them.”24
The book would go on to win the Christopher Award, and sell thirty thousand copies in its first weeks. It was also published abroad, despite mixed American reviews. The New York Herald Tribune found the efforts of an ostensibly all-star cast of authors “ragged.” The Voice of Saint Jude said that the best pieces were by women, except for Clare’s pedestrian introduction, which “did not succeed in matching the high quality” of the rest.25
Clare kick-started the GOP presidential campaign in Connecticut on September 11, before a huge crowd at Bridgeport’s Stratford Hotel. She concentrated most of her energy thereafter on lectures, radio talks, and television speeches, ratcheting up an eventual total of over a hundred appearances. She focused on inner-city, blue-collar Catholic Democrats, as the most likely part of the former New Deal vote to be lured away from Stevenson. Al Smith had done just this in his New York gubernatorial races in the 1920s. Many of these Catholics were Poles who had been angered when FDR ceded their homeland to Stalin at Yalta. Ike, too, took up the Catholic anti-Communist cause, berating the “tragic blunders” made at Tehran, at Yalta, and in the postwar negotiations at Potsdam, where the West had traded “overwhelming victory for a new enemy and for new oppressions and new wars which were to come.”26
Nixon adhered to the anti-Soviet theme, alliteratively accusing Stevenson of being “a Ph.D. graduate of Dean Acheson’s cowardly college of Communist Containment.” He had been incensed during the first Alger Hiss trial, when the Governor appeared as a character witness, and swore to the loyalty and integrity of the defendant.
The hapless Stevenson played further into the hands of the GOP by saying he would not appoint an envoy to the Vatican, because “it constitutes an official recognition of a religion incompatible with our theory of the separation of church and state.” He followed this with an impolitic boycott of the annual Al Smith dinner hosted by Cardinal Spellman, leaving the floor to Eisenhower to capture yet more Catholics with his pro-Poland remarks on foreign policy.27
Clare was not at her best on September 28, when she debated Senator Hubert H. Humphrey in an American Forum of the Air broadcast. She attacked the Truman administration for being careless of the safety and resources of the United States Treasury. “We are in a bloody war in Korea. And certainly it hasn’t given us solvency. Every American citizen owes the government $1,800 … our national debt is $655 billion.” What was more, the Democratic-dominated Congress, with Humphrey’s approval, now wanted to pour taxpayers’ money into a wasteful, “high-minded” irrigation scheme in Asia.
Humphrey effectively replied that the scheme was part of a foreign aid program to advance democracy, not just drainage. Clare continued to protest that after having spent “billions and billions of dollars” abroad, the United States saw “nothing in return.”
The Senator was not about to be steamrolled by allowing her to monopolize the conversation. “With all the charm on the other side of the table,” he said, “I still want my moment.” He repeated a mantra of his own campaigns. “Freedom is not free … $500 million for a continent that embraces over a billion and a half people is a small price … to wage a war for peace.”
Drawing attention to the contrasting platforms of the presidential candidates, Humphrey damagingly cited Eisenhower’s tolerance of the ranting anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. At this Clare seemed at a loss for words. Recovering, she accused him of being “violently opposed to Mr. Truman” in the 1948 election. When he corrected her, she became uncharacteristically flustered. “Well, I don’t see why we should labor all these points, of what you said or didn’t say.” Humphrey replied, “I don’t either.”28
Meanwhile, Harry, riding along for two days on Eisenhower’s campaign train, was unimpressed with some of the acolytes he encountered on board, calling them “90 percent self-seeking chiselers.”29
His remark gained credence when Richard Nixon was accused of making personal use of a campaign trust fund. Eisenhower was appalled when this became public, and told aides that Nixon should quit. The GOP’s crusade against unethical practices in Washington would lack resonance “if we ourselves aren’t as clean as a hound’s tooth.”30 Nixon was cleared by an audit, but Ike believed that even the rumor of malfeasance had tarnished his value as a running mate.
Afraid of being dropped, Nixon appeared on prime-time television to exonerate himself before a record sixty million. With his stony-faced wife, Pat, beside him, he righteously pleaded his modest financial status, and asked viewers to let the Republican National Committee know whether he should remain on the ticket or not. Eisenhower was furious, but in more than four millio
n responses to party headquarters, 200 to 1 said the answer was yes.31
Hoping to redeem her Humphrey debate performance, Clare agreed to stand in for Joseph McCarthy in a television broadcast on September 30. Increasingly virulent in his diatribes, the Senator had been accusing Roosevelt and Truman of “twenty years of treason,” for not having been sufficiently anti-Communist. Posed against a stark background in a black rhinestone evening gown, Clare gave her apocalyptic views on the Sino-Soviet threat to Western democracy. John Kenneth Galbraith, a speechwriter on Stevenson’s team, derisively noted her “taut, high-pitched, frantic tones” as she condemned domestic tolerance of Bolshevism.32
Since Clare always made a point of speaking in a low register, Galbraith was likely objecting more to the content of her remarks than to any lack of mellowness. Eisenhower, in contrast, complimented her for “bringing into sharp focus the Communist infiltration of our America.”33
Encouraged, she gave a substantial address to a capacity audience at the Executive Club Ladies’ Day lunch in Chicago, eleven days before the election. She said that the number one issue before the world was the problem of Communism, and until it was solved no nation could know peace or security. Defending McCarthy’s “blunderbluss, bile and brimstone” style of fighting the Red menace, she said it was harmless compared to what President Truman had been saying about Eisenhower. He had accused the general of wanting to start an atomic war against the Soviets, as well as being anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, callous to Negroes, and prone to the Nazi theory of a “master race.” No Democrat, she observed, had reprimanded Truman for his “hysteria, slander, smear, or of whacking away at the Bill of Rights … all of which things are by their own definition, ‘McCarthyism.’ ”
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