Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Leavening her onslaught with humor, Clare caused much laughter by deriding the President’s lack of inches. “Just last week Mr. Truman rose to his full height … stretched his neck looking way up, and shouted, ‘Moral pygmy!’ ” She granted that many people did not like McCarthy’s language. She had been a victim of it herself. “I am not here … to pat McCarthy on the back or sock him in the nose, though it is my private opinion that it would be a good idea for the Senator’s soul if both were done calmly and with regularity.” This got applause as well as laughter. But, she went on, his desire to oust Soviet sympathizers from the United States government was sincere, as was his “relentless exposure of their sinister influence on New Deal foreign policy.”

  She accused Secretary of State Dean Acheson of bringing into the State Department a cadre of “arrested adolescents whose minds stopped growing somewhere in the Thirties, at the time when they first experienced the fine raptures of liberalism.” The reverence of these immature bureaucrats for Soviet ideology had caused the loss of China, and the present war in Korea. “Young people are often like blackberries. When they are green, they are red.”

  In the brief question period that followed, she went after Stevenson for having chosen a white supremacist as his running mate. She also pointed out that the Governor, who had been a reporter in Russia twenty-five years before, had never spoken of the million or more citizens liquidated by Stalin. A prolonged ovation followed as she returned to her chair.34

  Within hours of Clare’s Chicago address, Eisenhower made a major announcement on television about America’s military involvement in Asia. He had been appalled to learn that in the past two years the United States had incurred more than one hundred thousand casualties in Korea, twenty-five thousand of them fatal. Truman was at fault, in his opinion, for failing to devise a withdrawal plan when Chinese reinforcements made it impossible to defeat the Communist North. The President, in response, had challenged Ike to propose an immediate exit strategy of his own.

  Taking the bait, Eisenhower said he would make ending the stalemated conflict his priority as Commander in Chief. In honor of that intent, he vowed that as soon as he was elected, “I shall go to Korea.”

  These words from the five-star general were immediately seen, by Democrats and Republicans alike, as certain to assure him victory in November. Clare, asked to comment on CBS’s Longines Chronoscope show, said that Eisenhower would be especially able to evaluate what he saw and heard at the Korean Front, “because he has been a great modern soldier.” As for those who feared that his military background would incline him to wage war, she said, grinning, “Did you ever hear of a fireman that wanted to start a fire?”35

  In the campaign’s final week, as Stevenson’s support dropped precipitously in the polls, Clare appeared again on national television to blast the administration’s record on Communism. She illustrated her remarks with newsreel clips and phonograph recordings of testimony by Whittaker Chambers and other witnesses to Red perfidy. Her broadcast turned out to be among the most effective of that electoral season, with a rating second only to Nixon’s apologia.36

  To the last hours of his eight-week countrywide tour, Eisenhower, at sixty-one, showed a degree of energy that Stevenson, nine years younger, could not match. He traveled 51,376 miles through forty-five states, spoke in 232 towns, and held many more press conferences than his rival, who sometimes showed signs of fatigue.

  Ike’s stump work paid off. On November 4, he won the election by 55.1 percent of the vote to his opponent’s 44.4 percent, and a resounding 442 electoral votes to 89. Republicans also gained a majority of eight in the House, and tied for seats in the Senate, which meant that in a deadlock, Vice President Nixon would cast the deciding vote.37 Ike also took all but nine states, including “doubtful” Connecticut, sweeping Bush, Purtell, and Morano into office with him—the last with the highest plurality ever recorded by a Congressman in the Fourth District.

  Cutting into the traditional Democratic hold on the South, Eisenhower carried Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, and Oklahoma. Two of the nine states he lost were Kentucky and West Virginia. The others were in the Deep South. Clare had correctly bet a dollar on six for Stevenson: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and West Virginia.38

  Clare filming a television spot for Eisenhower, October 1952 (illustration credit 30.2)

  One statistic that especially gratified her was the GOP’s overwhelming success with Catholics (particularly of Eastern European descent). No longer the religion of a select number of rich elite and poor immigrants, the Church of Rome had finally exercised political clout through the ballot box rather than the pulpit, and was on the verge of becoming a force in American life.39

  The Democratic Party thus found itself out of power for the first time in twenty years. Clare and Harry were ecstatic, having contributed not only her oratory and his editorial support, but a whopping $48,500 to Ike’s coffers. The question now was whether either of them would be rewarded with a plum post in the new administration.

  31

  THE HEALING DRAUGHT

  We are what we repeatedly do.

  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

  —ARISTOTLE

  Two days after the election, Clare addressed a dinner for Jesuits in New York. Her subject was the mission of St. Francis Xavier to China, and she laced her remarks with references to the same Red villains she had castigated in the presidential campaign. She told her audience that exactly four hundred years before, Emperor Kia Tsing had issued a xenophobic edict refusing the Spanish monk admission to his country. Now, she said, the door to China was more firmly closed against Christian envoys than ever, but it was Communist imperialism that kept them out.

  Harry, whose desire to spread the values of American capitalism abroad was as zealous as Xavier’s evangelism, arranged a five-week business trip to the Orient. Since Eisenhower was about to visit Korea, he wanted to update himself on the strategic prospects for the United States in the region.

  No sooner had he left than a summons came for Clare to meet the President-elect at his transition headquarters in the Commodore Hotel at 3:00 P.M. on November 28.1

  En route to her appointment, Clare fantasized ways she might play a part “in the world and in history.” When she arrived at the hotel, she found a warren of offices swarming with job seekers, and chatted with an aide for twenty minutes. Then Eisenhower emerged and strode toward her, smiling broadly with outstretched hand. He ushered her into his room and closed the door.

  She was impressed, as often before, by the “sheer vitality of the man, and his essential simplicity and goodness … with that warmth and cheerful heartedness and self-possession that inspire love and confidence in everyone.”2

  Their conversation began with pleasantries about Harry’s role in the campaign. Eisenhower then changed the subject, saying he would like to appoint a Catholic as his Secretary of Labor. What did she think about that? Not knowing how to respond, Clare said he would need someone of “tremendous capacity” for such a demanding job.

  “There is no job so tough you couldn’t do it,” Ike said.

  While she digested this compliment, he remarked that she was “certainly smarter and abler” than Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold that or any cabinet post. Clare was even more flattered, but knowing from congressional experience that she had no propensity for dealing with unions, said she felt unqualified.

  Eisenhower asked if there was another job she would prefer. Clare suggested tentatively that she could be a successor to Eleanor Roosevelt as chairman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. He looked surprised, and said that would not be “much of a thing.” In any case, the post was filled.

  Edging closer to candor, Clare said she “fit no where except into the field of foreign affairs.” Before Ike could reply, she added, “And with London gone to Aldrich—”

  “Who told you that?” he snapped.

  “Everyone in Ne
w York knows, because the Aldriches have leaked it.”

  He laughed and said Winthrop Aldrich was “the brainiest man with the least wisdom” he had ever encountered. It was true, however, that the former banker had been appointed to the Court of St. James’s.

  Continuing to press, Eisenhower asked, “What would you like best?”

  As his question—perhaps the most momentous ever asked of her—hung in the air, Clare knew there was only one answer. Mysteriously and often over the years, Italy had summoned her, first when she had been a correspondent for Life in the spring of 1940, then twice more, visiting American and British troops in 1944 and 1945. It was there that she had first met Pope Pius XII, and adopted little Augusto. Since the end of the war, she and Harry had been as concerned over the threat of Communist expansion in Italy as in China. They had helped orchestrate the successful fund-raising visit to the United States of Alcide De Gasperi, Italy’s postwar architect of Christian capitalist democracy. He was still in power, and deeply grateful to them both.3 Over the years, she had returned to Italy for cultural and spiritual refreshment, even finding love in the Uffizi gallery.

  But Eisenhower was waiting to hear what reward she wanted. Clare took the plunge.

  “Naturally, what I can’t get. Rome.”

  “Who told you you can’t get it and why?”

  “There are so many others to whom you are obligated.”

  At this point, she cast aside false modesty, and cited three benefits he might gain in choosing her. First, he would gratify the millions of Catholics who had voted for him, second, her appointment would save him from having to send another of her faith to the Vatican—something Stevenson had found out was a sore point with Protestants, and third, every female in the electorate “would be pleased that a woman had finally got a number one diplomatic post.”4 She felt she could handle the vexed question of how much further aid to give a country that was making a remarkable economic recovery from the war. Left unspoken was her own dismay at the growing presence of Communists in Italy’s government and industries.

  Eisenhower hedged. He wondered if she might have a second choice, such as Mexico. “You could do a splendid job for me there.” Clare said lamely that it would be an easier commute. Still probing, Ike asked how her husband would feel about her going to Rome. She admitted they had discussed it, and Harry liked the idea. Time Inc. had a bureau in the Holy City, so he could visit her and run his business from there. She did not have to remind Eisenhower that with their combined wealth, they had ample means to finance the entertaining expected in a prime ambassadorial spot.

  He brought the discussion to an end without committing himself, but gave her a caution that sounded like encouragement. “Please don’t discuss this with Foster.” John Foster Dulles, as Clare knew, was his choice as Secretary of State.

  “Let me wrangle it, and be patient,” Ike said.

  As if on cue, Dulles entered. After a brief chat, she left with the impression that if Dulles (a former adviser to Senator Vandenberg) agreed to have her in his diplomatic corps, she would get her heart’s desire.5

  Outside, she faced reporters and cameramen, telling them nothing about her conversation with Eisenhower. But in a letter that night, she shared every detail with Harry, seeking to assuage whatever disappointment he might feel at not having been favored himself.

  She told him that she disliked the prospect of their having to pursue separate careers on different sides of the Atlantic. “The awful apartness … fills me with panic, vertigo, anguish beyond reason when I contemplate it.” They must thrash it out as soon as he returned from Asia—the implication being that she hoped Harry would reassure her their marriage could stand the strain. In the meantime, “my poor, thirsty little (no, big) ego has had the healing draught it needed most.”

  Clare wished that he could have shared the moment when, after offering her a cabinet post, Eisenhower had agreed to consider her for the position she hankered for all along. “I am so happy because I feel recognized, appreciated, wanted … by the one man whose recognition and appreciation matter most in politics.” In a dozen ways, she added, Ike had made it clear that “in honoring the wife, he sought to honor and please the husband!” She reminded Harry, in a postscript, of his importance around the globe. “Gosh darling, in the tragic environs of Korea and Formosa, does all this sound—trivial and selfish? And irrelevant?”6

  Her true excitement showed in a note to her friend at Vogue. “Maggie, I want Italy more than anything in my entire life.”7

  The day after seeing Clare, Eisenhower flew to South Korea. He met in Seoul with President Syngman Rhee, who wanted to unify the divided country by forcing the Communists back to the Yalu River. General Mark Clark, now commanding the United Nations forces there, had even bolder hopes, suggesting air and sea assaults on China, and even proposing that “serious consideration” be given to the use of the atomic bomb. Ike refused both men. “I have a mandate from the people to stop this fighting,” he said. “That’s my decision.”8

  Clare was not sure how long confirmation of her appointment would take, so she decided to spend the next few weeks in the Bahamas. As she settled into Nassau’s Cable Beach Manor, she yearned for Harry’s company and counsel. But he was unlikely to join her until Christmas.9 After years of marital crises and exhausting reconciliations, their mutual support of Eisenhower and shared interest in Cold War politics boded salvation for them both. They were now in a position to try to influence policy as well as comment on it.

  Far away in Mexico City, Carlos Chávez felt increasingly isolated from Clare. He was hurt that she had sent only perfunctory replies to his many letters in the last couple of years. He did not understand that foreign policy, not religion, was her latest obsession. At any rate, it certainly excluded him. “I really should not be keeping on this correspondence without correspondence,” he wrote in a note tinged with sadness. “But I am not expecting any answer to these lines anyway.”

  Carlos added that he had finished only the first movement of Ann’s symphony, and half of the second. Completion of the whole four-movement work, his most complex and ambitious yet, was going to be a long process. He now aimed for its world premiere in “the winter of 1953–54.” To that end, he was about to take the score to his Acapulco studio, “where you once were in a starlitten [sic] night.”10

  On December 17, Clare received a phone call from C. D. Jackson, now a senior aide to Eisenhower. He confirmed that she had been appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Italy. The nomination would be announced in the new year, and if approved by the Senate, she would soon find herself at the center of the Mediterranean world.

  Harry got back to New York four days later. Stopping only long enough to report on his travels to the President-elect, and at greater length to his editors, he flew to Nassau on December 23, bringing Clare an engraved Cartier gold circular pill box, decorated with a cabochon sapphire.11

  Reunited after more than five weeks apart, the Luces attended Christmas Eve Mass in the island’s small cathedral. Clare, ecstatic at her elevation, felt that the service was one of the most beautiful and inspiring she had ever attended. She wrote to tell the Abbot of Gethsemani about “a great golden-throated choir of Negroes—and all the parishioners, most of them colored—singing the responses in Latin … from memory.”12

  32

  GAL FOR THE JOB

  The art of diplomacy is to get other people to want what you want.

  —MADELEINE ALBRIGHT

  By the time Clare left Nassau with Harry for New York on January 2, 1953, the FBI had begun background checks in anticipation of her Senate confirmation. Its grilling of friends and acquaintances was extensive and intrusive. One agent even barged into George S. Kaufman’s bedroom, where he was working on a play, simply because he had helped Clare with third act problems in The Women seventeen years before.1 The Luces were alarmed when they discovered that their apartment telephone wires were tapped.2

 
Clare’s new status as the first woman ever chosen to head a major U.S. Embassy abroad, plus Harry’s now undoubted status as the most powerful publisher in America, with presidential access, placed the couple at the height of sociopolitical eminence.

  Harry felt exalted to find himself, or imagine himself, as a counsel to the powerful. He advised Secretary Dulles on how to handle the Korean stalemate, gave Ike a further briefing on his tour of the Far East, and had lunch with Winston Churchill. Returning to Time Inc. from the last encounter, in “what Billings called a delirium of happy excitement,” he treated his editors to impressions of the last two leaders. Ike, he said, had given Churchill “unshirted hell” for failing to do more on European unity. But the President-elect did not understand the full nature of Communism, and thought Japan should be free to trade with Red China. Struggling, as so often, to express himself in metaphor, Harry said Winston was “like a great symphony orchestrating fixed themes.” Yet he was unable to quote the exact words of either great man.3

  The weather for the Inauguration of Dwight David Eisenhower on January 20 was cold but clear. Before dawn, crowds gathered in front of the east face of the Capitol. Men wearing top hats or homburgs mingled with Indians in full tribal regalia, and a California woman held up a live turtle that waved a small flag wired to its right front leg. Just after 10:00 A.M., the U.S. Marine Band struck up beneath the swearing-in platform. As noon approached, the VIP stands began to fill. Clare, a guest of her old colleague Joseph W. Martin, Jr. (now Speaker of the House), took her place near, but not among, members of the diplomatic corps, since her appointment had not yet been announced. Finally, to the sound of ruffles and flourishes, Eisenhower followed President Truman and Richard Nixon to the front row.