Ambassador Luce at her desk in the Palazzo Margherita (illustration credit 33.2)
During the next eight hours Clare went from floor to floor of her domain, introducing herself to as many officers as possible. Five counselors reported to Durbrow and his principal assistant, John Shea, administering, respectively, the Political, Labor, Agricultural, Public Affairs, and Embassy Departments. Other officials handled such programs as Mutual Defense Assistance, Treaty Claims, Navy Purchasing, Veterans’ Affairs, and Cultural Exchange. In addition to these Foreign Service units, Clare was responsible, as Chief of Mission, for thirty-two separate agencies, including a twelve-man CIA team under Gerald Miller, a Narcotics Bureau, the Agricultural Service, and the American Battle Monuments Commission.18
In all, she had authority over fifteen hundred employees—five hundred in the embassy compound and a thousand more stationed elsewhere at eight consulates and other posts throughout Italy, as well as the U.S. Representative in Trieste. Most were holdover Democrats appointed by Truman after the war. Some went back further: her press relations officer referred to himself as “a howling New Dealer.”19 Their impassive, even glum, demeanors revealed how much they disliked having to defer to a Republican envoy. More than a few were skeptical of Clare’s diplomatic acumen. Mutterings behind her back demonstrated insecurity as well as querulousness. “Will she have a purge? Will she be difficult? Will she run a social rather than a substantive Embassy?”20 Italy had enacted female suffrage only six years before, so a concern widely shared was, “Why the heck send a Latin country a woman?”21
Given the hostile press that had preceded Clare’s arrival in Naples, it was a surprise that the majority of that day’s newspapers seemed disposed in her favor. They quoted her broadcast remarks from the Andrea Doria, and featured her picture on many front pages. She was described as “one of the most beautiful women in America,” and “a writer and journalist of the first rank.” Only the Communist l’Unità disparaged her as an “elderly lady” who spoke Italian with a Brooklyn accent.22
That night, Durbrow asked the Luces to his house for a buffet supper, so that top aides and their wives could get to know them socially. Harry was at ease in his new role as “Consort.” Durbrow had looked into the delicate question of Luce’s protocol ranking, and decided it should be only slightly inferior to that of a minister plenipotentiary. This allowed him to be seated in any formal situation below Sua Eccellenza, but ahead of the chargés d’affaires.23
When Clare returned to her office the following morning, much of the earlier frosty reception had thawed. She was further gratified by an extraordinary gesture on the part of the Italian Foreign Office, housed in the Chigi Palace. Custom required her to pay a courtesy call there on Barone Michele Scammacca, the Chief of Protocol. But Scammacca instead came to the Palazzo Margherita, and was photographed gallantly kissing her hand.24
Before getting down to work in earnest, she put on her desk a framed copy of Lord Astley’s prayer before the Battle of Edgehill:
Lord, thou knowest I shall be verie busie this day.
I may forget Thee—
Do not Thou forget me.25
Soon to supplement this, on a side table, was a cautionary motto by Talleyrand: “Above all, not too much zeal.”26
Clare could not function officially as Ambassador until the President of Italy received her. But Einaudi was on a visit to France, so on April 28 she presented a copy of her credentials to Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, in his subsidiary capacity as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Their meeting was cordial, since he gratefully remembered the financial support he had received from her and other Americans.27
Tall and slightly stooped at seventy-two, De Gasperi remained vigorous and intensely serious, with blue eyes that could be chilly. He was internationally respected as the most distinguished Italian statesman since Cavour. Yet he was not guaranteed reelection when his countrymen went to the polls on June 7 to choose a new Parliament from multiple parties. Even at the height of his power in 1948, De Gasperi had never managed to amass more than 48.5 percent of the vote for his Christian Democrats. Effectively, he maintained control only by virtue of his skill in building coalitions from moderates on both the right and left sides of Italy’s bewilderingly wide political spectrum.
This juggling act, which excluded extremists in the Monarchist Party, as well as Socialists and Communists constituting the Popular Front, had enabled him to preserve a working majority through seven different governments since 1945. However, his chance of forming an eighth was threatened by an escalation of political tensions, with the Popular Front growing in power, and former Fascists arguing that only a military dictatorship could keep Italy from going Red.
De Gasperi and Clare were therefore linked at the outset of their official relationship by a dread that the coming election could bring about a disaster for democracy. The Italian Communist Party was two million members strong, by far the largest in any country beyond the Soviet Union, making Italy the weakest link in the Allied chain of defense against Soviet expansionism.
The Prime Minister had another electoral liability. Moderate Monarchists, whom he relied on for coalition support, were traditionally against social reform, and a fanatically nationalist minority blamed him for not governing like Il Duce. Clare was no admirer of Mussolini, although in 1940 she had met and been charmed by his son-in-law Count Ciano, one of the principal architects of the Fascist State.28 But she feared totalitarianism on the left much more than autocracy on the right.
De Gasperi was not as convinced as she that the Monarchists were less dangerous than the Communists.29 Clare emphasized that President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles shared her concern about the danger to the vote in June posed by the brilliant and shrewd Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti.30
The following day, Ike’s Secretary of Defense, Charles E. Wilson, arrived in Rome for a meeting with his Italian counterpart, Randolfo Pacciardi. At the embassy, Ambassador Luce chaired a preliminary discussion of Italy’s role in NATO.
Besides Wilson and Admiral Carney, there were several attachés and aides from her staff. Clare initiated the proceedings by saying that having been in her post only one week, she would like to hear opinions on the “salient points” of NATO policy in Southern Europe.
The Italian Republic had been a member since March 1949—a reluctant one at first, because De Gasperi had needed to persuade both his nationalistic right wing and the anti-American Socialists and Communists that Italy would not lose its sovereignty by joining. Since then the pace of American-assisted rearmament had been rapid, and NATO bases were already established along both coasts, much to the disgust of Togliatti. Italy was now firmly integrated into the Western Alliance’s Mediterranean defense strategy, to the chagrin of Monarchists as well as Communists.31 One of Clare’s assignments would be to persuade at least the former that NATO was not detrimental to national pride.
Clare holds a staff meeting in her Embassy office. Gerry Miller, CIA representative, far left; Elbridge Durbrow, chief of staff, fourth from left. (illustration credit 33.3)
Some attendees at the meeting tried to impress her with an excess of bureaucratic detail, as Carney later recalled.
Well, she stood it for a few minutes, and then she let go with a resounding sailor man’s oath, and said this was not the kind of information she wanted, and let’s get down to brass tacks and confine it to facts. There was a silence around the table that you could have cut with a knife, and it suddenly dawned on everybody who was the boss man at the table, and it was Mrs. Luce; and she did a superb job at chairmanship … bringing these people down to factual viewpoints and statements. I was highly amused, and I must say that Mrs. Luce’s stock went up with me very considerably when I saw her take charge.32
That night, with a fur cape over a long gown, Clare arrived at the Villa Madama to dine with Wilson and Pacciardi. Bystanders were so struck by her glowing looks that they called out, “La Luce, La Luce.”
While his wif
e went about her business, Harry did, too, setting off daily in his black Lancia to an old building on the Corso d’Italia. After entering a dark hallway, he deposited a five-lire gettone into a coin box, rode an elevator cage to the second floor, and entered a door marked “Time Inc.” At the end of a carpeted space, he sat at a small Venetian desk, among the bureau’s other five employees.33
But supporting and escorting Clare was his main priority. Thus on Monday, May 4, Henry Luce became the first consort in Italian history to squire a female Ambassador to her presentation of credentials at the Palazzo del Quirinale. Shortly before noon, he donned striped trousers, cutaway coat, and top hat, while she put on a dark dress, two strands of pearls, a hip-length mink coat, and a robin’s-egg-blue beanie hat.34
As they alighted in the courtyard, Bersaglieri in cock-plumed helmets saluted, and Baron Scammacca stepped forward to shepherd them inside. Lining the stairway and long marble corridors were cuirassiers of the presidential guard, in horse-tailed headgear and shiny breastplates. They raised sabers in salute as the Luces passed.
Harry waited in a side room while Clare proceeded to the chilly Salon of Kings, keeping on her hat and coat.35 The Chief of Protocol announced her as Signora Clare Boothe Luce, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States. “Extraordinary, yes, but plenipotentiary—no,” she was tempted to say as she approached President Einaudi, an elderly man with rimless glasses and a cane. He welcomed her in a soft voice and in a manner distinctly democratic, despite the regal trappings.36
Divested of her formal papers, Clare now officially represented her country, becoming the junior member of Rome’s diplomatic corps, outranked by at least two dozen others.37
Her principal responsibility, more important than ingratiating herself with Italians or entertaining eminent compatriots passing through Rome, was to implement American postwar policy toward Western Europe, as laid out in a 1947 State Department paper.
The staff does not see Communist activities as the root of the present difficulties in Western Europe. It believes the crisis in large part results from the disruptive effect of the war on the economic, political and social structure of Europe.… The planning staff recognizes that the Communists are exploiting the European crisis and that further Communist successes would create serious danger to American security.
In recognition of this situation had come the Marshall Plan and the Offshore Procurement Program, which awarded defense-related manufacturing contracts to equip NATO. Now that the basic needs of the Italian populace for food, housing, and work were being satisfied, largely by the improving economy, Clare could concentrate more on the precarious political situation. “I can already see that it is going to be a fascinating experience,” she wrote in a progress report. “Especially just at the outset, with the Italian elections approaching in less than six weeks.”38
She made it a goal to encourage moderate politicians to resist, and if possible defeat, Communist efforts to dominate the ideological conversation. At the same time, she aimed to help nurse a still-struggling democracy with a weak parliamentary system that until recently had known only monarchical or totalitarian rule. The extreme Left was doing its utmost to upset the frail alliance of the centrist parties, De Gasperi’s Christian Democrats being the strongest of those. Moscow was covertly giving financial support to the Italian Communist Party (PCI), led by the canny Togliatti, and by extension to its ally the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), led by the equally adroit Pietro Nenni. These two had been partners in underground wartime efforts to unseat Mussolini. Imprisoned together in Nazi concentration camps (Nenni’s daughter had died at Auschwitz), they had forged a political bond.
Clare knew that secret Soviet funding of the Popular Front had a destabilizing potential for the governing coalition. In communications with Washington, she implied that Togliatti and Nenni were ideologically of one mind, and referred to them as “Socialcommunists.”39 Gerald Miller shared her views and her faith, and quickly emerged as a close confidant. His main mission at the CIA was to counter the influence of Moscow by clandestinely funneling millions of dollars to democratic center parties, non-Communist labor unions, Catholic youth groups, and other anti-Red organizations.40
On May 10, Clare had a second meeting with De Gasperi. Foremost on his mind was how the Trieste issue might affect the coming election. If it was not settled soon, he said, it could lead to his defeat or, even if he won, jeopardize his ability to form another coalition. Trieste, De Gasperi emphasized, was an emotional subject for his countrymen of whatever political stamp. Ever since the port’s annexation at the end of World War I, they had seen it as the final jewel in the symbolic crown of their unity. “Trieste is for Italians,” the Prime Minister kept insisting. “More than a city and a harbor: it is a national feeling.”41 This was particularly so for the Monarchists, whose support was essential to De Gasperi’s political survival.
Just a day after Clare’s arrival in Rome, he had been at a NATO meeting with Secretary Dulles in Paris, and had told him that the large Italian population of the so-called Free Territory of Trieste (FTT) wished to “return to the motherland.”42 He had rejected Dulles’s suggestion that Yugoslavia’s Slovenes and Croats, having fought bravely with the Allies during War World II, were surely entitled to at least one point of access to the Adriatic. They had enjoyed that privilege since the earliest days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In technical diplomatic terms, that meant that De Gasperi was not only demanding the repatriation of some 286,000 Italians in Zone A north of Trieste, but objecting to a significant presence of 93,000 Slavs living just south of the city in Zone B.
The problem, as De Gasperi saw it, was that the Allied governments of the United States, Great Britain, and France seemed undecided how and when to partition the two zones of the Free Territory. He asked Clare if the United States, in view of the comparative apathy of its partners, would make a final effort to honor the Tripartite Declaration of March 20, 1948, which had hastily committed the Allies to supporting the wholesale return of the FTT to Italy.
Yugoslavia had been offended at not being made party to the terms of that announcement. Tito was particularly angry at the apparent Allied impression that he was a Soviet stooge. This misperception had long ago been invalidated, when only three months after the Tripartite Declaration, Yugoslavia had been expelled from the Soviet defense bloc (Cominform) for not being sufficiently malleable. The Truman administration had thereafter recommended granting the Yugoslavs at least those parts of the Istrian peninsula where they were in the majority. It saw advantages in wooing Tito closer to the West by also giving him economic aid. In 1949, the State Department had done just that, urging that Tito’s feelings be considered whenever Trieste’s return to Italy was discussed. This amounted to a watering down of the pro-Italian Declaration, and a furious De Gasperi had made it clear that his country intended to keep the Allies “nailed to their moral engagement.”43 Echoing him, Clare reproved the State Department, saying the contradiction between America’s ideological war against Communism and its support of “renegade Communist dictator Tito” was morally indefensible.44
Map of the Free Territory of Trieste, 1953–1954 (illustration credit 33.4)
Now the Prime Minister told her that Italy would hold direct talks with Yugoslavia, but only if the United States arranged an advance agreement, based on the Tripartite Declaration, that also included “at least one half of Zone B.”45 Parrying, she replied that her government would require a quid pro quo for any such favor: a speedy acquiescence, “immediately after the election,” to the expansion of U.S. military facilities in Italy.
De Gasperi avoided a commitment on that score. He warned that his time as senior statesman was nearing its end, and that with him gone, some “hotheads” in Parliament might take it upon themselves to solve the Trieste problem violently.46
To increase rapport with her senior staff, Clare began to hold informal discussions with them each Monday morning at the Villa Taverna. She th
rived on lively debate, and ran the sessions as she had editorial conferences at Vanity Fair, asking for ideas and opinions so that she could make informed decisions. If tempers flared, she tamped them down with a joke or witty anecdote.47
The embassy’s economic adviser, Joseph Jacobs, who had contemplated retirement from his post rather than work for her, admitted, “I came to scoff, but I stayed to praise.”48 Francis Williamson, head of the political section, marveled at her ability to repeat hour-long diplomatic conversations “with the fidelity of a tape recorder.” Durbrow singled out her powers of absorption and reasoning. “She thinks things through using a lawyer’s logical method,” he said, comparing her sharp mind to a “diamond edge.”49
Clare took her first official trip out of the capital on May 12, leaving by air for a three-day car tour of Apulia, the southeasterly heel of the Italian boot. Her purpose was to assess the effectiveness of millions of dollars of American aid for land reclamation. Covering some 250 miles, she was pleased to see farms and villages thriving, and a good number of war-damaged roads, bridges, houses, and schools rebuilt. She surprised a group of farmhands by climbing onto a reaping machine and riding across their fields.
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