A highly emotional man, Wisner harangued Clare for hours about the need to help the freedom fighters, and expressed his anguish over Eisenhower’s neutrality. For four days, he continued to drown his despair until she feared he was heading for a breakdown.24
Adding to their mutual concerns was an equally sudden outbreak of violence in the Middle East. On October 29, Israel invaded Egypt, taking over the Sinai Peninsula. This did not at first seem to be related to Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal, but on the following day, Great Britain and France, the two major shareholders in the canal company, issued a suspiciously prompt ultimatum to the belligerents, warning that if peace was not restored at once, they too would invade and reestablish order throughout the region. Within twenty-four hours, this threat was implemented, and British and French warships began a bombardment of the Suez Zone.25
On instructions from Dulles, Clare began working with Vice Admiral Charles R. Brown of the U.S. Sixth Fleet to coordinate the evacuation of some twenty-eight hundred Americans from the Middle East to Italy. She also made arrangements for the evacuees to be housed and fed.26
With less than a week to go before the presidential election, Eisenhower was furious with the aggressors in the Middle East for having kept him uninformed about their collusion. He believed that Egypt was “within its rights” to nationalize a canal whose entire length ran through its own territory, linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.27
On November 1, Dulles presented a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly, calling for a total cease-fire in the Middle East. At the same time, Eisenhower informed Prime Minister Eden that Britain would not receive American petroleum to replace oil shipments stalled by Nasser’s retaliatory blocking of the canal. He also threatened to restrict Whitehall’s access to its American bank accounts.
That same day, Nagy, in what turned out to be an act of hubris, announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Soviet troops and tanks, surreptitiously parked on the country’s borders, began moving back toward Budapest in vast numbers. Their initial retreat had been a feint to persuade the West that Nagy’s reforms would be tolerated, and to discourage any active outside support of the rebels.
While the General Assembly debated the United States’ resolution, Eisenhower delivered the last speech of his reelection campaign. To Clare’s horror, he seemed willing to accept the coming debacle in Hungary. “We cannot—in the world, any more than in our own nation—subscribe to one law for the weak, another law for the strong; one law for those opposing us, another for those allied with us.” This assumption of a moral high ground in international affairs showed the President’s willingness to chastise longtime allies, and his reluctance to provoke another world war by interfering in the Soviet sphere of influence. He won instant acclaim in Arab states and other nations with memories of colonialism. In the small hours of November 2, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of the U.S. resolution.28
By then Clare was staying with Douglas Dillon at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, and Dulles had entered Walter Reed Hospital for emergency colon surgery. Eisenhower was therefore in sole charge of United States foreign policy when, at 4:00 A.M. Hungarian time on November 4, some two hundred thousand Red Army soldiers and four thousand tanks overran Budapest, shelling indiscriminately in a display of totalitarian fury. Nagy broadcast an appeal for Western help at 5:15 A.M., after which all communications with the outside world shut down.
It was apparent to Clare that all her doomsday forecasts over the last ten years were now reality. In a melodramatic cable to the President, she warned: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls in Hungary today. It tolls for us if freedom’s holy light is extinguished in blood and iron over there.”29
At dawn the following day, Britain and France ignored the demand of the UN for a Middle Eastern cease-fire, and escalated their assault on Egypt with a full-scale amphibious invasion at Port Said. Some two hundred warships, including five aircraft carriers and six battleships, crowded the shore as paratroopers and commandos took the city. Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin at once sent messages to the three leaders responsible—Eden, Guy Mollet of France, and David Ben-Gurion of Israel—hinting that he was prepared to use nuclear force, if necessary, to restore peace.
Meanwhile, in Budapest the Soviets dangled the bodies of partisans from bridges over the Danube, executed Hungarian officers, and packed thousands of mostly young civilian rebels into cattle trucks for mass deportation to Russia. By late evening, the Red Army was in control of the entire country.30 An increasingly distraught Frank Wisner, now on the Austro-Hungarian border, witnessed the first wave of escapees pouring across. He was hoping for permission from Washington to send in some locally stored CIA weaponry, but it never came.31 Meanwhile, the death toll in Budapest mounted to 2,652 Hungarian dead and 669 Soviets. The number of refugees swelled to more than 200,000.
Late that Monday night in Paris, Clare wrote a six-page letter to Harry that had both Orwellian and Churchillian overtones.
It cannot be long now before the Big Show begins—unless all of Europe is to become a Hungary.
The Suez question has changed nothing, essentially. The struggle in the Near East and for the Near East was always foreseen. What has changed everything is the massacre and martyrdom of Hungary. For that is our Munich.… If we do not go forward resolutely now, we will begin the long shameful retreat into the final isolation, where we will fall, at last, between the Chinese and the Red masses of a Europe driven against us.…
Now we shall see: will the British and the French capitulate before the Russian threats? Will we? I do not dare to hope we will call their bluff.… These very hours witness what may be the long touted end of “Western civilization.”32
When Election Day dawned in America on November 6, the world learned that Eisenhower had no intention of calling Moscow’s bluff. A White House press release announced that the President had received a telegram from Bulganin that went so far as to suggest that American and Soviet forces unite to prevent what might grow “into a third world war” over the canal.33 Privately, Eisenhower was sure that the Soviet Premier’s communication was an effort to divert attention from the Hungarian uprising. “Those fellows are both furious and scared,” he told senior aides. But his release simply stated that “neither the Soviets nor any other military forces should now enter the Middle East area except under United Nations mandate.”34 Its implication was that the Kremlin should not think of interfering militarily in any sphere of direct American interest. Nor could the British government count on White House permission for the International Monetary Fund to release dollar deposits Eden needed to continue his Suez adventure. At 12:30 P.M. Washington time, the chastened Prime Minister agreed to a cease-fire, effective midnight.35
By then Clare was back in Rome, her apocalyptic letter to Harry unmailed as “too gloomy.” On Wednesday morning, she heard that Ike had been reelected in one of the greatest landslides in history—carrying forty-one states to Adlai Stevenson’s seven.
She returned to America in mid-November, and on the nineteenth saw the President, and at last made her resignation public. Ike let it be known that her job had been “superbly done.” The Washington Post agreed: “Judged by the pragmatic test of results, her mission was extremely successful.… She worked fantastically hard, even to the detriment of her health, and there was no doubt of her warm friendship for Italy. She brought both dignity and intelligence to her position. Her efforts command the gratitude of her countrymen.”36
A reporter asked her if being a female had been a disadvantage in her life. “I couldn’t possibly tell you,” Clare replied. “I have never been a man.”37
On November 20, she wrote Gerry Miller, saying she had quit Rome for her own sake. But she was now feeling desolate “at the thought of leaving the task, which however hard and frustrating, nevertheless had many compensations. The greatest was the camaraderie, the teamwork … imperfect though it often was.”38
She went on to say
that while she and Dulles tended to look at issues such as Hungary and Suez parochially, the President “sees all the problems, in large and in detail, and if others don’t know what he is doing, that is just what he wants.”39
Her final three weeks in Rome, with Harry at her side, were a whirl of farewell events. On December 10, she held her own white-tie dinner at the Villa Taverna for forty guests. The list, headed by “Ambassador and Mr. Luce,” included many of the aristocrats she had earlier neglected: the Infanta Beatriz and Prince Alessandro Torlonia, Prince Don Aspreno and Princess Donna Milagros Colonna, Donna Diana Chiaramonte Bordonaro, Count Lanfranco di Campello, and others, as well as the Belgian, Dutch, Australian, Swiss, and Italian Holy See Ambassadors. The old house, perfumed with flowers, glowing with candlelight, and softly resonating with the sound of chamber music, was a long way from 533 West 124th Street in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem, where Ann Clare Boothe had been born more than fifty-three years before.
The Italian government’s valedictory state banquet for the departing Ambasciatrice took place on December 18. In his remarks, Foreign Minister Martino said that she had conducted her mission “with energy and devotion equalled only by intelligence and experience.” He presented her with his country’s highest award, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, never before given to a woman. Clare, dressed in turquoise blue, felt her eyes again welling up. At the embassy, she received the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, entitling her to wear a Maltese cross for the rest of her life.
Her departing address, entitled “Italy, the United States and the Free World—a Retrospect and Prospect,” was given in the upper room of the Banca di Roma to a packed audience of ministers, diplomats, businessmen, cultural figures, a Cardinal, and, in the words of the Il Tempo columnist Apollodoro, “elegantly-dressed women who came to honor so deserving, or rather so exceptional a representative of their sex.”40
Wearing a black dress and double strand of pearls, Clare spoke of the American will to spread freedom around the world, and the cooperative role Italy could play “in that great project.” Straining to describe her podium aura, Apollodoro wrote, “Mrs. Luce assumed the aspect almost of a figure of glass … compounded of precision and control.” She delivered her peroration in Italian, gesticulating like a Neapolitan, and smiling “with a special sweetness.”
In taking her leave, Clare used the same word as when docking on the Andrea Doria three and a half years before: “Arrivederci.” As the crowd passed in front of the stage to shake her hand, they repeated, “Arrivederci! Arrivederci!” Apollodoro commented: “It was as though we were at the station, waving handkerchiefs, before a train slowly moving out.”41
On the night after Christmas, Clare, resplendent in an evening gown and white fur stole, went with Harry to hear Act I of Pietro Mascagni’s Iris at the Rome Opera House. Afterward, the embassy Chrysler took them to the Trevi Fountain. A small procession of cars, photographers, and onlookers followed. They watched while the Luces threw silver half-dollars into the cold water, and ragazzi jumped in to retrieve them.42
Clare at the Trevi Fountain, December 1956 (illustration credit 39.1)
The next day, as Harry escorted his mink-coated wife aboard the 3:45 P.M. TWA flight to New York, she turned to wave good-bye to more than five hundred Italian officials, diplomats, and American well-wishers. They sang “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as the door closed behind her. Then the plane taxied away and lifted off.43
Ambassador Luce left behind an Italy strongly democratic and economically stable, in contrast with the demoralized nation that had received her with trepidation in 1953. Its Communist constituency was diminished, and its armed forces greatly strengthened by the Mutual Defense Assistance Program.44 She had successfully completed all her seventeen diplomatic assignments, and scored a notable triumph in helping to end the long agony of Trieste. Her mission had remained controversial throughout, alienating liberals and leftists on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Clare Luce is despised and hated here,” the expatriate scholar William Weaver told Christopher Isherwood. In contrast, Milan’s major daily, Corriere della Sera, wrote: “No one will ever know how much Italy owes to this fragile blonde.”45
40
LIQUID PARADISE
The sea has many voices.
—T. S. ELIOT
In New York on January 2, 1957, Clare wrote a letter to a young black Baptist minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Avid for news in the first days of her “retirement,” she had read about his leadership of the successful struggle of southern Negroes to overcome racial discrimination on public transport. Blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, emboldened by a recent Supreme Court ruling that segregated seating on buses was unconstitutional, had ended their year-long boycott of the local line and quietly resumed riding, now in whatever seats they chose. Judge Dozier DeVane of Florida declared that “every segregation act or law of any state [is] as dead as a doornail.” White snipers, having already attacked Dr. King’s house with dynamite and shotguns, had chosen New Year’s Eve to fire on a bus, the fourth such violent incident in a week.1
“You know, of course,” Clare wrote King, “that the race prejudice and bigotry of some of our fellow Americans have been a very strong weapon which the Communists have used against us, everywhere in the world.” She cited gibes from Reds in Italy about the suppression of Negro rights in her avowedly democratic nation. “No man has ever waged the battle for equality under our law in a more lawful and Christian way than you have.”2
Coming from a rich, white, Catholic Republican, these words might have surprised King, had he been unaware of Clare’s enlightened record as a champion of Negro rights over the past fourteen years. As a Congresswoman, she had called for integration of the American military long before Truman, condemned the Daughters of the American Revolution for discriminating against Marian Anderson, delivered eloquent Lincoln Day speeches advocating “human rights” for all races, blasted the “lousy” segregation laws of New Orleans, appealed on radio and at the Tuskegee Institute for improvement in Negro education, and most recently, in a list of her political assets and liabilities, identified blacks as a constituency that would be for her, if they knew more about her.
King responded with a polite letter of thanks on January 14. A week later at Eisenhower’s second inauguration, Clare found herself with Ike’s administrative aide E. Frederic Morrow, the first black man ever to hold such a position in the White House, and the first to be seated in the presidential reviewing stand.3
Then, on February 18, in what was perhaps no coincidence, Harry put Dr. King on the cover of Time, heralding the twenty-eight-year-old civil rights leader as an American who “reached beyond lawbooks and writs, beyond violence and threats, to win his people—and challenge all people—with a spiritual force that aspired to ending prejudice in man’s mind.”
Since the moment she left Rome, Clare had lost the tension of three and a half years of the most all-consuming activity of her life. “I felt the release so suddenly,” she wrote Gerry Miller, “that like a spring uncompressed I seemed to fly apart, tangle and sprawl inside, and have been incapable almost of [making] the simplest decision!”4
That remained true all winter. Intermittently, she tried to bestir herself, moving between New York, Connecticut, Palm Beach, the Bahamas, and Elizabeth Arden’s spa in Phoenix, Arizona. She also visited Washington, D.C., half hoping to be offered another diplomatic post—either London, Paris, or even, as rumor had it, Moscow.5 At the same time, she announced she was at work on a play about a kleptomaniac called The Little Dipper, intended for the Gish sisters, and negotiated a contract with Harper & Brothers to write her autobiography, which she would call The Dream of My Life.6
John Foster Dulles, now back at work, had nothing to offer, though he hinted at the possibility of a major posting in due course. When the journalist Bob Considine quizzed Clare about her prospects, she quoted the humorist Irvin Cobb’s three reasons for n
ot going to a party. “Number one is that I haven’t been invited. Which makes the other two academic.”7
Humor aside, Considine detected a “faint aura of sadness” in her demeanor. She gave one explanation in a letter to a British diplomat friend. “The fact is, I find myself missing Rome, and certain of mes chèrs colleagues not less, but more as time goes by.” Besides, she hungered for a purposeful routine. “I felt I ought to be going somewhere, doing something, in the public places. I have, I fear, contracted the diplomatic habitus. I do not find it as easy as I had thought to relax.”8
To occupy her mind, she immersed herself in The Coming World Civilization, a recent tome by the septuagenarian philosopher William Ernest Hocking, and typed him an ambitiously intellectual, nine-page, single-spaced letter. It amounted to a survey of international affairs in terms of such symbols as the Hammer and Sickle, the Rising Sun, the Stars and Stripes.
By mid-March, she was ensconced at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, relishing the warm, dry air and sweeping desert vistas. Her reading now included “great slogs of Toynbee,” Pascal’s Pensées, Camus’s philosophical novel The Fall, Lionel Trilling’s latest volume of literary criticism, A Gathering of Fugitives, Somerset Maugham’s collected short stories, verses by Hilaire Belloc, and a second perusal of Moby-Dick.9
Harry meanwhile played golf on the hotel’s adjoining course, which was surrounded by houses on the Biltmore Estates, many of them owned by multimillionaires, including Vincent and Brooke Astor. On an evening walk round the manicured circuit, the Luces came across No. 43, an appealing single-storied pink stucco, red-tiled, Mediterranean-style villa on three acres, backing onto the greens. It was owned by the much-married playboy Tommy Manville, and happened to be for sale. On closer inspection, they found it was laid out around a giant olive tree set in a grassy courtyard profuse with flowers. Inside were two salons, five en suite bedrooms, and a porch. Harry saw a spot behind the swimming pool where Clare could build an art studio. Nearby were servants’ quarters and a garage. Before returning to New York at the end of the month, they bought the house as a winter retreat for $250,000.10
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