20. Congressional Record, May 3, 1945. Martin Gilbert records that Americans had shipped four hundred tons of rocket equipment from Nordhausen to New Mexico by June 1, 1945, before the Russians arrived in what would be their zone of occupation. He also says that the rockets that killed three thousand were used between June and Dec. 1944. Gilbert, The Day the War Ended, 154, 387.
21. Evans, The Third Reich at War, 663–65.
22. CBL to John Chamberlain, n.d. [1946], JBP.
23. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1988), 624.
24. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition (New York, 1995), 339.
25. CBL to Bayonne Times (N.J.), Mar. 2, 1945; CBL interview, June 9, 1981.
14. VICTORY IN EUROPE
1. Dunkirk Evening Observer (N.Y.), Apr. 26, 1945, reporting CBL broadcast from London.
2. CBL comments reported in Bridgeport Telegraph and Bridgeport Post, May 2, 1945.
3. CBL report to House of Representatives, Congressional Record, May 3, 1945.
4. Ibid.
5. Gilbert, The Day the War Ended, 70–71, quoting Stars and Stripes, May 5, 1945.
6. Almost fifty years later, on Sept. 1, 1994, the last occupying Russian troops would leave Germany by train from the Karlshorst railway station. See Gilbert, The Day the War Ended, 414.
7. Ibid., 1.
8. Brinkley, Washington Goes to War, 275; Gilbert, The Day the War Ended, 134–35.
9. Truman’s broadcast was on May 7, a day before the official day of celebration.
10. Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 624.
11. Clark, The Last Thousand Days, 308. Spencer Warren, in “Churchill’s Realism,” The National Interest (Winter 1995–96), points out that the “Iron Curtain” phrase had been previously used by a Russian philosopher in 1918, by Joseph Goebbels in Feb. 1945, and twice by Winston Churchill, in a telegram to Truman in May 1945 (quoted in chapter 14) and in the House of Commons in Aug. 1945.
12. Speech transcript in CBLP.
13. CBL Blue Network broadcast of May 29, 1945, published in Vital Speeches, Aug. 15, 1945, 647–49.
15. FRAGMENTATION
1. Ray Stecker to CBL, n.d. [early summer 1945], CBLP.
2. Ibid., Jan. 22, 1946, CBLP.
3. Charles Willoughby to CBL, June 2, 1945, CBLP.
4. Ibid., May 9, 1945, CBLP.
5. Ibid., May 9 and June 2, 1945, CBLP.
6. Lucian Truscott to CBL, May 7, 1945, CBLP.
7. Ibid., June 11, 1945, CBLP.
8. Ibid. See also Heefner, Dogface Soldier, 247–48.
9. Truscott to CBL, May 31, 1945, CBLP.
10. Diary of Truscott’s aide, June 24, 1945, quoted in Heefner, Dogface Soldier, 248.
11. Years later, Truscott’s daughter, Mary, confirmed that her mother had been devastated by the general’s obsession with CBL during World War II. Paul Hendrickson to SJM, Apr. 8, 1988, SJMP.
12. Truscott to CBL, May 13, 1945, CBLP. Truscott retired from the army in Sept. 1947, and had a desk job at the War Department determining which soldiers should be retained, promoted, or retired. In 1951 he joined the CIA as its covert senior representative in Germany. Allen Dulles promoted him in 1958 as deputy director for coordinating the agency’s espionage network worldwide. He left the CIA in 1959, wrote his memoirs—omitting his years at the CIA—and died on Sept. 12, 1965, aged seventy.
13. Mrs. John Hill interview, Mar. 10, 1988.
14. John Billings diary, July 14, 1945, JBP.
15. Ibid.
16. George Waldo to CBL, n.d., ca. 1945 or 1946, CBLP.
17. Ibid., and July 16, 1945, CBLP.
18. This was the prototype atomic bomb known as “Fat Man,” to be dropped if the Japanese continued to be defiant. When Truman shared his news with Stalin at Potsdam, the Soviet dictator showed no surprise. His spies had already penetrated Los Alamos. In fact, he knew about the bomb before Truman, who had not been told about it by FDR. Richard Lawrence Miller, Truman: The Rise to Power (New York, 1986), 387–88; Clarke, Last Thousand Days, 351.
19. John Billings diary, July 18, 1945, JBP. The ban applied only to Time. In Life, CBL’s byline continued to appear on articles and photographs.
20. John Billings memo, July 21, 1945, JBP.
21. John Billings diary, July 23, 1945, JBP.
22. Chamberlain CBL profile, JBP.
23. CBL quoted in Bridgeport Post, July 24, 1945.
24. CBL once said Saint Joan was Shaw’s greatest play, and the one she would most like to have written. Morris, Rage for Fame, 341.
25. George Bernard Shaw, Complete Plays with Prefaces, vol. 3 (New York, 1963), 213.
26. Ibid., passim.
27. Ibid., 227–29.
28. Ibid., 213.
29. Ibid., 265.
30. Tere Pascone, “Next Week in Person: CBL in Candida,” Bridgeport Post, Aug. 2, 1945.
31. John Billings diary, Aug. 6, 1945, JBP. Subsequent official statistics put the bomb drop height at thirty thousand feet and the detonation height at one thousand nine hundred feet; http://atomicbombmuseum.org.
32. CBL to John Wilson, Aug. 18, 1945, CBLP.
33. Bridgeport Telegram, Aug. 7, 1945.
34. “Candida: The Audience Was Polite,” Newsweek, Aug. 20, 1945. Apparently, the theater management prevented the distribution of the political literature.
35. Bridgeport Telegram, Aug. 7, 1945; CBL interview, Aug. 2, 1985.
36. Walcott Gibbs, “Candida Excursion,” The New Yorker, Aug. 18, 1945. Gibbs made a point of telling his readers that he stayed only through the second act. Also see New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 7, 1945.
37. CBL interview, Aug. 2, 1985.
38. Variety front-page story, Aug. 15, 1945.
39. George Frazier, The One with the Mustache Is Costello (New York, 1947), 11–12.
40. Ibid.
41. “Summer Theater, Candida,” Life, Aug. 20, 1945.
42. Ibid.; Newsweek, Aug. 20, 1945.
43. Newsweek, Jan. 24, 1955.
44. Guest lists for Aug. 6–11 entertaining at “The House,” CBLP; CBL to John Wilson, Aug. 14, 1945, CBLP. Some of the bitterest comments on CBL’s performance came from professional thespians who resented the intrusion of a politician onto their boards. Libby Holman gave her no quarter: “In the last ten minutes she warmed up to a cool icicle” (Daily Variety, Sept. 7, 1945). Humiliatingly for CBL, who had always made much of meeting George Bernard Shaw in 1939, the aging playwright failed to recall her when sent notices about the Stamford production. “I know nothing about the lady,” he wrote, adding that he was “not surprised when I learnt that she had been so ill-advised as to attempt to act Katharine Cornell’s leading part without the necessary four or five years training and stage practice.” Shaw to Emarel Flesher, June 21, 1946, CBLP; also see Morris, Rage for Fame, 341–42.
45. John Billings diary, Aug. 7 and 12, 1945, JBP.
46. Ibid., Aug. 14, 1945, JBP.
16. BLACK HOUR
1. On Sept. 9, 1945, the National Institute for Human Relations announced that CBL and Madame Chiang Kai-shek had been named top female orators in the English language. Its speech consultant, Dr. James F. Bender, recommended CBL as “a model for business and professional women who must use their voices before large audiences without the benefit of public address or recording systems.” The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 9, 1945, and Bridgeport Post, Sept. 15, 1945.
2. CBL, “The Real Reason,” II, second part of a three-part series in McCall’s, Feb., Mar., and Apr. 1947.
3. Ibid., III; John Kobler, Luce: His Time, Life and Fortune (New York, 1968), 131. Kobler interviewed CBL in the early 1960s.
4. CBL, “The Real Reason,” I.
5. Ibid., II. CBL wrote: “Few people have ever found God in the analyst’s office, but sometimes, years later, they may recall that was whom they were seeking.” She concluded that analysis was one of the real reasons she became a Catholic. Anthony Storr, in
Solitude (New York, 1988), 192, quotes Alfred Jung as saying that a problem for every one of his psychiatric patients over the age of thirty-five had been the inability to “find a religious outlook on life.”
6. CBL, “The Real Reason,” III. Also see Alden Hatch, Ambassador Extraordinary: Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1955), 176–85. Waugh’s novel had been published in England, but did not appear in the United States until Jan. 1946.
7. The article, “What One Woman Can Do,” was about Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s care of war orphans.
8. CBL, “The Real Reason,” III.
17. CONVERSION
1. Ann Charnley interview, May 3, 1988; John Cooney, The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman (New York, 1984), 251. See also Fulton J. Sheen, Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen (New York, 1980).
2. For Sheen’s theatrical, almost hypnotic, screen presence, see, e.g., his TV broadcast How to Improve Your Mind (1956) on YouTube.
3. Sheen, Treasure, 337; Ann Charnley interview, Mar. 3, 1988.
4. Sheen quoted in Hatch interviews, Apr. 1955, AHP. Also see Hatch, Ambassador, 181–82.
5. Sheen quoted in Hatch interviews, Apr. 1955, AHP.
6. Hatch, Ambassador, 180.
7. CBL, “Converts and the Blessed Sacrament.” The writer Katherine Anne Porter, also a convert, had a similar aesthetic response to the accoutrements of church architecture and the trappings of the Mass. Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (New York, 1982), 101.
8. CBL, “Converts and the Blessed Sacrament.”
9. Ibid.
10. Kobler, Luce, 131.
11. CBL interview, July 24, 1982. CBL frequently questioned why she clung to the relationship with HRL when it so often made her miserable.
12. CBL, “The Real Reason,” I.
13. Maisie Ward, unpublished foreword to a proposed book edition of “The Real Reason,” ca. 1956, CBLP.
14. CBL, “The Real Reason,” III; Joan H. Fitzpatrick interview, Mar. 15, 1988.
15. Hatch, Ambassador, 183.
16. John Billings diary, Nov. 2, 1945, JBP. After HRL’s return from China, Billings sensed he was less pro-Chiang than previously.
17. Al Morano interview, Oct. 6, 1981.
18. CBL, “The Real Reason,” III.
19. CBL’s House Resolution 101, proposing nuclear arms control, was presented concurrently on November 14, 1945, but no action was taken until 1946, when her principle emerged in the Atomic Energy Act.
20. Congressional Record, Nov. 14, 1945. CBL later remarked, apropos of the distinction between conventional and nuclear arms, “Conventional is simply a euphemism for obsolete.” CBL, “Eisenhower Administration,” Columbia University Oral History interview with John Luter, Jan. 11, 1968, Columbia University (New York, 1973), 76.
21. John K. Jessup, The Ideas of Henry Luce (New York, 1969), 355.
22. “I never had any shadow of a doubt that what my husband did was infinitely more important to the world than what I did.” CBL quoted in Family Circle, Feb. 1954. She frequently expressed this opinion to SJM.
23. Bernard Baruch to CBL, Dec. 25, 1945, CBLP. Mary Bancroft, a confidante of HRL, believed that CBL should have married Baruch, since he was the one man who “would have made her happy, if any man could.” Bancroft to W. A. Swanberg, May 1, 1971, MBP.
24. HRL to Billings, Nov. 28, 1945, JBP; Al Grover to Billings, Nov. 29, 1945, JBP.
25. Gladys Freeman interview, Feb. 20, 1982.
26. CBL, “The Real Reason,” III.
27. Ibid. The last phrase is the title of a 1922 novel by H. G. Wells.
28. Fulton J. Sheen quoted in Hatch interviews, Apr. 1955, AHP. CBL’s mood improved on Jan. 6, with a flattering contractual offer from Hollywood to spend six weeks filming in Hollywood as costar to George Raft, in a movie entitled The Congresswoman. Though the script was not specifically about her career, the action took place in the contemporary political arena. She was tempted by the $175,000 fee, but declined, saying she was far too busy being a Congresswoman to act one. The movie, retitled Mr. Ace, was released later that year with Sylvia Sidney taking a much reduced female lead. The New York Times, Jan. 8, 1946; CBL to Willi Schlamm, Jan. 7, 1946, CBLP; Mark Fearnow, Clare Boothe Luce: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Westport, Conn., 1995), 127.
29. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 209–11.
30. Sheen quoted in Hatch interviews, Apr. 1955, AHP.
31. Fulton J. Sheen, The World’s First Love: Mary Mother of God (New York, 1952), 260; also see Newsweek, Jan. 24, 1955.
32. Sheen quoted in Hatch interviews, Apr. 1955, AHP.
33. CBL “The Real Reason,” III.
34. Ibid.
35. Charles Willoughby to CBL, Nov. 2, 1945, CBLP. For extra biographical information on Willoughby, see Kenneth J. Campbell, “Charles A. Willoughby: A Mixed Performance,” http://intellit.muskingum.edu/wwii_folder/wwiifepac_folder/wwiifepacwilloughby.html.
36. CBL to Willoughby, Jan. 5, 1946, CBLP.
37. Willoughby to CBL, Jan. 4, 1946, CBLP.
38. CBL, “The Real Reason,” III.
39. CBL introduced HR 481 on Jan. 14, 1946. CBL, “On My Record in Congress—Bills Introduced. Remarks of Hon. Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut in the House of Representatives, Wednesday, July 31, 1946,” Congressional Record, July 31, 1946.
40. The house in Hobe Sound was owned by Sam Pryor of Pan Am.
41. CBL to Fulton J. Sheen, “Monday night, Jan. 21, Hobe Sound, Florida,” CBLP. This handwritten four-page letter may not have been sent. CBL sometimes held back her epistolary effusions. See below, chapter 43, note 94.
42. Ray Stecker to CBL, Jan. 22, 1946, CBLP. Stecker divorced and remarried. He died of a heart attack in 1967 and was buried with full military honors at West Point.
43. Willoughby to CBL, Mar. 6, 1946, CBLP.
44. Ibid., Mar. 12, 1946, CBLP.
45. Ibid., ca. Mar. 7, 1946, CBLP.
46. Emporia Gazette (Kans.), Feb. 2, 1946.
47. Ibid.
48. New York Sun, Jan. 28, 1946. Since a senatorial candidacy by CBL would be the subject of much political jockeying in Connecticut over the next few years, the complicated history of this seat (junior to that of the Democratic Senator Brien McMahon) needs clarifying. Former Admiral Thomas C. Hart (R) was only a caretaker occupant, having been appointed to the seat after the death of Senator Francis T. Maloney (D). Hart served from Feb. 15, 1945, through Nov. 5, 1946, when Raymond E. Baldwin (R) was elected to fill out the remainder of Maloney’s term, plus a full term in his own right. However, Baldwin resigned from the Senate on Dec. 16, 1949. His term was then completed by another appointee, William Benton (D), who subsequently lost the seat in the election of 1952. McMahon remained Connecticut’s senior senator from 1945 until his death in 1952. For the wartime relations of CBL and Hart, see Morris, Rage for Fame, 426–28 and 440.
49. Tucson Daily Citizen, Feb. 8, 1946; Santa Monica Outlook, Feb. 21, 1946.
50. PM, Feb. 12, 1946.
51. Willoughby to CBL, dated only “In the night,” CBLP.
52. CBL quoting G. K. Chesterton to the Boston Pilot, Nov. 24, 1951.
53. CBL, “Converts and the Blessed Sacrament.”
54. Fulton J. Sheen quoted in Hatch interviews, Apr. 1955, AHP. Sheen told Hatch that most of his conversion courses took some fifty hours. “Clare’s took hundreds.” Even that of the probing questioner Evelyn Waugh had taken Father Martin D’Arcy only three months. Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903–1939 (London, 1986), 228.
55. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 211, quoting an interview with Sheen twenty-one years after CBL’s conversion.
56. Sheen quoted in Hatch interviews, Apr. 1955, AHP.
57. Sheen told Gretta Palmer that he considered CBL “the most brilliant of his converts.” Palmer, “The New Clare Boothe Luce”; Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 209–10.
18. OTHER ARENAS
1. The New Y
ork Times, Feb. 17, 1946, and Syracuse Post-Standard, Feb. 17, 1946.
2. New York Journal-American, Feb. 19, 1946.
3. Tere Pascone to CBL, Feb. 17, 1945, CBLP.
4. Ibid.
5. Fulton J. Sheen to CBL, n.d., CBLP.
6. Leila Hadley Luce interview, May 1, 1997; Sir Isaiah Berlin interview, Nov. 20, 1988. Another visitor that fall noted that a statue of the Madonna and the figurines of the angels Cyprian and Felix had been added to CBL’s bedroom decor. Constance O’Hara memo, ca. Oct. 1946, CBLP.
7. The Brockhurst portrait of Sheen hangs at American Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
8. CBL quoting Saint Augustine in “The Real Reason,” II.
9. Jean Dalrymple interview, Feb. 5, 1988. Since mid-1945, Harry’s aides had begun to speculate that the boss must have “a secret girl,” because “he gets a haircut every few days, puts in a long private phone call every morning and disappears for hours from the office, with even Thrasher not knowing where he is.” John Billings diary, Aug. 29, 1945, JBP.
10. Jean Dalrymple interviews, Feb. 5 and 6, 1988; CBL memo “To HRL’s Psychiatrist,” Mar. 10, 1960, CBLP. Dalrymple admitted to SJM, “I became a kind of fan of Clare. I admired her tremendously.”
11. “I hear hair-raising stories about Harry and Clare—how they appear to be on the brink of divorce. Is Harry running around with other women? I’m sorry for Clare—because it must be hell-a-mile to be married to Harry.” John Billings diary, June 22, 1943, JBP.
12. Jean Dalrymple interview, Feb. 6, 1988. Darlymple admitted to SJM that since a romantic disappointment in her teens, she had learned not to trust men, and HRL was no exception. Besides, he had never made “enough of an effort” to please her.
13. John Billings diary, Feb. 13, 1946, JBP.
14. Elizabeth Root Luce to CBL, Feb. 20, 1946, CBLP.
15. Constance O’Hara, Heaven Was Not Enough (New York, 1955), 288.
16. CBL to Wilfrid Sheed, June 15, 1982, CBLP.
17. Caroline Moorhead, ed., Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (New York, 2006), 179.
18. Quoted in Philip Dunne to Edmund Morris, April 15, 1987, SJMP.
19. Helen Lawrenson, “The Woman,” Esquire, Aug. 1975. Sheen’s pastoral attentions reportedly ceased when Jack lost his prominent position in the National Maritime Union. The tireless cleric had better luck with Buff Cobb Rogers, converting her despite her recent attempt to dissuade Clare from joining the Roman Church.
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