Luce’s commitment to Eisenhower—and his willingness to overlook disagreements with him—was greatly strengthened by the president’s decision to name Clare the American ambassador to Italy early in 1953. For Eisenhower the appointment was a way to repay a Republican stalwart (Clare) and an important supporter (Harry) and to cement his relationship with a powerful media empire. It undoubtedly helped Clare’s case that she was a famous convert to Catholicism and thus an appropriate liaison with the Vatican.* For Harry the appointment made possible a richer and more direct engagement with affairs of state than he had ever had before, while at the same time allowing him to remain in control of his magazines. In the four years in which Clare was ambassador, Harry spent almost half of his time in Rome, working partly in a Time Inc. office he had created for himself in the city, and partly in the embassy, where he was an unofficial adviser to Clare and an active participant in almost all public events.60
Clare’s appointment to Italy was not universally popular, in the United States or in Italy, and it encountered some resistance from the State Department. Clare believed that Dulles himself was opposed to her candidacy. Harry constantly reassured her that everything would work out, even as he was quietly battling the obstacles that still stood in her way. Clare, in the meantime, became more and more agitated, convinced that there was a conspiracy to deny her the job, and fearful of the humiliation if—after extensive press coverage—the nomination was withdrawn. At the same time, as she often was in times of stress, she became preoccupied with her age (fifty in 1953). “I feel so old these days,” she wrote in her diary in a low moment in January. “I no longer feel that the clothes enhance my beauty, rather they conceal the fact it is—as it must—wasting away.” But her despair did not last long. Early in February the president announced Clare’s nomination. The Senate confirmed it in early March, and Clare—after a round of lavish farewell parties—arrived in Rome in late April, accompanied by Harry and a retinue of friends and relatives.61
Harry stayed with Clare in the embassy (in separate bedrooms as always) for her first seven weeks in Rome before he returned to New York. But he came back regularly for long periods of time—on average twenty weeks a year over the four years of her term. It was a rare period of peace and commitment in their marriage. “My deepest concern was always HRL’s togetherness with me on this!” she wrote in February 1953. “I now feel the deepest faith in his loyalty, and his sympathy and aid!” The ambassadorship brought them into a genuine partnership, something that had eluded them during the first eighteen years of their marriage. It was Harry who had negotiated with the president and the State Department for Clare’s assignment to Rome. He had declined on her behalf offers that she be appointed secretary of labor or ambassador to Mexico. He donated five thousand dollars a month to the embassy to facilitate Clare’s entertaining, and paid for extensive renovations to the ambassador’s elegant but decaying residence. He brought his assistant Kip Finch to Rome with his family to serve his and Clare’s needs. When Harry was in Rome he was omnipresent in the life of the embassy—a constant prod to the foreign-service officers to show the deference they owed the ambassador, a stickler for protocol, and a host at lunches and meetings that Clare could not attend. He was, one colleague said, “an extraordinarily good ‘ambassador’s wife.’” While Clare entertained dinner guests before the huge living room fireplace in the ambassador’s residence, “he circled the outer fringes of the party making sure everyone else had a drink, had seen the Rouaults and the Churchills” (paintings that had once hung in their apartment in New York). In no other setting in his life had he been so solicitous a host.62
But Luce was far more than an attentive and supportive husband. As always his personal reconciliation with Clare was closely tied up with the opportunities her new position offered them both to exercise power and influence, which were much enhanced by the somewhat exaggerated belief of Italian leaders that the Luces had an “intimate friendship” with President Eisenhower. Allen Grover, Harry’s jaded and somewhat disillusioned deputy, described him as
obsessed with the subject of foreign policy and his direct influence on it. Nothing else interests him. He regards his position as “unique” for exerting pressure—Clare in Rome, C. D. Jackson [his once and future employee] in the White House, and his magazines to press his points. He fancies he is molding the destiny of the U.S., in the world.
Luce and his Time Inc. staff handled much of the embassy’s correspondence (including a large amount that was addressed to him almost as if he were himself the ambassador). And he wrote regularly to Eisenhower and Dulles with accounts of Clare’s successes. Harry also had a quasi-diplomatic life of his own in Italy. He traveled extensively, had meetings with ministers and provincial officials and leading industrialists—meetings not unlike those he had always conducted while traveling abroad, but much enhanced by his connection to the American Embassy. He was, Billings noted, “on the top clouds of Rome.”63
At the heart of Clare’s ambassadorship was the inevitable preoccupation with Communism that she shared with her husband—and with the State Department. Italy was among the Western European nations with a strong Communist Party that had at least some prospect of winning control of the government. Clare, encouraged by the foreign-service officers in the embassy, ignored the tradition of ambassadors not intervening in the politics of the countries in which they served. Instead, she became a staunch, and often strident, critic of the Italian Left. She was also critical of the dominant Christian Democratic Party for the weakness of its leaders and for its failure to adopt “a vigorous anti-communist attitude.” It was, as one historian noted, an “ambitious attempt … to drastically transform Italy’s political landscape.”64
In the several national elections during her time in Italy, she openly warned voters that the United States would withhold its financial aid to the country should the Communists win. “If the Italian people should fall unhappy victim to the wiles of totalitarianism … of the Right or the Left,” she threatened during a 1953 parliamentary campaign, “there would follow, logically and tragically, grave consequences” for the “intimate and warm” friendship between America and Italy. Skeptical of what she considered the wobbly leadership of Alcide de Gasperi, who had served as prime minister since the end of World War II, she actively supported the right-wing Christian Democrat Giuseppe Pella, whose “political virility” she admired. (Pella defeated de Gasperi in August 1953 only to be defeated himself five months later.) Discouraged, she began trying on her own to mobilize anti-Communist leaders—not just politicians but also industrialists, intellectuals, journalists, and others. She exhorted companies to purge their work forces of Communists and threatened them with a freeze on American aid should they fail to do so. Fiat, Italy’s largest industrial corporation and a significant recipient of U.S. support, responded by creating a blacklist of “undesirable employees” who were dismissed or suspended because of their leftist politics. There was frequent and often outraged criticism from many quarters of Italian politics and from the Italian press about what they considered Clare’s inappropriate interference in the nation’s affairs. But she was not, in fact, a renegade, although her great fame and visibility helped make it appear so. She was taking steps that were entirely consistent with the Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy and its strong commitment to combating Communism through nonmilitary means in Europe. It was also a reflection of Harry’s own aggressive internationalism, which contributed much to Clare’s controversial initiatives.65
Clare’s life in the American Embassy in Rome was even more intensely busy than it had been in New York and Washington. Most politically appointed ambassadors left the real work to the career foreign-service officials and spent their time largely on ceremonial duties. Clare, however, took the diplomatic work seriously, spending hours every day at her desk laboring through cables and correspondence and meeting constantly with starstruck and somewhat puzzled subordinates unaccustomed to direct contact with the ambassador.6
6
Clare was a healthy woman who lived an active life well into her eighties, but she was also something of a hypochondriac who retreated to her bed frequently with undiagnosable ailments. Such incidents occurred particularly frequently and severely in Rome. Her illnesses drew Harry closer to her for a time. On many evenings they would sit together in her bedroom reading to each other, playing highly competitive games of Scrabble, and enjoying a kind of domesticity they had rarely experienced in the United States. Clare later told her secretary that the “years in Rome were the happiest of their married life.” Harry periodically rushed to Italy to take her on long, restorative cruises in the Mediterranean or to quiet resorts in France or Greece. Her recovery after these absences reinforced the belief of some of her doctors and friends that her ailments were in some way self-inflicted, products of stress and exhaustion. Late in 1954 she began to have serious dental problems that she and others feared might be the result of poisoning. Finally the embassy announced that staff members had discovered that Clare’s bed lay below a ceiling whose flaking lead-based paint had gradually been exposing her to low levels of arsenic. This alleged discovery was widely publicized, including in the pages of Time, but there were claims at the time that the story was apocryphal, that Clare’s real problem was a viral infection that coincided with age-related dental problems and that the lead-paint story was a cover for extensive cosmetic dentistry that required her to spend months in New York. As she moved into her mid-fifties, she had become ever more concerned about maintaining her beauty, which she correctly realized was one of her most important assets in the high-stakes, male-dominated world of politics and diplomacy.67
By late 1956 Clare was becoming restless with her life in Italy. She was discouraged by the continuing weakness of the anti-Communist Right in the nation’s politics, bored with the daily routine of the embassy, and eager for a larger place on the public stage. She urged Eisenhower to let her leave Rome to campaign for him in 1956. When rumors began to spread that the president was planning to replace Nixon as his vice presidential running mate, Clare began lobbying implausibly to succeed him. She sent out feelers about running for a Senate seat in Connecticut, but there was little enthusiasm in the state Republican Party for the idea. She was also mentioned as a possible secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, but nothing came of that either. She finally resigned her ambassadorship early in 1958.
But she remained a prominent candidate for another diplomatic post: She hoped for London, to no avail. Finally in 1959 Eisenhower asked her to serve as ambassador to Brazil—a post she found much less attractive than Italy but that she halfheartedly agreed to accept. There was considerable criticism of the appointment, some of it rooted in Latin American resentment of Time Inc.’s coverage of the region. She also inherited the anger of some Democratic members of Congress who had run afoul of Harry’s strong support of Eisenhower. At one point Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, who had recently changed his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat to the great dismay of Time, gave a long and scathing speech opposing Clare’s nomination. Nevertheless she was easily confirmed. Harry encouraged her to go and promised to spend as much time with her in Rio as he had in Rome. But she continued to waver—both because of her lukewarm interest in the position and because of her fear it would have required her to oversee the end of American aid to Brazil, which would inevitably lead to criticism and failure. Friends reported that Clare was looking for a way out, and deliberately or not, she soon found one. She released a statement to the press shortly after the confirmation (over the advice of her advisers and without consulting Harry) that “I am grateful for the overwhelming vote of confirmation in the Senate. We must now wait until the dust settles. My difficulties of course go some years back and began when Senator Wayne Morse was kicked in the head by a horse.” After a small firestorm of criticism in the Senate, she turned down the appointment, citing the “extraordinarily ugly charges” made against her and the likelihood of “a continuing harassment of my mission.”68
For Clare the Brazil fiasco marked the end of her political career. She returned to New York, tried to get back to writing, made occasional speeches, and remained a sought-after celebrity in the social world. But she never regained the prominence she had once had. For Luce, however, the late 1950s had a different meaning. The experience had reinvigorated him and given him new enthusiasm about the future. No longer wholly preoccupied with the Cold War, he began to focus on what he considered the great success of the United States and the transformation of American life. He also began seeking not just power, but happiness.
*The ambassadorship to Italy was also the ambassadorship to the Vatican until 1974.
XIII
National Purpose
The eight Eisenhower years were great years for the Republic,” Luce wrote in his unfinished memoir in the mid-1960s. “Largely by their own efforts, individually or in voluntary association, the American people made giant strides in nearly every field of endeavor under the benign laws of their Republic.” For a man who had recoiled from the nation’s leadership for more than twenty years, a man whose mission in life had often seemed to be railing against the failures of national will and imagination, a man who continuously exhorted the country to change course, this sense of political contentment might have seemed out of character. But Luce’s optimism was not sentimental nostalgia. It was a result of his warm personal relationship with Eisenhower and the flattering attention he received from the president. It also arose out of his conviction that the United States was surmounting its most serious problems and embracing “another word [that] had been put into the language, namely, ‘Excellence.’” 1
Luce considered the mid- and late 1950s not only a good time for America but a good time for him. His sojourn in Italy had rejuvenated him and had at least briefly restored some relative calm to his troubled marriage. His company was prospering as never before, and his magazines continued to flourish. Luce gradually slowed down his restless efforts to remake the magazines and, uncharacteristically, deferred to his talented editors more often than in the past. That made it possible for him to enlarge his activities outside Time Inc. He became increasingly involved with philanthropic organizations, intellectual projects, and new personal relationships that contributed to a growing, if precarious, satisfaction with his life.
But Luce could never be wholly content for long. By the end of the 1950s he was once again facing new crises in his personal life. And at the same time he was also embarking on a new mission—one that combined his new optimism with his old impatience. He set out to lead an inquiry into what he called the “national purpose,” a project he embraced with both enthusiasm and urgency and one that preoccupied him for the rest of his life.
Luce’s happiness with the Eisenhower administration, and with the state of the nation, did not soften the opinionated tone in his magazines. On the contrary, the Eisenhower years produced even more energetic criticisms than Time Inc. had received during the 1952 campaign. In the past complaints about Time’s bias had often focused on Luce’s attacks on Roosevelt and Truman. By the mid-1950s a major complaint was about the magazine’s excessive approval of Eisenhower. Luce had, of course, gone to extraordinary lengths in the past to promote Republican candidates, most notably in his passionate commitment to Wendell Willkie in 1940. But Eisenhower was the first serving president whom Luce wholly admired, and the coverage of the Republican administration was so positive that even Luce’s own editors began to complain. Thomas Griffith, the Foreign News editor of Time, warned Luce in 1956 that the magazine was in danger of “losing the esteem that you and I (and so many others) … want Time to deserve and to have.” In the past, Griffith noted, Time “used to cheat a little” at the end of a campaign, but now, he charged, “it’s a four-year proposition.”2
Griffith’s accusations were hard to refute. In a July 4, 1955, story (with a cover portrait of Eisenhower framed by the Liberty Bell), Time celebrated the “clear and c
onvincing evidence of patience, determination, optimism and faith among the people of the U.S. In the 29 months since Dwight Eisenhower moved into the White House, a remarkable change had come over the nation. The national blood pressure and temperature had gone down; nerve endings had healed over.” The “new tone could be described,” Time claimed, as “the return of confidence.” A year later, during Eisenhower’s reelection campaign, Time exulted over the president’s “zest” and his newfound political skills. “Cheerleaders bounded and bounced in a political harlequinade, and Republican dignitaries lined up with grins wide enough for tooth inspection,” the magazine wrote of Eisenhower’s arrival at a campaign stop in San Francisco. “The military hero who walked so gingerly for so long in the political world has become a zestful party leader who thoroughly likes that world and its political inhabitants. Last week, by his every word and act, he proved it.” Time even reported gratuitously on other journalists who wrote approvingly of Eisenhower. At one point the magazine ran a story reporting that the usually Democratic columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop described Eisenhower’s legislative program as a “conspicuous success.”3
Time’s undeniable favoritism in its reporting on American politics generated increasing criticism of other areas of the magazine. The Philippine ambassador gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1959 describing Time’s editorial philosophy as “All the news as we angle it.” A few years later the left-leaning New York magazine Fact collected complaints about Time from prominent people and published their stories of “lies,” “distortions,” and “rampant inaccuracies.” (The editors apologized for not having enough room in the magazine to publish all the comments they had solicited.) “Every music column I have read in Time has been distorted and inaccurate,” Igor Stravinsky claimed. The actress Tallulah Bankhead went on the Tonight Show to warn the audience, “Don’t believe a word you read in Time…. It is made up of fakery, calumny, and viciousness.” The parade of accusations continued for more than twenty pages: “I regard Time as prejudiced and unfair in its reporting” (Senator John McClellan); “There is not a single word of truth in Time magazine” (Broadway producer David Merrick); “Time slants its news” (poet Conrad Aiken); “Totalitarianism … rather than insight or intelligibility is the object of all of Time’s technical brilliance” (media scholar Marshall McLuhan); “… about the most inaccurate magazine in existence” (novelist P. G. Wodehouse). Time was not nearly as biased as these critics claimed, but there was enough “slanted” reporting to give the accusations credibility. Luce alternated between defensiveness and distress in the face of such attacks, and he occasionally made efforts to defuse the criticisms. But for the most part he simply lived with the charges of bias. “TIME will remain pro-Eisenhower and therefore pro-Republican,” he defiantly wrote a critical colleague in 1955. He remained convinced that pure “objectivity” was both impossible and undesirable, and he was convinced as well that these were his magazines and should reflect his view of the world.4
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century Page 54