To be effective, he said, the peacekeeping body must be armed. For the foreseeable future, the technology of the atom bomb ought to be shared solely by the United States and Great Britain. “It would be criminal madness to cast it adrift in this still agitated and un-united world,” Churchill said as Truman and the crowd applauded.
Then, in words that resonated around the globe, Churchill praised the Soviet Union’s wartime achievements, but not its subsequent aggrandizement. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he said with orotund portentousness, “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Behind that line lay the capitals of Central and Eastern Europe, now in Moscow’s sphere of influence, and many already under “totalitarian control.” He expressed doubt that the Soviets contemplated war. But they did want “the fruits of war, and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” Western democracies were unlikely to be molested so long as they stood together. But if they became divided, “catastrophe may overwhelm us all.”21
Eight days later, Churchill and his wife and family were entertained to lunch by Clare at the Waldorf-Astoria. Others attending were Bernard Baruch, the John D. Rockefellers, and the Charles Scribners.
Crisscrossing the country had tired Winston. His eyes were rheumy, his back stooped, and he shook hands limply, with his fingers only.22 His son, Randolph, too, showed signs of wear. Now in his mid-thirties, he was no longer the bright, handsome youth of twenty-three whom Clare had captivated in 1934, first at Chartwell and then at the Ritz in Paris. Randolph had written afterward to say he thanked God for the passions they shared.23
The ravages of dissolute living, and an unhappy, brief marriage to Pamela Digby (currently having an affair with Averell Harriman), had turned the former Adonis into a pugnacious, puffy, and veined satyr. He continued to lust after Clare, still smitten with her looks, wit, and intelligence.
By now, world reactions to the “Iron Curtain” speech had proliferated. Stalin predictably denounced Churchill’s criticisms of the USSR, and even Truman declined to endorse the address, saying untruthfully that he had not known of its content in advance. The socialistic George Bernard Shaw complained that Churchill’s words at Fulton had been “nothing short of a declaration of war on Russia.” Leftist protesters planned to disrupt a New York ticker tape parade in his honor.24
That evening, it was Harry’s turn to host an all-male banquet for Winston at the Union League Club. After chomping on terrapin and pheasant, and downing six glasses of champagne, the old warrior gave a toast: “To Time, Life, Fortune—and any others I don’t know about.” At ten o’clock, he and Harry left the club and walked to their limousine to boos from Communist pickets.25
Clare joined Herbert Hoover on March 16 for a WNAB broadcast entitled “World Famine.” In support of the administration’s food relief program, she urged American housewives to reduce their purchase of wheat products by 40 percent, so that twenty million starving people worldwide might at least have a daily ration of bread.26 She then requested a few minutes of Oval Office time to discuss the issue further, along with the possible gradual assimilation of some fifty-five hundred Jewish refugees into the United States. But word came back that she was “blacklisted from the White House.”27
Truman apparently bore her a grudge going back to his Senate days, when she had publicly called his wife “Payroll Bess” for taking a salary of $4,500 a year to handle her husband’s business mail and edit committee reports.28 Clare had also gibed at Truman’s claim that his mother had not reared him to be a statesman. “His mother will not be disappointed.”29
Peeved at being rebuffed, Clare asked her House colleague Joe Martin to intervene on her behalf. He agreed to do so, saying he had “never heard of a President refusing to see a Representative on national business.” But Truman told Martin that as long as he was Chief Executive, “that woman” would not be welcome at the White House.30 When he ignored a second appeal from Clare, she wrote to say she was entitled “as a duly-elected Representative of 418,384 citizens of the State of Connecticut, to transact business with you officially in their behalf.” She explained that the wisecracks that irritated him had been made in her parody of a Walter Winchell column. Truman regarded even this excuse as “a mortal insult” and still refused to see her.31
By now Clare was by far the most sought-after public lecturer in the House of Representatives, unable to fulfill a tenth of the speaking requests that came to her office. But as her retirement from Congress neared, she accepted more of them.32 Martha Gellhorn’s prediction that conversion would make her an oracle of the anti-Communism Right came true on May 21, when the Congresswoman took part in an American Forum of the Air radio debate aired by the Mutual Broadcasting System. The topic was “Are Communism and Democracy Mutually Antagonistic?” and her fellow panelists were William H. Chamberlin, a conservative writer, William Z. Foster, chairman of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA, and Dr. Harry F. Ward, professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary. The moderator was NBC’s Theodore Granik.
Clare, Theodore Granik, William Z. Foster, and Harry F. Ward debate on The American Forum of the Air, May 21, 1946 (illustration credit 18.2)
Clare had shone in debate since her school days, gathering experience through a decade of arguing contemporary issues with Harry, followed by more than three years of congressional give-and-take and five months of intense philosophical and theological dialogue with one of the best intellects in the Roman Catholic Church. Although she sounded impatient on the air, interrupting and making too many barbed remarks, she outdid the two leftist members of the panel, particularly Dr. Ward, an ill-informed ethical “expert.”
In her opening statement, she provocatively quoted Foster as proof that the answer to the debate question was yes. In the early 1930s, he had claimed before an investigating committee of Congress “that a belief in God and loyalty to the American flag are wholly opposed to Communism.” He shot back.
FOSTER: Communists learn as they go along. I would like to ask Mrs. Luce whether she believes in this statement, which she wrote in 1930. Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts. It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains … the idealism that, being what it is, it falls so short of in fact and in deed.
CHAIRMAN: Do you want to let her answer, Mr. Foster? Go ahead, Mrs. Luce.
CBL: The article of which you speak was a parody—a society satire—clearly so marked, for Vanity Fair magazine, written in the year 1931, in a series of other café society satires; and if Communists had a sense of humor—which they obviously haven’t or they would laugh themselves to death at themselves—they would have seen that.… For a belief in lying as a high art, for subterfuge, and all sorts of evasion, I will be very happy to supply you with a quotation from your own left-wing Communist magazine, quoting Lenin on the subject. It is necessary, says Mr. Lenin, to be able to agree to any and every sacrifice and even, if need be, to resort to all sorts of devices, maneuvers, and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuge, in order to penetrate the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on Communistic work in them.
At this point, Ward questioned if Clare regarded capitalism as a moral ideal. “Mr. Ward,” she replied, “our capitalist economy has many faults.… I am the first to acknowledge them, and the first to say that we must improve them. But the fact that capitalism has faults does not prove that Communism is virtuous; nor does it prove that Communism is a cure, except as a guillotine might be called a cure for a case of dandruff.”
Chamberlin, supporting her, asked Ward if, “as a more or less prominent Christian,” he saw any inconsistency between the ethics of his faith and “such Soviet practices as executing people without trial and keeping millions of human beings in slavery in concentration camps?” Ward was dismissive. “I should think those extravagant statements of yours by this time had become too hoary for any respectable m
an to use.” If Chamberlin would “read a little history,” he would find that from early times it had been agreed “that the ethical base of the Communist ideal and the ethical base of early Christianity were the same.”
The first burst of audience laughter occurred when Ward blustered that the gulags Chamberlin spoke of were “constructive rehabilitation programs.”
CBL: Lenin, in his pamphlet, entitled “Lenin Speaks to Youth,” said, Our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle.… Now, Dr. Ward, do you think that this belief, which you have referred to as a high ethical principle, explains why, after twenty-five years of Communist education, the thing that the Soviet armies will be remembered for best by the women of Europe is rape?
WARD: You have not a shred of proof. Not one shred of proof can anybody produce that there has been any more rape by the Soviet armies than by the capitalist armies.
When Foster defensively accused America of “an imperialist campaign designed to dominate the world,” Clare pounced.
CBL: I consider it nonsense of the most egregious sort for anyone to try to pretend as you do, that the United States is out to start a war with anybody.… We have not asked for a foot of territory in Europe or Asia. We have not taken a piece of loot. To call this an imperialist, aggressive country is just shabby nonsense. [APPLAUSE]
CHAIRMAN: Please hold the applause. You are taking the time of the speakers.
Chamberlin gave Ward some of the proof he had demanded of Clare’s accusation of Russian rape. He quoted a congressional report that cited “the wholesale raping of Polish women” by Soviet soldiers, and testimony by the author John Dos Passos saying that the Red Army was “allowed to rape and loot and murder at will.”
Ward continued to bluster that there was “not a shred of proof” of these accusations. He even denied there was any such thing as OGPU, the Kremlin’s secret police. Clare suggested that the best way to learn the truth about the workings of Soviet Communism was “for Uncle Joe to let down the iron curtain and let us all go in and have one good, big look at it.… What goes on there that he is so ashamed of?”
“Mrs. Luce,” said the exasperated Ward, “I have lived enough in the Soviet Union to know that that iron curtain is in part a figment of Mr. Churchill’s rhetoric and imagination, and in part a necessity of the situation.”
Foster reverted to his charge of American imperialism, claiming that the nation’s armed might around the world was such that “trigger-happy” reactionaries in Washington wanted to drop the atomic bomb again at the first opportunity.
Clare joined in audience cries of protest and insisted on interrupting.
CHAIRMAN: I have to give the mike to Mrs. Luce.
CBL: Mr. Foster, are we the ones who marched into Poland and took half of it over?… Have you ever at any time publicly before, during, or since the war, condemned, criticized, or found fault with anything that Stalin has ever enunciated from Moscow? If so, what? Take all the time you want.
FOSTER: The Soviet policy is the correct policy, and why should I criticize it?
CBL: Oh, dear! I wouldn’t if I were you. Remember what happened to Trotsky. [LAUGHTER]
When the time came for her to sum up, she spoke directly to him.
The charge that Mr. Chamberlin and I have made tonight is that you and the American Communist Party … are loyal to an antireligious foreign system and government which has been characterized by torture to obtain confessions, executions without trial, falsification of the record, floggings, beatings, shootings, slave labor, and the suppression of all minority and individual opinion. I would rather die than live under such a system and, incidentally, I think Dr. Ward would, too, though I am not sure. In any case, like many liberals of his ilk, Dr. Ward is a self-deluded man. He is fighting against our system of Christian democracy, a system which he does not in his heart wish to destroy, and defending a system that he could not bear to live under.33
A private worry for Clare at this time was whether her brother could bear to return to civilian life from the army, where for once in his errant existence he had found purpose. Shortly after V-J Day, she had received a poignant letter from him.
It is with deep regret that we bid goodbye to the phantasmagoria of World War II. So while the entire world celebrates there remains but one, an obscure 1st Lt., who is sad, for in his selfishness he can see no further than the fact that his only sweetheart is irrevocably gone.34
That David had seen combat as his one reason to exist plagued Clare. At the time he wrote, David was based at Clark Field in the Philippines, and complained of being harassed by black marketeers and pimps.35 Clare suspected he was drinking heavily, being forty-four years old and afraid that his services as a transport pilot would not be required much longer.
Charles Willoughby had stopped by to see him, at Clare’s request, en route to Japan and wrote to reassure her that David looked well and seemed reasonably happy. He had given him lunch and—unwisely—a bottle of scarce Scotch. Not only that, he had offered him a desk job in Tokyo, working on Korean intelligence directly under his supervision.36
David had agreed, but the description Charles sent Clare of life in the tumbledown capital did not convince her it was an ideal destination for David. “Unrest. Poverty. Blackmarket. The fellow travellers are right in Headqrs.”37
Summer found Clare still in Washington, unable to be free of Congress until the long session ended, with luck by August. She needed weekend escapes, but the house in Greenwich was no longer available. The government was building an airport nearby, so she and Harry had sold it. She found a temporary rental in Far Away Meadows, a weather-beaten old farmhouse in Newtown, Connecticut, owned by a friend, the opera star Grace Moore. Harry could have joined her there but for some unstated reason chose to vacation in Snowville, New Hampshire. As a possible guilt gift, he sent a bouquet of red roses.
Clare knew he was depressed, but not why. Missing his advice on her career, she wrote to tell him that formal overtures had been made for her to run for the seat that Senator Hart would be vacating in November. “I cannot tell you with what repugnance I view all this, and how I shrink from it, really.… At best the Senate can only involve me in noble futilities.”38
Harry wrote to assure her that government work was not futile. “It is, on the contrary, a high calling. You have only to ask: is it your calling? It certainly looks as if it is!”39
This letter belied Clare’s fond belief that he wanted her out of Congress because he missed her.40 In the absence of total honesty, husband and wife remained at cross-purposes, neither sure of the motives, ambitions, and emotional needs of the other. To Clare, Harry’s recurring malaise was harmful to their well-being.
“The lover,” says Thomas a Kempis, “desires always the good of the beloved.”
As I do love you very much, I do desire your good, tho’ the trouble is, of course, I am not wise enough to know what that good really is. Nor have I ever been able to figure out, since you ceased to be “in love” with me, whether or not it should include me.… My very presence seems a reproach and a burden to you, very often. What, oh what can I do to make you a happier—or as you sometimes put it—a more useful man? To accomplish this would be more important by far than “going to the Senate,” or even writing books. For myself, it is remarkable how little I really care about doing this or that, or being this or that, anymore.…
It is wrong, terribly, horribly wrong that a man as gifted as you, as powerful, as successful, as fortunate, should be miserable within himself.41
On July 17, Clare made her last important speech in the House. She spoke for thirty minutes in favor of establishing an Atomic Energy Commission, which would put the atom under civilian control, while including two military advisers. It was a subject that aroused passions, and she tried to be a voice of reason. Energy and matter, she pointed out, were amoral, as opposed to human beings, whose only choice was morality or immorality. If all world leaders were good men, the development
of atomic energy “would not require such totalitarian legislation as this.”42
She claimed to have prepared for her address by talking to fifteen physicists and military experts and reading twenty technical reports. But Representative John Elliott Rankin (D-MS) disparaged it as “the powder-puff argument of the delightful gentlewoman.”43
Another item on the late July agenda was aid to China. Republicans made the case that the Democratic administration was not providing the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek with enough funds to beat Mao and his Red Army. Truman, on the advice of General George Marshall, who was in China to assess the situation, wanted to limit aid and have American officials supervise its distribution. Marshall said that the amount of money should be dependent on the Generalissimo’s regime getting rid of corruption and being more inclusive in its political base, by trying to form a coalition with the Communists. Two months before, on the House floor, Clare had praised the fruits of Marshall’s statesmanship and the “extraordinary diplomatic job” he had done in China.44 Now she opposed his recommendation to limit aid and had a letter of protest signed by thirty-eight Chiang supporters put into the Congressional Record of July 24, 1946.45
Clare took the floor of the House on Wednesday, July 31, this time to give a summary of her two terms in office.
She admitted to few legislative successes in her first year, and to being absent for much of her second, due to depression after the death of her daughter. Between October 1943 and March 1944, she had sponsored only two bills of note, to do with redistribution of service and civilian manpower. Both measures had become the basis for legislation passed by the House, but were rejected by the Senate.
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