Fanfani rose to his feet to protest such an attack on the representative of a foreign nation. As a man, “I must lament that the most elementary rules of chivalry have been so crudely disregarded.” De Gasperi followed, denying that other countries had a hand in formulating Italian policy. Togliatti evidently mistook Italy “for one of the Soviet Union satellites.”21
When the vote was taken, all the minor coalition parties that Fanfani depended on—the Monarchists, the Liberals, the neo-Fascist Social Movement, and Saragat’s Socialist Democrats—withdrew their support, leaving him with 260 ayes and 303 nays. As a result, on February 10, Fanfani, after just nineteen days in office, was replaced by Mario Scelba.22
Scelba was the fourth man to serve as Prime Minister of Italy since Clare’s arrival less than ten months before. He swore in a left-of-center cabinet, consisting of fourteen Christian Democrats, four moderate Socialists, and three Liberals. Monarchists were conspicuously lacking. For this reason he, too, was not expected to last long.
Clare nevertheless welcomed the elevation of another Christian Democrat. Scelba was an able former Minister of the Interior, and on socioeconomic issues was firmly left of center. He had been an enforcer of law and order in De Gasperi’s government, and was responsible for creating Italy’s reparto celere—flying squads that Clare had seen in action last November outside her embassy gates. Together with the PS (pubblica sicurezza) and the carabinieri, they were part of a civilian force of 160,000, the largest in Europe, and more numerous than the current Italian army.23
As publisher of the recently launched Sports Illustrated, Harry, back in Rome, felt duty-bound to acquaint himself with European soccer, and went to a game at the Foro Italico, a monumental stadium built by Mussolini. Most evenings he attended social events with Clare. He was usually seated next to well-informed people, and was frustrated by having to keep to himself what he learned from them.24
While he enjoyed playing consort in Rome, he happily went to other capitals in search of firsthand news to file with his home office. An opportunity arose in late February, when trouble erupted in the eight-month-old Republic of Egypt. He flew to Cairo and arrived just in time to see General Gamal Abdel Nasser’s troops quelling what turned out to be an attempted revolt against the regime of President Muhammad Naguib. Harry collected complaints from protesters that he thought would make lively copy, and managed an interview with Nasser himself. He found on reading the next issue of Time that all his best stuff had been cut. “Damn it, they were interesting quotes.”25
Clare’s own store of international information was enriched by Harry’s confidences, although she could not share classified material with him. Continuing her series of meetings with powerful Italians, she received a variety of industrialists, undeterred by the warning of Giulio Pastore, president of Italy’s Free Trade Union, that they were “transformisti—political chameleons of the first order.”26 Among these conservatives were Dr. Angelo Costa, president of Confindustria, Count Carlo Faina, chairman of Montecatini Industries, and Carlo Pesenti, president of Italcementi.
The Ambassador respected Costa as a man of moral worth, but soon divined that he did not understand problems outside business. He had come to maturity in the Fascist era, and was used to working under an authoritarian government, not a weak one like Scelba’s. When she told him that Communist gains in last year’s Italian elections were “a major worry” for the United States, he blustered that uninformed people were capable of voting for extreme parties while having “little sympathy” for them.
“We fell for this explanation once,” Clare responded, “and the mistake cost us a) the loss of China, and b) the vast sacrifice in blood of the Korean War and imperilled all of Asia.” She could hardly be expected to tell the Senate Appropriations Committee that Italians who voted Red were aid-worthy because “they are not really Commies.”
She ventured close to interference in Italian corporate affairs in a meeting with Vittorio Valletta, managing director of the enormous Fiat car company based in Turin, and a close friend of Scelba’s. Speaking in French, she stressed the State Department’s reluctance to award offshore procurement contracts to any Italian plant with Communist-controlled unions. A scared Valletta later sent her a report attesting that Fiat was hiring three hundred new workers well trained in corporate values to be future foremen, while sacking “turbulent elements” and restricting suspected leftist ubversives to the spare parts section.27
In Paris that February, Cyrus L. Sulzberger, the chief foreign correspondent of The New York Times, became curious about the political crisis in Rome. “I have decided to make a tour of Italy,” he wrote in his diary, “to confirm or deny Clare Luce’s asseverations to Washington that it is going Communist unless we intervene. I think she’s nuts and merely wants to make a big name for herself as an activist in her first diplomatic job.”28
Sulzberger decided to postpone seeing her until toward the end of his survey. He spent three weeks traveling from Turin and Venice to Naples and Calabria, meeting as she had done with a wide spectrum of Italian leaders, but including Communists as well as religious and cultural figures.
Alcide De Gasperi, he reported, was near tears when criticizing Clare Luce’s “misguided” attempts to enlist the Right against the Communists. “It is difficult for us to form a government with the Monarchists, as your ambassador wants.… You cannot expect us democrats who fought fascism to join with fascism.”29 Nenni said that he was not bound to the Communists.30 Aldo Cucci, an anti–Stalinist Party member in Bologna, a Communist hot spot, told Sulzberger that the peasants of Italy were “only temporary Communists.” Like their nineteenth-century Russian predecessors, their aim was to own their own land, while factory workers were more drawn to Communism, because they had no illusions about ever becoming bosses.31 Cardinal Lecaro, Bishop of the same city, said that the Catholicism of the Italian people was “shallow.” Marxism-Leninism appealed to them because it was presented by the party as an alternative religion, with its own iconic images.32
Sulzberger, a good-looking, forty-one-year-old Harvard graduate, finally met with Clare on March 5. He was seated next to her at a Villa Taverna dinner, and for the next four hours was subjected to a monologue that was part seduction and part policy lecture.
I was appalled. She is an exceptionally beautiful woman—quite astonishingly so when one considers her age. She had the (lifted) skin of a girl and an excellent figure. But this exterior conceals the most arrogant conceit and the most ruthlessly hard-boiled self-assurance it has ever been my privilege to come up against. Furthermore, Mrs. Luce blandly assumes that she has everybody eating out of her hand in a few minutes’ time.
Clare told Sulzberger that she kept a scrapbook “filled” with his articles, apparently thinking it would guarantee his loyalty. She added that one of his colleagues had written that she imagined she could save the situation in Italy by charm alone. “If he only knew,” she said with mock humility.33
She then turned—for the benefit of Lily Cannon, wife of the American Ambassador in Greece (and Lily was gnashing her teeth throughout the performance)—to the subject of the difficulties of being American ambassador in Italy. One of these difficulties is entertaining the thousands of Americans who pour through.… She has organized a system to take care of it. The lowest category … are invited to the embassy chancery at four o’clock in the afternoon, and Mrs. Luce goes down the line shaking hands with them as they stand around in the hallway. The people in this category she described as persons with letters from Congressmen … or people of no importance who assure her they voted for her in the Connecticut elections. The second category are people who are honored by invitations to cocktail parties. These are people recommended by more important political figures back home or by friends of hers, but who have no importance in themselves. The third category is invited to dinner. These, she said, looking at me with a soupy expression in her eyes, are “friends.”34
Listening half-enthralled to Clare reelin
g off facts and figures to do with the Italian parliamentary scene, Sulzberger found himself wondering how she acquired all her knowledge.
She spoke admiringly of such strong men as Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, and Egypt’s General Naguib and Colonel Nasser, who had helped overthrow King Farouk, because men like them could rule Italy with an iron hand, and turn it over to democracy when they died.
At this point she interrupted her steady stream to say that her husband had just come back from Egypt. He had arrived just before the recent coup d’état but had stayed long enough to straighten things out and, she added with a giggle, to get Naguib back in. She said he had had a long talk with Colonel Nasser trying to persuade him to institute freedom of the press. I have not noticed any success along these lines. She also said that despite the miserable gap between power and wealth in Italy, Harry had told her that in Egypt the “fellowhens” (here, of course, she meant the fellahin) were worse off than the Italian peasants.35
Growing more indiscreet as the evening wore on, Clare showed what struck Sulzberger as “the most extraordinary contempt … for the intellectual acuteness of apparently everybody.” She said that Italians were “corrupt cowards who are unable to govern themselves by democratic means,” and that “the government never passed any decent tax laws or slaps tax cases against the rich because it is bribed by the rich.”36
When the meal came to an end, Sulzberger was amused to see that Harry, acting as “hostess,” had to take the ladies and a few other guests into a separate room, while Clare settled down over brandy with himself and Arnaldo Cortesi, the veteran Rome correspondent of The New York Times. They were joined by Elbridge Durbrow.
As she explained the intricacies of the [political] situation and her own brilliance in handling it, she would occasionally turn to Durbrow and say, “Durby, isn’t that so?” Whereupon Durbrow would nod sagely and add a platitude like, “Yes, the ambassador really handled that one well.” With a claque like that it is easy to see why her self-esteem floats blandly along.37
Clare’s first audience with Prime Minister Mario Scelba was instigated by him that first week of March. Squat, bald, and bespectacled, he inscrutably refused to have an interpreter in the room, and spoke at great speed in a Sicilian accent for ninety minutes. She complained to the State Department afterward that her Italian, “while good enough to understand the sense of everything, is not good enough to get fine shades of meaning or subtle points.” However, she did understand Scelba when, discussing the left-wing threat that so disturbed her, he surprisingly said, “If we must have civil war, we need to prepare for it.”
Interrupting, she asked why he used the word need—did he mean that his police and carabinieri were currently unable to handle real trouble? Was he afraid of “the paramilitary strength of the CP”?
Not answering directly, he inquired what the United States would do “if such a situation did develop.” Clare had no authority to speak on that point, she said, but believed the Eisenhower administration would, in its own interest, back his government.
She then read him her list of policy instructions, and was encouraged when he signaled assent to all of them, especially, to her surprise, ratification by Italy of the European Defense Community Treaty.38 But she noticed, as he spoke, that he fidgeted with an ivory amulet carved in the shape of a fist with two fingers. To Italians it symbolized protection against “the evil eye.”
Back at the embassy, she said to her CIA chief, “You know Gerry, I think he kept pointing that damned thing at me!”39
By now, Clare was being harshly criticized in the American liberal press for diplomacy that emphasized the State Department’s toughened offshore procurement policy. The New Republic’s Frank Gorrell accused her of a misguided “crusade” waged in tandem with right-wing Christian Democrats “who, in common with some important elements of the Roman Catholic Church, would like a ‘regime,’ if not of the Mussolini kind, then of the supposedly milder Salazar kind,” as in Portugal.
Having thus, in effect, called Clare a Fascist, Gorrell went on to say that the greatest asset enjoyed by Italy’s Popular Front was the failure of Christian Democrats to solve the chronic unemployment problem. It would be a tragedy if the only powerful and cohesive political entity in the country were to lose its progressive wing and “become a party of privilege and reaction, a party of resistance to urgently necessary social reforms.”
In conclusion, Gorrell stated that Ambassador Luce’s “psychological warfare” in Italy was helping rather than hindering the Popular Front, and suggested that the Eisenhower administration was trying to bring about a new policy of “neo-isolationism in military strategy.”40
The latter was exactly what the President wanted. Never again, if he could prevent it, should American soldiers have to fight in European wars, hence his efforts to get Italy to join the EDC.
Pressure continued to build on Clare. Frustrating news came from London that the secret Trieste negotiations had run into obstacles—Velebit was more demanding than anticipated. This left her sounding desperate. “Any hope of a settlement in the near future seems to have gone aglimmering,” she wrote Dulles. The Scelba government was still so weak that only a pro-Italian Trieste solution would save it and prevent a forced election in October. That, in turn, might lead to “an eventual Communist coup d’état or civil war.” It was entirely possible, she felt, “that Italy could be the powder keg of World War III.”
To avoid disaster, a “vast direct economic program” was necessary. Even that might not be enough to assuage the crisis. “Half the Communists in Europe are right here.… And their numbers are growing. What are we expected to stop them with, if not Trieste?”41
On the evening of Thursday, March 25, when Clare was in Paris for a NATO meeting, the Italian newsmagazine L’Europeo published what it claimed was an eyewitness report of her off-the-record remarks at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in January. She was quoted as saying, among many other things, that Italian politics were “confused and weak,” portending a Communist government within three years, and that Latin men had “a kind of inferiority complex which gives way to a sense of superiority when they have to deal with a female.”42
Before she had a chance to react, thirty-four Communist Senators in the Italian Parliament accused her of “unwarranted” interference in Italian affairs, and demanded her recall. In the Chamber of Deputies, Togliatti, amplifying his earlier imprecations, slandered her as “an aging witch.”43
On Saturday, March 27, Clare issued a denial.
An article published last week in an Italian magazine, which purported to be substantially the text of a speech I am supposed to have made to American correspondents during my recent visit to the United States, twists, distorts, and utterly misrepresents my views on Italy, her problems and her leaders. The article is a fabrication pure and simple. I made no such speech.44
This statement was far from true. In the first place, L’Europeo had been careful to emphasize that “the text we publish is not a stenographic literal one, but rather an account written by one of the journalists present at the Mayflower luncheon.… This does not in any way mean … that the text is not substantially faithful to the original.”45
In addition, nothing Clare was reported as saying differed much from what she had opined in private to American and Italian officials. She was understandably resorting to a public figure’s hoary excuse that off-the-record remarks had been misquoted.
Writing a long letter to Harry that night from Fontainebleau, Clare sounded depressed and somewhat paranoid. She complained that the leak to L’Europeo had done “tremendous mischief,” and probably came from New Dealers in the State Department. “What usefulness I had to Italy was badly damaged by the Trieste affair. This article damages it even more.”
She dreaded returning to Rome, and felt the best she could do for the moment was to say nothing more. “I cannot help but take comfort from the usual question I ask: ‘What is the worst that can happen?’ The worst i
s, of course, that I could be recalled.”
Even if she stayed, she despaired of seeing a permanent beneficial effect from her tenure. “In the end, there will be no Italian ‘democracy’ unless it is aggressive red, or neutralist pink. And the alternative is Fascist black.” Such prospects made her long to be home and free of political entanglements—“really retiring, writing, praying again.”
Then came a passionate outburst. “Please darling, think hard about the least damaging way of getting me home. The fact is, I’ve been given an impossible task.… I do feel that I am wasting my time, wrecking my health.”46
On Sunday, the State Department expressed support of its beleaguered envoy. But the next morning, L’Europeo’s editors insisted on the accuracy of their account, even though Mrs. Luce denied it.47
Back in Rome, Clare learned that buildings in many Italian cities were being plastered with posters denouncing her evil eye and diabolical scheming.48 One, depicting her as Madame Frankenstein, appeared near Letitia Baldrige’s apartment. She tore it off the wall and brought it to Clare, who laughed. “Tish, you have a lesson to learn that I learned long ago. Never take yourself seriously.”49
In fact, she was alarmed by this graphic campaign, and felt vulnerable at her next meeting with Scelba on April 5. It was a bruising encounter. The Prime Minister, apparently emboldened by her discomfiture over the L’Europeo revelations, said that American attempts to bully Fiat by withholding contracts were “short-sighted and hysterical,” and would only increase unemployment and the power of Communism in Italy. In her report to Dulles, Clare characterized Scelba’s pitch as, “Put up and shut up.”50
To comfort herself as her fifty-first birthday approached, as well as “to compete with the principesses” of Rome, she had a twenty-seven-stone emerald-and-diamond necklace reset by Bulgari. “And now,” Dorothy Farmer wrote Harry, “what she would like ‘most of all’ is for you to take care of the bill.”51
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