By the fifteenth, Clare was one of hundreds of top American officials congregating in Paris on the periphery of the first Big Four conference since Potsdam, about to begin in Geneva.
Winston Churchill had long pressed for such a “summit” (his own coinage) to reduce Cold War nuclear tensions. He had fantasized that an East–West détente would enhance his career and affirm Britain’s place among the great powers. Eisenhower and Dulles had opposed the idea, believing that Western Europe should be militarily integrated first. But after France’s sabotage of the EDC, West Germany had become part of NATO, prompting the Soviet Union immediately to corral its satellites into signing the Warsaw Pact. The consequent rise in tensions among the four powers had been only partly abated by Moscow’s willingness to join in an Allied withdrawal of troops from Austria, on the understanding that that country would henceforth remain neutral. This signal of goodwill encouraged Eisenhower to pursue Churchill’s dream.48
The President arrived in Geneva with a revolutionary “Open Skies” proposal, calling for mutual strategic inspection flights over the Soviet Union and the United States. Clare had much to say on this subject to Ike’s adviser Harold Stassen, if only because she had attacked a similar, if civil, idea—Henry Wallace’s “Freedom of the Air”—as “globaloney” in 1943.
The conference began on July 18 and lasted four days, by which time Clare was back in Rome, having greatly enjoyed herself in the company of the policy makers she considered her peers.49 “The President’s initiative at Geneva has had a tremendous constructive effect around the world,” Stassen wrote her on August 1. “Your thoughtful analysis in Paris was extremely helpful and deeply appreciated. You succeeded in developing a perspective which Geneva has proved to be of great value.”50
Stassen was right in saying that Eisenhower’s headline-grabbing idea had been welcomed by free nations everywhere, especially in America, where Ike had returned to an approval rating of 79 percent.51 He had taken the moral high road at the outset of the talks, knowing that Anthony Eden and Prime Minister Edgar Faure of France would go along. But the proposal had been rejected by the Soviet Premier, Nikolai Bulganin, and his new strongman, Nikita Khrushchev.
On doctor’s orders, Clare flew to Barcelona on August 19 for a weekend with friends at a beach house in Palamós. There, sitting under a pine tree alive with chattering starlings, she scribbled an odd letter to President Eisenhower, identifying the strenuousness of his work with her own. Addressing him as “Dear Ike,” she asked, “Have you had 48 delicious hours yet—since 1951, without one speck of work you could do, and no way for anybody to get at you? No, of course, you haven’t. And that’s why I grieve for you.”
She went on about “the cannibalism of the crowd devouring you bit by bit,” and the wearing effect of public life, until “one gets to feel like an old glove turned inside out.” Sounding like Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury, she continued, “Here we are, by God’s design, doomed (or privileged) to act, to do, to be—to commit ourselves, as we do our troops, as the battle unfolds.”
Perhaps fortunately, the letter was not mailed.52
Back in Rome the next day, she gave an al fresco lunch at the Villa Taverna.53 Among her guests were the Indian Ambassador and a clutch of other dignitaries, including three Italian Senators. Also present was a friend, Kay Halle, who published an impressionistic account of the event.
Frail and ethereal with her halo of platinum hair, [Clare] displayed eyes seemingly glazed with fatigue and overwork.… The buffet lunch of paper-thin Parma ham, rosy melons and ripe figs, cannelloni (meat-filled pasta smothered in melted parmesan cheese), aspic of chicken, and American ice cream, was served on beautiful marble tables. We sat on beige marble benches strapped with gold damask cushions under an arch of ilex trees. I could reach out and pick ripe oranges and persimmons from the lanes of trees bordering the gravel terrace. The food was served on graceful ceramic plates designed and especially marked for “CBL” by Rome’s most famous ceramist, Count Paolo Mischiatelli.54
The Ambassador wore a full-skirted rose dress by Eleanora Garnett, and black Ferragamo shoes. That season, she had bought a hundred Italian outfits in support of Rome’s beleaguered fashion industry.55 Each ensemble was custom-made with deep, lined pockets for her spectacles, powder compact, lipstick, small notepad, and gold Cartier pen. It was an idiosyncrasy of hers to avoid the encumbrance of a purse.56
On September 25, she was preparing to give a dinner for Thomas E. Dewey when a news bulletin from Colorado reported that President Eisenhower had suffered a coronary thrombosis. He had played twenty-six holes of golf before being stricken in his sleep.
Clare’s reaction was to draft an indiscreet letter to Richard Nixon, whom that morning’s New York Times had already heralded as being in the FOREFRONT FOR ’56. She assured him that the President “cannot run again, and may not even be able to campaign for the Republican nominee a year from November.” Any attempt by the administration to suggest otherwise would lead to worldwide uncertainty, which the Soviet Union would exploit.
If the President does not return soon to his desk—to work there harder than ever—it will be put about a) that his infirmity is greater than it is, and that this fact is being concealed by a group of greedy politicians who desire to remain themselves in power … or b) that Eisenhower himself has decided to stay because reports at home and abroad have convinced him that his Vice President does not enjoy the confidence of the U.S. or its Allies. The Russians can be counted on to add plenty of fuel to this, charging that Nixon would mean war if he came into office.
If Ike remained sidelined beyond the end of the year, she wrote, he should retire “and thus permit you to become his successor.”
Clare was not among the many Republican centrists and liberals who thought that Nixon, at forty-two, was too inexperienced for the top job. She favored him, she said, because as a proven anti-Communist, he would prevent the Soviets from destroying the foreign policy achievements of Eisenhower and Dulles. “You are young, intelligent, honorable, energetic,” she told him. “Above all, you are courageous.”57
The President’s illness set Clare to thinking again about her own future. Ideally, she would have liked to link it to that of Nixon. In a self-assessment entitled “Group Support of CBL as a Public Figure, or ‘Personality,’ ” she laid out her political assets and liabilities.
First, she believed that she could rely on Catholics. But their goodwill counted for little in a heavily Protestant nation. Republicans offered her only partial loyalty, since—unlike Nixon—she had never been popular with the GOP’s ultraconservative Old Guard, personified by the late Senator Taft. The same applied to many New Deal holdovers and press pundits who regarded her as a “triple interloper: woman, Republican, political appointee.” Intellectuals, she felt, spurned her because of her lack of college education and her Time/Life connection. So did people in the arts, owing to her “failure to join predominantly Jewish groups on Broadway and in Hollywood.”
Clare was equally gloomy about her appeal to socialites, community organizers, labor unions, and women. Black Americans, she wrote, “would be for me if they knew very much about me. But owing to [the] fact Negro leadership is still oriented towards [the] Democratic party, they are not told.” Her present post, moreover, was not making her rich. She was tired of “the oohings and ahings of visitors at the Embassy and Villa Taverna.” Her health was suffering, and most Italian problems seemed insoluble. All in all, she concluded, “it’s no fun.”58
Multiplying physical problems lay behind this plethora of complaints. Tish Baldrige alerted Dorothy Farmer, who had transferred to New York, that the boss was exhausted and “back on sleeping pills & lord-knows-whatses pills.”59
Clare told Harry that a visit of John Foster Dulles to Rome would be a chance for a “private personal talk” about her “near future.”60 The Secretary arrived on Saturday, October 22. He was on his way to a meeting of foreign ministers in Geneva. During his tête-à-tête with Cla
re, he praised her as a “strong” diplomat, but said he would not oppose her resignation, if her health continued to deteriorate.61
On Sunday evening, Clare left with Dulles for Paris, checked into the Plaza Athénée, and instantly succumbed to “grippe,” which kept her bedridden for two days. After moving on to Vienna on November 5 for the reopening of the State Opera House, she collapsed with colitis, and had to return to Rome the next day in great pain. Feeling worse overnight, she entered Salvatore Mundi Hospital for emergency treatment, and spent four insomniac days there losing weight. She struck her staff as being nervous and despondent. “I wish she would give this [job] up,” fretted her maid, Gretel. “She is killing herself & for what, no one will thank her in the end.”62
Barely recovered, Clare flew to Geneva on November 12 for another meeting with Dulles, before continuing to London for a ball held by Ambassador Aldrich. She had lunch at White’s with Randolph Churchill and Evelyn Waugh. “It became a press conference,” the latter wrote in his diary, “with her giving full and satisfactory answers to a hostile cross-examination. She has become slow in the uptake and verbose as an American rotarian, but is as pretty as ever.”63
On December 16, Clare headed to New York for the holiday season, and essential dental work. “My front tooth is sticking out further than ever,” she wrote in a memo, appalled that she would soon look like Eleanor Roosevelt.64
She appeared in Washington on January 9, 1956, amid a fever of speculation about whether the sixty-five-year-old Eisenhower—only recently returned to work—would run for a second term. That night, she went to the National Press Club for a celebration of Nixon’s forty-third birthday. The political purpose of the event, attended by five hundred Republicans, including Ike’s entire cabinet, members of his White House staff, and former Taft supporters, was to affirm the Vice President as Ike’s chosen heir apparent.65
Clare’s presence at the event, where she was seen kissing Leonard Hall, the chairman of the GOP National Committee, revived last summer’s rumor that she was interested in higher office. “Mrs. Luce is widely believed to be available for second place on the ticket if General Eisenhower does not run,” the New York Post reported.66
For all the talk of Nixon, Eisenhower remained taciturn about his own intentions. Republican leaders met with him on January 13 to assure him of their belief that only he could hold the party together, balance the budget, and keep alive “the Spirit of Geneva.”67 They followed up a week later in New York with a “Salute to Eisenhower” lobster dinner at Madison Square Garden. Harry bought a table for ten.68
The publication that month of an adulatory biography of Clare by Alden Hatch, entitled Ambassador Extraordinary, added to the speculation that Clare wanted the vice presidency. The book was widely if not favorably reviewed, and treated by many as a campaign document.69 The National Catholic Weekly Review said it contained few character insights, and highlighted a statement by Hatch that Clare “aroused an almost pathological antipathy in many.” In The Reporter, Marya Mannes called Clare intellectually smug, and said her fatal weakness was a lack of taste. “Short of being Pope of Rome,” Randolph Churchill wrote in The Spectator, “there is probably no other job which Mrs. Luce would more willingly discharge than that of President of the United States.”70
On January 25, Clare saw Eisenhower, who looked encouragingly healthy. Her intuition was that he was genuinely undecided about running again. But if he did, and won, he would ask her to remain in Rome.71 Again she told him that she was thinking of resigning, and again he insisted she must stay.72
“My health,” she said, “has been bad ever since that little bout with the paint.”
“What are you talking about?”
Clare realized with amazement that Ike had not been briefed by the CIA on her arsenate of lead poisoning. He insisted on hearing the whole secret saga.73
Facing reporters afterward, she announced that she was “definitely and irrevocably” not a candidate for the vice presidency. She would continue as Ambassador to Italy “as long as the President and Secretary Dulles believe I am doing a good job.”74
The following night in Manhattan, Clare and Harry hosted an early buffet dinner at their apartment in anticipation of the North American premiere of Carlos Chávez’s Symphony No. 3 in memory of Ann Brokaw. Among the twenty-two guests were the music critic Carter Harman, the gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell, and Daphne Skouras Root, a friend of Ann. Others were the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, the Mozart biographer Marcia Davenport, and the artist André Girard, painter of the windows in Saint Anne’s Chapel.75 Chávez was not present. He was preparing to conduct his work with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, where its patron had always hoped to hear it.
There was excitement in the hall as concertgoers took their seats to hear a major new work by Latin America’s most esteemed composer. They discovered that Chávez was also a gifted conductor when he led the orchestra in his own curtain-raising arrangement of the Chaconne in E Minor by Dietrich Buxtehude.76 After applause for that died, Clare at last heard live the piece that she had commissioned six years before at Carlos’s mountain retreat in Acapulco.77
The symphony was cast in classic four-movement form, albeit in an unusual sequence of Introduzione, Allegro, Scherzo, and Finale. Lacking music education, Clare was aware only of a gradually unfolding, twenty-six-minute sequence of extraordinarily varied orchestral effects. The musical texture was not so much melodic as a perpetual contrast of instrumental timbres: mellow horn chords mixing with the astringent wail of oboes, softly rattling kettledrums punctuating the harmony of strings, and a long, melancholy clarinet solo suspended over rumbling, almost inaudible, bass tones. There was a particularly haunting moment when the first movement thinned into an extremely high, soft, broken-octave phrase in the piccolo, obsessively repeated and growing fainter, as if a life were ebbing away.
But then more vital rhythms came jumping in, full of syncopated exuberance, resembling the music of Chávez’s friend Aaron Copland. This energy gave way to a series of exquisite woodwind dialogues. Overall, the symphony’s most noticeable feature was the perpetual imbalance between its highest and lowest sounds, each pursuing independent courses. The final effect was an aching sense of dislocation, which may have been Carlos’s inference of the geographic and temperamental gulf that had so often yawned between Clare and her daughter.78
Clare listens to Carlos Chávez playing (illustration credit 38.4)
Next day, Howard Taubman of The New York Times, noting that the symphony had been commissioned by Mrs. Luce, described it as “a score of original and driving intensity.” Carter Harman wrote in Time that it was “bluntly modern, enormously powerful and sometimes beautiful,” and that the composer had conducted “with broad-backed muscular energy.” He marveled that the themes of a work that had taken so long to write had been conceived in one day.79
Afterward, Clare took Carlos to “21” to celebrate. Their symphony was now part of the North American repertory, with two more New York performances scheduled over the weekend and others to follow in Cleveland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
On February 2, Senator Margaret Chase Smith predicted that, based on her own presidential poll, Richard Nixon and Clare Boothe Luce would lead the Republican ticket this year.
Clare was not on hand to face the renewed press stir this caused, having gone to Paris on a $4,645 shopping spree at Balenciaga. She asked Harry to pick up the bill for her coming fifty-third birthday.80 After returning briefly to Rome, she flew back to New York for urgent work on an abscessed tooth. Her face was “all ballooned out,” she wrote Gerry Miller. “For the first time in years I’ve been weeping continuously from pain.”81 She recovered enough from this latest affliction to be on hand for a state visit by President Gronchi, to begin on February 27.
Soon after Gronchi’s arrival, Eisenhower rocked the country by announcing that he meant to seek a second term. Asked if Nixon would be on the ticket, he declined to say.82 Nevertheless, Cl
are, traveling with the Italian delegation to San Francisco, said once more, on March 8, that she was “definitely and irrevocably NOT a candidate for the vice-presidency of the United States.”83 She could hardly say anything else, having overheard Eisenhower telling Gronchi that he insisted on her returning to Italy.84 Two days later, in New York, she dropped out of the tour, citing an attack of “influenza and laryngitis.”85 But she was present for Gronchi’s farewell reception at the Waldorf on March 13.
The next day, The New York Times gave him an admiring send-off. Gronchi’s courteous frankness about American shortcomings had impressed many outside the administration. In remarks seemingly directed at Ambassador Luce, he had told Look magazine that the State Department’s foreign policy was “far too rigid and inflexible” in its attitude toward Communism. “Human history is a continuing process. Revolution is invariably followed by evolution, and this applies equally to the Russian, Chinese, and American Revolutions.… Failure to understand this blinds Americans to positive aspects of developments in the Soviet Union and China.”86
As if in proof, the free world was stunned that weekend by the publication of a historic speech by Nikita Khrushchev. Addressing the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, he listed and denounced Josef Stalin’s crimes against humanity, in what the diehard Dulles called “the most damning indictment of despotism ever made by a despot.”87 Many Reds in the West, including those in Italy, tore up their party cards.88 To Clare, it was ironic that the countless postwar accusations she had leveled at the brutality of Communism had been validated by none other than the ideology’s current spokesman.
She was back in Rome with Harry in time for Easter, still experiencing dental discomfort and hoping her doctors were right in trying to cure it with penicillin. But on April 4 the tooth had to be pulled by a local dentist, after which she continued her scheduled meetings.89
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