Clare Boothe Luce conquered the political sphere in much
the same way that she stormed the publishing industry
and elite society—with quick intelligence, a biting wit,
and a knack for publicity that, along with her celebrity and
beauty, made her a media darling. Luce won a Connecticut
U.S. House seat in 1942, despite never having stood
for elective office. Though she was critical of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), Luce’s internationalist bent
led her to back the broad outlines of the administration’s
plans for the postwar world. She once described her
philosophy as, “America first but not only.”1
Clare Ann Boothe was born on April 10, 1903, in
New York City, to William Boothe and Ann Clare Snyder
Boothe, both involved with the theater. The family moved
from New York City to Memphis, Tennessee, but after
her parents divorced in 1913, Clare, her mother, and her
brother, David, returned to New York City to build a
new life. To help pay bills, Clare worked in several play
productions and did not attend school until she was 12,
studying at the Cathedral School of St. Mary on Long
Island and at Miss Mason’s School in Tarrytown. Her
mother eventually married Albert Austin, a wealthy doctor
who later served in the Connecticut state legislature and
the U.S. House. In 1923 Clare Boothe married George
Brokaw, scion of a clothing fortune. They had one
daughter, Ann Clare, but were divorced in 1929. Clare set
her sights on writing and was hired by publisher Condé
Nast at Vogue. By 1933 she served as managing editor at
Nast’s Vanity Fair magazine. On November 21, 1935, Clare
Boothe married Henry R. Luce, founder of Time, Life,
and Fortune magazines. Shortly thereafter Clare Boothe
Luce came into her own as a successful playwright. In
1936 she wrote a Broadway hit, The Women, a satire about
the lives of idle rich women. Other commercial successes
followed. When war broke out in Europe, she toured
the world as a Life correspondent. Luce eventually wrote
dispatches from the North African and Chinese theaters.
Clare Boothe Luce’s interest in politics developed
during the Great Depression. In 1932 she worked as the
executive secretary of the National Party, which united
conservatives with moderately liberal plans for rescuing
the economy. Through her relationship with the financier
Bernard Baruch, Luce for a brief time became a Franklin
D. Roosevelt (FDR) supporter. She eventually broke with
the President over New Deal economic programs. Her first
active participation in Republican politics came with her
energetic support of Wendell Willkie’s 1940 presidential
campaign. Her travels during World War II changed the
focus of her criticisms of FDR from domestic to foreign
policies. By 1942 Connecticut political leaders lobbied Luce
to run for a U.S. House seat encompassing Fairfield County
and the wealthy town of Greenwich, where Luce had a
home. Initially reluctant because she thought she did not
possess a temperament suited to politics and was unfamiliar
with the district, she later accepted.2 In the Republican
primary, opponents attacked her as a carpetbagger but she
prevailed at the nominating meeting by a nearly unanimous
vote.3 Luce based her platform on three goals: “One, to win
the war. Two, to prosecute that war as loyally and effectively
as we can as Republicans. Three, to bring about a better
world and a durable peace, with special attention to postwar
security and employment here at home.”4
In the general election, she ran against Democratic
incumbent Le Roy Donnelly Downs, a local newspaper
publisher who had defeated her stepfather, Albert Elmer
Austin, in 1940. She dismissed Downs as a Roosevelt
“rubber stamp.”5 Nevertheless, her internationalist
orientation differentiated Luce from isolationists. On
that basis the influential syndicated columnist and FDR
supporter Dorothy Thompson endorsed Luce.6 Former
GOP presidential candidate Wendell Willkie also
campaigned for her.7 With support from labor unions,
Downs held his core Democratic voters together, but Luce
defeated him by a 46-to-42 percent margin.8 If Socialist
candidate David Mansell had not skimmed away 15,000
votes that likely would have gone to Downs, Luce would
not have been elected. Still, she portrayed her victory as a
mandate. “I have campaigned for fighting a hard war—not
a soft war,” Luce declared. “Therefore this election proves
how the American people want to fight this war.… They
want to fight it efficiently and without bungling. They want
to fight it in an honorable, all-out, plain-spoken partnership
with our Allies.”9
Luce originally hoped to get a seat on the Foreign
Affairs Committee, but Republican Minority Leader
Joseph W. Martin Jr. of Massachusetts steered her onto
the Committee on Military Affairs. Impatient with the
arduous process of creating and passing legislation, she
used her Military Affairs assignment as a soapbox from
which to criticize the wartime policies of the Roosevelt
administration. Her first floor speech attracted half the
House Members—an unprecedented draw for even the
most powerful veteran. In an address entitled “America in
the Postwar Air World,” Luce advocated postwar U.S. air
dominance, both commercial and military. In the same
way that the British Navy controlled the world’s oceans
in the nineteenth century, Luce suggested, U.S. airpower
would control global airspace. She warned against British
and Russian competition and attacked the administration’s
“freedom of the skies” plan for postwar international
aviation cooperation as “globaloney.”10 The speech had the
effect Luce seemed to intend, stirring domestic and foreign
controversy.11 From London, Member of Parliament Lady
Astor mused, “People who start out to be sensational usually
don’t last long.”12 Luce later clarified that she believed “every
nation has sovereignty of its skies” and that the U.S. must
extend aid to allied nations to reinvigorate the aviation
industry and spur competition.13
Despite her status as a leading GOP spokesperson, Luce
voted to support the general outlines of FDR’s foreign
policy. She described an Anglo-American bilateral alliance
as the “foundation stone” of any postwar international
organization.14 She supported the so-called Fulbright
Resolution in 1943, sponsored by Representative J.
William Fulbright of Arkansas, which envisioned American
participation in a postwar international organization—later
the United Nations. She introduced resolutions to study the
problem of postwar refugees and to create a United Nations
(UN) agency to oversee arms control.15 Unlike isolationist
Republicans in the House, Luce backed American
involvement in the UN Refugee Relief Agency, though
she wanted separate U.S. oversight of aid distribution in
recipient countries.16 Luce also supported the creation of a
Jewish state in Palestine.17
On domestic policy, Congresswoman Luce was more
centrist than her rhetoric implied. In 1943 she supported
the Equal Rights Amendment on the twentieth anniversary
of its introduction in the House. Luce also endorsed the
development of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, arguing
that, “We have always been fighting women and never
afraid to do our part.”18 She advocated a heavy wartime tax
on the rich: “those who can afford it, the well-to-do and
the rich, must be taxed almost to the constitutional point
of confiscation.”19 In 1946 Luce introduced a bill to create
a Labor Department bureau to ensure women and minority
workers equal pay for equal work.20
Republican leaders most valued Luce for her wit, sharp
intellect, and ability to turn a phrase, especially when singling
out Roosevelt’s policies for criticism. Party leaders selected
Luce as the keynote speaker at the 1944 Republican
National Convention in Chicago, the first woman so
honored by either party. Her “G.I. Joe and G.I. Jim”
speech largely consisted of her charge that Roosevelt
had been duplicitous in handling foreign policy as war
grew imminent in both Europe and Asia, and, through
wartime mismanagement, had caused undue American
fatalities.21 Aiming squarely at Roosevelt’s habit of
making one-man diplomacy, Luce charged that American
democracy was “becoming a dictatorial bumbledom.”22
Luce’s re-election bid in the fall of 1944 was buffeted
by intraparty fighting, resulting in the abrupt resignation
of her top backer, J. Kenneth Bradley, from his GOP state
chairmanship.23 Luce survived the primary and entered
the general election against a 29-year-old Democrat
challenger—deputy secretary of state of Connecticut
Margaret E. Connors.24 Connors attacked Luce as a
late and opportunistic convert to the cause of a postwar
international organization.25 Meanwhile, Luce intensified
her rhetoric against President Roosevelt during a national
speaking tour to support the GOP presidential candidate,
Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. Luce declared
FDR to be “the only American President who ever lied us
into a war because he did not have the political courage
to lead us into it,” arguing that Roosevelt had not halted
the transport of vital strategic materials to imperial Japan
soon enough as it waged war against China.26 She also
insisted that from 1933 to 1939, as Hitler and Mussolini
rose to power in Europe, FDR was “the world’s leading
isolationist and appeaser” because he had failed to confront
fascism more forcefully.27 Critics assailed her. Mary Norton,
dean of Democratic women in the House, accused Luce
of “complete ignorance” of the facts. Vice President
Wallace dismissed her as a “sharp-tongued glamour girl of
forty” who “when running around the country without
a mental protector, ‘put her dainty foot in her pretty
mouth.’”28 Connors portrayed Luce’s “lies” as proof of
her core isolationist beliefs.29 Connors eventually carried
industrial sections of the district by wide margins.30 In an
election year when prominent isolationists such as Hamilton
Fish of New York went down to defeat, the Democratic
message that conflated Luce’s criticisms with isolationism
proved potent. Luce barely edged Connors by 49.9 to 48.9
percent. A Socialist candidate polled 2,448 votes, a little
more than Luce’s margin of victory.31
In early 1945, Representative Luce expressed grave
concerns about Soviet foreign policy objectives, particularly
in Eastern Europe. She traveled to liberated Europe
and toured the Buchenwald concentration camp where
Nazis had murdered thousands of Jews and Soviet war
prisoners. As the German threat receded, Luce perceived
a growing menace in Soviet communism. She argued that
the Kremlin had “incorporated the Nazi technique of
murder” and that Washington should halt the spread of
communism in Europe.32 Returning to the United States,
Luce authored a bill to acknowledge American “national
responsibility” for the Yalta Agreements of February
1945. Hers was a particularly resonant attack on FDR’s
compromise with Joseph Stalin over the division of postwar
Europe. Recognizing the role the Soviet Army played in
crushing German occupation forces in Eastern Europe,
FDR had conceded Moscow’s sphere of influence in the
region. Stalin, whose chief security interest was to prevent
another German invasion through a weak Polish state, soon
reneged on his promises for free elections and a coalition
government in that country. Nevertheless, Luce and other
critics described the accords as capitulation on the part
of the FDR administration and as “a partition of Poland
and overthrow of its friendly, recognized constitutional
Government.”33 Her position played well in her district,
home to a large Polish and Eastern European community.
Luce’s interest in political office, however, steadily
eroded. In January 1944, her daughter, Ann, a student
at Stanford University, died in an auto wreck.34 Friends
noted that the tragedy sent Luce on a three-year search for
closure and greatly diminished her enthusiasm for politics.
In January 1946 she declined to run for re-election and
retired in January 1947.35 She did not, however, drop out
of politics. Luce addressed the 1948 Republican National
Convention.36 In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower
appointed her U.S. Ambassador to Italy, making her
the fifth woman to represent the United States in a
foreign country and the first posted to a major European
nation.37 She served until 1957, eventually arranging a
conference that settled the disposition of Trieste, a city on
the Adriatic Sea, claimed by both Italy and Yugoslavia.
In 1959 she was confirmed overwhelmingly to become
the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil. But, following a bitter
public exchange with Senator Wayne Lyman Morse of
Oregon that undermined her standing, she resigned her
ambassadorship after just three days.38 The Luces settled
in Honolulu, Hawaii, where Clare remained after Henry’s
death in 1967. In 1983 she accepted a post on President
Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and
received the Presidential Medal of Freedom as “a persistent
and effective advocate of freedom, both at home and
abroad.” After a long battle with cancer, Clare Boothe Luce
died on October 9, 1987, in Washington, DC. Upon her
death, the Washington Post, which often stood at odds with
Luce’s politics, eulogized her. “She raised early feminist hell.
To the end she said things others wouldn’t dare to—cleverly
and wickedly—and seemed only to enjoy the resulting
fracas … Unlike so many of her fellow Washingtonians she
was neither fearful nor ashamed of what she meant to say.”39
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
[ Top ]
