The Last Empire (28 page)

Like so many successful commercialites, Clare had immortal longings. Would she—could she—reach Shaw’s level? George Bernard, not Irwin (who had rebuffed her advances). Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that Miss Boothe might indeed be a first-class playwright, “when the bitterness of the experiences which she has evidently had are completely out of her system.” Clare thanked her for the kind thought but said that the cold “stupidity” of this world had done her in, she feared, as a potential builder of another, “sweeter place.”

Back to Europe in the crucial year 1939. Clare flirted with Gertrude Stein. Then, in two weeks, she wrote her anti-Nazi play,
Margin for Error,
a somewhat confused melodrama with quite a few sharp, funny lines: “The Third Reich allows no margin for error.”

Clare was now turning more and more political. In September 1939, she marched into the office of
Life
’s editor and said that she wanted to be a war correspondent. She was no longer just the boss’s interfering wife. She was a famous writer and, as such, she was hired, though Harry worried about their being separated for so long, even though they had not been getting on. So, as was her habit, Clare wrote him a position paper, noting that for him “to conjure up some dominant discontent or misery out of such good fortune as ours is positively wanton.” Then:

There are times when a man or woman does better to act with sense than to react with sensibility. This seems to me to be one of them. . . . I would like to show more sympathy to you in this matter, but . . . if I did, I should not be acting with as much love as I feel for you. You see, I not only love you . . . but I like you, and admire you far more than you think. Indeed, you always seem to be afraid that if I didn’t love you blindly, I would dislike you openly. That is not the case. . . . Now darling, to bed. I do not like to go to bed without you. But somehow, lately, even when I’m with you, I seem to go to bed without you.

Had Broadway been less sternly lowbrow, Clare might have been our Congreve.

Harry’s response was hardly in the same class. In short, he said he feared Time’s winged wastebasket. By February 1940, they were discussing divorce. Meanwhile, war correspondent Clare was having a splendid time in Europe. Lecherous Ambassador to Britain Joe Kennedy had designs on her as well as a good deal of pro-Nazi propaganda to pour into her ear. Clare was at the Ritz Hotel in Paris when the Germans swept through France. She wanted to stay until the very end, but on May 30th the concierge told her that she must leave the now deserted hotel, because “the Germans are coming.” When Clare asked him how he knew, he said, “Because they have reservations.”

Clare’s reports were well written and became a successful book,
Europe in the Spring.
Dorothy Parker’s review was headed “All Clare on the Western Front.” “While it is never said,” Parker notes, “that the teller is the bravest of all those present, it comes through.”

Clare and Harry were both interventionists by now, and they spent a night at the White House, working over President Roosevelt, who was all smiling amiability. Clare thought he looked old, with trembling hands. Yet it was fairly certain that in November he would run for a third term—and why not? A fourth one if the country should be at war.

Although politically minded, Clare could not be said to have any proper politics. She was basically a vulgar Darwinist. The rich were better than the poor; otherwise they would not be rich. She could mock the
idle
rich, but the self-made must be untaxed by such do-gooders as the Roosevelts. Harry was much the same, except for one great bee in his bonnet: he believed, fervently, that it was the task of the United States in the twentieth century to Christianize China, the job that his dad, the missionary, had so signally failed to do. The damage that this one bee did to our politics is still with us, as the Christian right now beats its jungle drums in the chigger belt, calling for war with China.

Clare became a kingmaker. She would elect as President Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s Republican challenger. Morris describes her appearance at Madison Square Garden: “She wore a plain black dress, and as she stepped forward on the platform, a powerful spotlight beamed down from distant rafters onto her glossy blond hair. The crowd responded with wild enthusiasm even before she opened her mouth. None of her experiences on a movie set or theater stage had equaled this moment. It was the giant arena she had sought since adolescence.” Even H. L. Mencken was impressed. “Slim, beautiful and charming . . . when she began to unload her speech, it appeared at once that she was also a fluent and effective talker.”
Don’t cry for me, Dun & Bradstreet
.

Two years later, she would be elected to Congress from a Connecticut district; she served two terms. The team of Luce would continue until his death, in 1967.

At our last meeting, in my Roman flat, the sirocco was blowing and the shutters were banging. An Italian woman who occasionally did typing for me unexpectedly arrived. When she saw the former Ambassador, she nearly fainted. She had worked for Clare at the Embassy. Clare was amiable. The woman left. I think it was Morris who asked what her function had been. “Actually,” Clare said, “she worked for my consort. She was traffic coordinator for Harry’s countesses.”

Morris heads her long list of acknowledgments with “Above all, I wish to thank the late Clare Boothe Luce for cooperating with me on this biography during the last six years of her life. From the age of fifteen . . . she had kept letters, diaries, scrapbooks and masses of other documents, all of which she courageously allowed me to see.” Courageously? Oh, dear. Could that knowing smile in the middle distance belong to the inexorable Janet Malcolm, brooding upon yet another example of her iron law, the necessary betrayal of subject by observer-writer?

She also submitted to countless hours of interviews and let me stay and work with her in her Washington apartments, her Honolulu house, and a rented mansion one summer in Newport. We spent time together in New York City, her birthplace, in Connecticut, her main residence for most of her life, and at Mepkin Abbey, the former Luce plantation in South Carolina, where she would be buried. We traveled to Canada and London for semi-centennial productions of
The Women
, and to Rome to see the villa and embassy where she had lived and worked as United States Ambassador to Italy. The fruits of that last research, as well as details of our complex personal relationship, will appear in the second volume of this biography.

Complex?
All about Eve? The Lady or the Tiger? Rosebud?

Whatever wonders are yet to come, Sylvia Jukes Morris has written a model biography of a woman who, if born a man, could easily have been a president, for what that’s worth these days: a cool billion, I believe. As it is, if nothing else, Clare Boothe Luce certainly enlivened the dull—when not downright dangerous—century her husband so pompously hailed as “the American.” Now we are more modest or, as the current president somewhat edgily put it, we are the one “indispensable”—or was it “undisposable”?—nation, while
Time
no longer sets the pace for partisan ad hominem malice. Although Harry’s poisonous gift to American journalism is still widely imitated, the “fame” of the Luces themselves has been erased as century ends. Of their once proud monuments, nothing beside remains in the lone and level sands except the logo of a dull, incoherent conglomerate, Time Warner.

The New Yorker

26 May 1997

* 
T
RUMAN

An English paper asked a number of writers to meditate, briefly, on their heroes or villains. My villain, I wrote, is a perfectly nice little man called Harry S. (for nothing) Truman. A worthy senator, he had been casually chosen by our Augustus, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to be vice-president in 1944. Some months later, Augustus joined his imperial ancestors Jefferson, Polk, Lincoln, and cousin Theodore in Valhalla (just above Mount Rushmore). Truman was now master of the earth, a strange experience for a failed farmer, haberdasher, and machine politician from Missouri.

Roosevelt, the late conqueror, had not bothered to tell his heir that we were developing an atomic bomb or what agreements he had made about the postwar world with the barbarian chieftain and ally, Stalin. Truman had to play it by ear. The whole world was now his: what to do with it?

Lately, as the American empire bumps to an end—too many debts, insufficient military enemies—Truman and the empire are being mythologized at an astonishing rate. A recent biography of Truman emphasized his grit, and his miraculous reelection against terrible odds.

At no point in the hagiographies of Truman does anyone mention what he actually did to the United States and the world. First, he created the National Security State. He institutionalized the Cold War. He placed us on a permanent wartime footing. He started that vast hemorrhage of debt which now is more than $4 trillion and growing by $1 billion each day. Why did he do this? First, the good reason. When the Japanese, much provoked by us, attacked, we had not got out of the Depression that followed the crash of 1929. The Roosevelt New Deal of the Thirties had been palliative, but not a solution. There was still great unemployment and the specter of violent social change. War gave us full employment. War removed our commercial rivals and put an end to the colonial empires of our allies, empires we quietly took over in the name of “self-determination,” democracy, and Grandma Moses, an icon of the day.

Truman and his advisers from both political parties decided that they would, in effect, declare war on a vile religion known as Communism and its homeland, the Soviet Union. The demonization of the Soviet Union started in 1947, when they were no threat to the American empire and its clients. They were indeed unpleasant masters to their own people and to those buffer states that we allowed them to keep after the war. We thought they were unduly paranoid about being invaded, but a nation that has been three times invaded from the west might be forgiven a bit of nervousness.

Although the United States has not been invaded since the British burned down Washington, D.C., in 1814, Truman and company deliberately created a siege mentality. The Russians were coming, they proclaimed. To protect us, the National Security Act was passed in 1947. Thus, government was able to regiment the American people, keep the allies on a tight leash, and lock the Russians up in their northern cage. In 1950 the American republic was quietly retired and its place taken by the National Security State, set up secretly and outlined in a document not to be made public for twenty-five years, the National Security Council Memorandum 68. War and Navy Departments were combined into a single “Defense” Department while the CIA, an unconstitutional secret police, was invented. The NSC-68 established the imperial blueprint that governed the world until the recent crack-up of the Soviet Union, which happened
not
as a result of our tactics of ongoing wars, and an arms race that they could not afford, but was
due to the internal fragility of an artificial state which was, in a sense, a crude mirror of our own, now falling apart, as well, through debt and internal ethnic wars.

Truman’s blueprint made seven points. First, we were never to negotiate with the Soviet Union in any honest way. Two, we were to develop the hydrogen bomb. Three, build up conventional forces and reinstate the draft. Four, increase taxes to pay for this—in 1954 I earned $100,000 and paid $90,000 to the peacetime government of the U.S. This is the only thing that Ronald Reagan, equally hit in the same town, Hollywood, and I ever had in common. Five, mobilize through the media all Americans to fight Communism—Truman instituted “loyalty oaths,” a nice totalitarian gimmick that Joseph McCarthy would have a lot of fun with. Six, control the Allies with NATO, hence our military presence to this day in Europe. Seven, propagandize the Russians through misinformation, and so on. Since 1950 the U.S. has been compulsively at war (hot) in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq; (tepid) Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala; and (cold) Iran, Angola, Chile, Grenada. Also, the interference through our secret
police in European elections, start-ing with April 1, 1948, when the CIA ensured the election of the Christian Democrats in Italy, through the harassment of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the Sixties, to various crimes in every continent. . . .

I shall stop here. Deliberately, the thirty-third president of the United States set in train an imperial expansion that has cost the lives of many millions of people all over the world. Now we are relatively poor, unloved, and isolated, with a sullen polity ready for internal adventures. Thanks a lot, Harry.

The Independent Magazine

3 October 1992

* 
H
ERSH’S
JFK

Early spring, 1959. Dutchess County, New York. My telephone rang. “Senator Kennedy is calling.” It was Evelyn Lincoln, Jack’s secretary. (Her employer hadn’t yet metamorphosed into the imperial acronym JFK.) Years later, Mrs. Lincoln wrote a fairly unrevealing memoir of her years with Kennedy—a pity, since she knew a great deal about him, including the subject of his call to me. Jack came on the line. No hello. No how are you. “That friend of yours up there, Dick Rovere. He’s writing a piece for
Esquire
about ‘Kennedy’s last chance to be President’ or something. Well, it’s not true. Get to him. Tell him I don’t have Addison’s disease. If I did, how could I keep up the schedule I do?” Many more staccato sentences. No time to lose. Primaries were coming up; then the Convention. Before I went down the road to see Rovere, I looked up Addison’s disease: a deterioration of the adrenal function that can lead to early death. No wonder
Jack was panicky. Even a hint that he was mortally ill . . .

Background: In 1953, Jack married Jacqueline Bouvier, whose stepfather, H. D. Auchincloss, had been my stepfather until, in a fit of generosity, my mother passed him, like a well-stuffed safety-deposit box, on to Jackie’s needy mother. Through Jackie, I got to know Jack; delighted in his darkly sardonic humor, not unlike my own—or Jackie’s, for that matter. In due course, I shifted from the noble—that is, Adlai Stevensonian—side of the Democratic Party to the raffish gang of new kids from Massachusetts, by way of Riverdale, N.Y. Then I, too, went into active politics; by 1960 I would be the Democratic-Liberal candidate for Congress from New York’s highly conservative Twenty-ninth District, and our party’s Presidential candidate was a matter of poignant interest to me. When Jack rang me—the first and last time—I was eager for him to be nominated, even though I had already seen a poll that indicated that his Roman Catholicism could cost our district the election.
In the end, I was to get 43.3 percent of the vote to his 38 percent; this was very satisfying to me. Unfortunately, the Republican incumbent congressman got 56.7 percent. This was less satisfying. “Your loss,” Jack grinned afterward, “was a real tragedy for our nation.” Whatever else, he was funny.