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Philip Nash, "Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman" (Routledge, 2022)
01:04:56
An interview with Philip Nash
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- [00:02]
Philip Nash
Hello, friends. Guess who? That's right. It is I, the replacer. Once again, I've been called on so you can play the new Call of Duty Black Ops 7 with three expansive modes, 18 multiplayer maps, and the tastiest zombie gameplay you've ever freaking seen.
- [00:23]
Sponsor/Announcer
Call of Duty Black Ops 7 available now.
- [00:26]
Philip Nash
Rated M for mature.
- [00:32]
Sponsor/Announcer
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- [01:27]
Philip Nash
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:31]
Victoria Phillips
Good evening or good afternoon or good morning.
- [01:34]
Philip Nash
Hi there.
- [01:35]
Victoria Phillips
Hi. I'm here with Philip Nash and we are here to speak about his new book on Clare Booth Luce. And it's a really exciting topic and a woman, an opportunity for me to hear hear about the genesis of this project. I'm Victoria Phillips and why Clare Booth Loose? Why now? What drew you to her?
- [02:04]
Philip Nash
Right, well, there's one just to get this out of the way, there's a practical issue, which is to say I had written an earlier book called Breaking Protocol. It's about America's first half dozen female ambassadors in Clear Booth Loose was one of them and we'll talk about her ambassadorship later. And so it was in one sense a natural spin off. I had done a great deal of research on Loose already, so it was, it was a relatively easy book to write in terms of just sort of the, the archival spade work and all the research I had to do. That's sort of the practical reason. But there are, there are several other reasons. As, as people may not be aware, Luce had an official biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris, who sadly passed away in 2020. She spent 30 years writing a massive 1100 page, two volume authorized biography, sort of Life and Times, which. It's an amazing book. It's an amazing resource. I rely on it heavily. I mean, how could you not she had privileged access to a lot of information. But that book is, like I said, It's 1100 pages. And I think a lot of people will not be able to read all of that. And yet Claire Boothe Luce, I think, is also a very important and understudied figure in our field of history, especially in foreign relations and U.S. political history. I think we tend to focus too much on people on the left and people on the right tend to get neglected. Now that that's been corrected in the last few decades to a great extent. But I still think XI is an understudied figure. If you. I couldn't. Maybe you can. I can't think of anyone else, any other woman, certainly in the 20th century, who has a more sort of a wider resume than she does. And we'll go through these all the chapters of her life, but in terms of breadth of experience, I can't think of a more accomplished American woman. There are certainly women who are more prominent, like for example, Eleanor Roosevelt. But as I argue in the book, we, in the world of biography, we tend to focus on what I would call deep figures. In other words, they master one field and rise to the top of one field. Much rarer and in my view, neglected are what you might call the broad figures, the people who are, are not neither the first nor the best in any one field, but who enjoy considerable success in several fields. And if you consider the fact that she was an editor, a playwright, best selling book author, award journalist, a congresswoman, an ambassador and a pundit, her life is pretty, pretty impressive. And so I wanted to give a sort of write a brief, compact, accessible biography of her. It's in a series put out by Rutledge that's designed for classroom use. So for example, it has a collection of primary sources at the back. I'm hoping that some university courses somewhere might actually use it. But it's meant to be an introduction, it assumes no prior knowledge, but. But also I wanted to bring an academic historian's perspective to bear. There are at least a half dozen other biographies of Luce going back decades, including Morris, none of them were written by an academic historian. And so I work very, very hard in the book to put her in a historical and historiographical context. Whereas the Morris book, for all its strengths, it's very much a Life and times and focuses a lot on her personal life. I deliberately dial back the personal life and focus more deeply on her political and her international and professional engagements. So that was a really long, rambling answer to your question. But But I mean, what's important is I had, I think, several reasons to write this book, even though, as I say in the preface, I'm working in the shadow of Sylvia Jukes Morris and always sort of looking over my shoulder at her while I was writing the book.
- [06:03]
Victoria Phillips
Great. Just to start, to start out in terms of the contemporary world and the past focus of academic study on the left, a new focus on the right, and Clare Boothe Luce's presentation as kind of the right wing woman is in, in, in a Trump world. Is she right wing? You know, was she always right wing? How, how is, how is she right wing and how is she not right wing?
- [06:39]
Philip Nash
That's a fabulous question. One of my, one of my themes in the book is that she is much, much more complicated than I think even she would have presented herself as. Certainly on the political spectrum. Over the whole sweep of her life, she definitely moved around. She voted for FDR in 1932, sort of when she was just starting her career. She quickly converted to the Republican cause, partly because she married Henry Luce in 1935, who of course was a staunch Republican. But she's very, very hard to pin down and she's always unpredictable and heterodox. I mean, part of, part of what goes on is that in the mid-40s, she's a congresswoman from Connecticut and she represents a district that is heavily industrial labor. In fact, one of the great ironies in her life is that she won election to Congress in 1942 mainly because of the socialist third party candidate in her district, which is a little ironic considering how anti socialist she was. But she was very, very liberal on some issues during that time period. She, for example, lined up with the president that she otherwise loathed, Franklin Roosevelt, on issues like heavy taxation to fund the war. She voted against her own party when it came to the anti labor legislation that they passed, like the Smith Connolly act during the war. So she's, she's very hard to pin down. Sure, she was a super hawk when it comes to foreign policy, certainly during the Cold War. There's no question about that. She moved further and further to the right. There were points where she advocated preemptive war against the Soviet Union. And one of her many contradictions is she was clearly a gender essentialist during World War II. She argued that women were by nature more pacific than men were and deserved a seat at the peace table because of that. And yet a few years later, she's advocating preemptive war against the Soviet Union and pushing in the 50s, her boss Dwight Eisenhower from the right to do more, to take on the Soviet Union and the Chinese. And he was actually quite alarmed by how bellicose she was. And in the 70s, she's one of these people behind Ronald Reagan and the Committee on the Present Danger. And you know, she became an opponent of detente. So very, very conservative on most foreign policy issues. But she was also a feminist. And I think if, I think people not knowing much about her might be tempted to lump her together in the 70s, for example, with Villa Schlafly, who is of course the most famous conservative woman of that period, sort of single handedly led the effort to torpedo the era. Claire with Loose was always a supporter of the era. And in the 70s she's asking people like Betty, Betty Friedan over for lunch and she's appearing on talk shows with, with, oh, I can't come up with her name now. Who's the other icon of the feminist movement. Yes, thank you. Yeah. And so she's appearing on talk shows with Gloria Steinem and afterwards saying there's very little that you and I would, would disagree on. So I mean, that's clear. With Loose, this sort of icon of the Republican right. She was also very sort of wishy washy and almost avoided the issue of abortion in the 70s. She was a Catholic convert, which put her in something of a bind. But she, there were, there were people on the right, you know, once Roe v. Wade came to Law of the land in 1973, there were people trying to get her to sign on to the pro life movement. She basically refused. So she's all over the place. You asked very. The also subsidiary question, where would we place her today? Because, and I actually talk about this briefly in my conclusion because it's tempting to say considering what a big media figure she was, the fact that she was known for her, for her sort of biting rhetoric, she was very glamorous, very good looking. You could imagine her in the early 21st century being a regular on Fox News or on social media. I think it's not a stretch. And yet on the other hand, I would hesitate to put her in that category. I, even though, for example, she was a staunch Nixon supporter all through Watergate and even after Watergate, I think she would have been far too wedded to American small D democracy to side with the forces of the Trump movement. I think she was far too knowledgeable about the world and about how the world works. I think she would have had no time for all of the falsehoods and gaslighting that went on that goes on today and the passes for political discussion. You know, this is a woman who late in her life would read three books a week, and people were always impressed by her mastery of issues. And I think that's partly just going to add parenthetically. I think it's because she's compensating, because she never got a college education. And so I think she was at pains to improve herself intellectually and because she always regretted having gone to finishing school rather than college.
- [12:05]
Victoria Phillips
Wow, that's fascinating. This is just a kind of a big question that I had, you know, as a biographer, and particularly of Clare Boothe Luce, how do you tell a flowing narrative about a woman who seems so disjointed, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, she's glamorous, yet she is talking about nuclear war. You know, there's so many things that we think of as contradictory. They may not be for her and for you as the biographer, or they may be. So how do you tell a coherent story of a woman who holds so many contradictions?
- [12:52]
Philip Nash
At the risk of sounding snarky, I would. My answer would be, I don't. You're absolutely right. It is impossible. There are several points in her life where she is clearly, and I argue it's part of the. Part of her tragedy is that her inability to. Or her refusal to focus on any one thing, she always had, even early in her career, when she was managing editor of Vanity Fair in the early to mid-30s, she's always looking for the next opportunity, always distracted, always thinking she should be doing something else, always willing to try something else, and yet never willing to completely put things behind her. So she keeps adding things to her repertoire without subtracting. And so you're absolutely right. The challenge of weaving all that into coherent narrative is very, very difficult. I do it by basically taking a rasp and filing off the edges. And, you know, my. The structure of my book is chapters based on what was the primary activity of a particular time period. And then in that chapter, you'll also find reference to the other things which are still going on. And some often, very, very oftentimes very, very important things. But, you know, they actually have one section right after World War II, where she leaves Congress in 1947. And I think I'm pretty sure that the section's called A Little of Everything. Well, you could say that about her entire life, where she never really focuses. Technically, I'm at it. I'm aided by the fact that this is, once again, primarily a college textbook and so it has subheadings. And subheadings mean it's a crutch. It means you don't have to have smooth transitions. And so I relied on that very, very heavily to cover for my abrupt lack of transitions. But yeah, I mean, you know, there's so much. My, what my text is 186 pages. There's so much that gets lost because there's so much going on. There's so much information. There's so, you know, her. Her papers at the Library of Congress are what, 320 linear feet over 800 boxes. There's no way, I mean, even if I tried, I could have mastered all of that and sort of taken it all into account. There's almost too much. So like I said, in that case I had a real advantage working from this sort of massive. Well, and I was basically using as a reference work the. The 2.the 2 volume Morris volume Morris biography. So that I was able to. The book, let me put it this way, the book would have been much more difficult if I didn't also have the official biography to work from. There's no question. Because then I was able to get a sense of the big picture because it had already been painted. And then I could be selective. I can't imagine trying to make use of all the primary sources available and then write a brief but as comprehensive as possible biography of Luce without having Morris in front of me. It would have been very, very difficult. So I think more than most biographers, I owe a debt to another biographer in particular.
- [16:05]
Victoria Phillips
What do you think is the difference between an authorized and an unauthorized biography? And is there anything that you felt that you could write that the authorized biographer might not have been able to write?
- [16:18]
Philip Nash
Another great question. I think Morris does a pretty good job of being critical. But I think, you know, for example, she. And by the way, Luce was very, very reluctant, and Morris is honest about this. Luce is very, very reluctant to take on an authorized biographer. And she finally did in the early 80s. And then over the next five years, Morris interviewed her and. Which would only add to the information and even more complicated by the fact that Luz was a notoriously unreliable witness to her own life. And, and Morris is honest about this, you know, and so in a way it's a nightmare because you've got all this information and then if it's coming from her, you don't know what to believe. And so you have to constantly check it against. Against the other records you have. And she was a notorious embellisher. She put herself at the center of things that she wasn't the center of. And then you, you know, you really don't know what to believe. But I think, like I said, I think Morris does a pretty good job. I think the danger would be that you become too close to your subject matter. And I. So without. I really don't want to sound like I'm accusing Morris of anything, because I'm not. But I think compared to her, I had an additional layer of distance. And also, I'm relying much more than Morris did on secondary sources to provide historical context. So, for example, when she goes to China in 1941 and 1942, as a war journalist, I looked at other books that she either didn't have access to at the time or chose not to look at. For example, a biography of Henry Luce by Alan Brinkley, which is a fabulous book. It's called Publisher. I was able to. I had that at my disposal. Books and articles about China During World War II, I was able to incorporate those. And I think it makes for a very, very different book. And I would urge people to look at both because I think in some ways they're very complimentary books that I think together you could get a great sense of Luz, the person, you know. In the Morris book, no one could compete in its account of her personal life. Her personal life alone is incredibly complicated, incredibly messy. The state of her marriage. Well, sorry, the state of her marriages, I should say. She was married first for six years in the 1920s, and then she was married Henry Luce. That is an incredibly fraught marriage, even though it lasts for over 30 years. But so, like I said, I had the advantage. I. I was well positioned to write a complimentary book, I should say complementary book. It's not very complimentary. E. Not an I. One that plays off of the Moore's book, I think very, very successfully, like I said. And I had the luxury of being able to focus just on the political and the profession.
- [19:24]
Victoria Phillips
If you were a historian of Hollywood, I assume it would have come out very differently. So I'm assuming that. Or did you give that equal weight and time?
- [19:36]
Philip Nash
I think I gave that equal weight and time. She is someone. She actually did. In the late. Around 1937. She was asked to do a screen test by Daryl Zanuck, and she failed miserably. And I think even when she was very young, she sort of fantasized at one point of not just being a playwright or in the theater, but of also being an actress. And that was one. She normally mastered everything she touched, including in sports, for example. Acting was one thing that was always beyond her. She just did not have a talent for acting. And she did have some involvement in Hollywood. She. Was she nominated or did she win? She was nominated for an Academy Award in 1950 for us, for the story, not the screenplay. So basically for the story idea of. I think the movie's called Come to the Stable. Anyway, so she did screenwriting. She's had several involvements in Hollywood. She had a lot of personal connections with people like David Zelnick and other people in Hollywood, but she's really not fundamentally a Hollywood figure. Now, obviously, let's not forget that the, the Women, her, her ginormous hit play was also made a movie in 1939 and it was very successful and only doesn't get more attention because it was up against movies like Gone with the Wind and the wizard of Oz and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939. As I'm sure you're aware, it's an amazing movie year and the women had the bad luck to come out that year. But yeah, if I were. So in other words, if I wrote this as sort of a celebrity book, sure, it would be different. It wouldn't pay nearly as much attention to her activities as a congresswoman or as an ambassador to Italy in the 1950s, which of course were my fundamental interests. I'm a 20th century political and foreign relations historian. I'm not, I'm not a cultural historian. I'm typically not interested in Hollywood. But you cannot write the history of her early professional career without talking about Hollywood to some extent, but even more so Broadway. She came out with three hit Broadway satirical plays in three years. So pretty much out of nowhere, her first play in 1935 was called Abide with Me. It was a horrible flop. But the women, Kiss the Boys Goodbye and Margin for Error were all hits. And so she belonged in the late 1930s, she belongs up there with the greats and is an important part of her larger biography because looking back on her life, she always regretted not having focused on playwriting. I think that was the thing she felt she had the most talent for. And I think that's the thing she regretted most, not having stuck with. Now. She also set the bar very, very high for herself. She. She was actually, she never wrote it, but she was going to write an autobiography and she was going to call it, what is it? The Diary of an Unsuccessful Woman. She considered herself not very successful and she a success. She would have considered a Nobel Prize for literature. That in my view, that's Setting the bar a Little High, circa 1938, 1939, she was the toast of Broadway. And, you know, who knows whether she could have sustained that, but she was one of the greats. And so really, I think Broadway is the more relevant focus than Hollywood is, like I said, even though she did have her involvements there and she did try her hand at script writing and did come up with a story idea for that, for that 1949 movie that she was nominated for.
- [23:29]
Victoria Phillips
And what I mean, we can see, particularly with the specter of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, we see the celebrity aspect. I hate to call Donald Trump a celebrity, but he was. He was a television celebrity.
- [23:45]
Philip Nash
No, that was the platform for his presidential run, was the fact that he starred in the Apprentice.
- [23:50]
Victoria Phillips
Right, that was the platform. And certainly Ronald Reagan. And you know, we don't think of women doing that, and we barely thought about people doing that before Reagan. But, you know, how did you feel like she used her theatrical experience to propel her political career? Did she use her kind of her knowledge of theatricality and drama in her political life? Or was it driven by something, a different part of her?
- [24:22]
Philip Nash
Yeah, another great question. I think that's true to some extent. You know, so she does come into Congress in 1943. And as I point out, and you touch on something very important. This was a time when people who were already famous outside of politics did not go into politics. That's something that's much more of our age at the time. People got involved in local politics and worked their way up to Congress, Senate, Governor, etc. Etc. Sometimes they. They went through the military, but I couldn't think of any other example at the time of someone who, you know. And by the way, there were celebrities involved in politics. You know, In World War I, you had, you know, Mary Pickford selling war bonds, and you had. You had celebrities in 1940 lining up for and against Franklin Roosevelt, but running for office. That was extremely rare, if not never seen. So she was definitely. And she had gotten. In 1940 in particular, I mentioned that she had really become politically involved, very active in the Wilkie campaign, comfortable, speaking in front of large audiences. That's where she really discovered that one of her many talents was for public speaking. You know, she didn't have any experience as an actress that might have helped her. She's definitely comfortable in. In the limelight. After all, she had always sought it. She was very well spoken. She thought about how to present herself. I think she was sort of ahead of her time. She re. She would Always tell women that if you're going to speak publicly, lower the register of your voice. Because she aware of, she was aware of the double standard. She was aware of the sexism. Right, that the women come off as shrill because their voices are high. And so if you can actually go online, you can listen to recordings of her and her voice seems actually kind of low. And that's deliberate. So she was certainly aware of how to present yourself publicly. She was, people would actually were annoyed by her because no matter what time of day, no matter how hard she'd been working, she always looked perfect, not a hair out of place, makeup always immaculate, always. She didn't have a great style sense, but she was always professionally dressed. And so those were definitely things she brought to the table. It's one of the reasons why she was sort of headhunted to run for Congress in Connecticut's 4th district in 1942. They realized that she was sure she was a celebrity, but she also had this amazing experience. She had been around the world as a war journalist, so she knew about international affairs. She had great name recognition. She was very good looking. I mean, I can imagine a political consultant just sort of drooling over her. And you know, and not because she necessarily, like I said, had any experience as an actor, but she had all these other strengths as a candidate. She was also very, very hard working. One of the things I was struck by at every. Everything she tried, she was not. She never sort of kicked back and let other people do work for her. When she was in Congress, she was an incredibly hard worker, excuse me. And she would master any issue that she was about to speak on or about to work on in committee. And even people like John Gunther writing at the time were impressed by her industry. And that's one of the very impressive things about her too, you know, because, you know, there are a lot of in you can imagine, let me put it this way. I can imagine her being in Congress and being sort of a showboat and, but not really doing the spade work of working in Congress and just not being interested in that sort of thing. And that's not true at all. She was a very, very hands on, effective member of the Military Affairs Committee, which was during World War II, as you might imagine, was a very, very influential and important committee. It's the precursor of today's House Armed Services Committee. She was the only woman on that committee. So afraid I've lost the thread of your question, but I, I, in a way, I think she was sort of a natural when it comes to public relations and speaking. But it's not really because, like I said, because of Hollywood or because she was an actress. I think it's more that she was just naturally good looking, comfortable in front of the limelight. And perhaps most important of all was her sarcastic witness. She already knew how to use that tool to get attention and to get into the newspapers. And she did that a lot during her congressional career. And even, even as an ambassador, she knew, she knew, she knew how to make good copy, I'll put it that way. No question about that. And, you know, and that's another thing. A lot of people were put off by her because it was, for them, in a very sexist world. It was an uncomfortable combination. You know, women, if you're smart, you're supposed to pretend you're not smart. And if you're witty, you're supposed to pretend that you're not witty. And if you're articulate, you're supposed to pretend you're not articulate. You're not. Certainly if you're ambitious, you're supposed to hide that. You know, if you're a woman and you want to get ahead, you're supposed to hide all of your attributes because otherwise the double standard will come in and will tear you down. So I think she deserves credit for basically taking the risk of being a brash, assertive, ambitious, yes, incredibly narcissistic. But, you know, for someone who did not hesitate to demonstrate the attributes that were always celebrated in men and were detrimental to women, she didn't care. And she deserves enormous credit for that. Interesting.
- [30:10]
Victoria Phillips
You mentioned that she campaigned for Wendell Wilkie. Did she stay with him through the One World publication and that did she, did she gel with him ideologically when it came to the idea of One World?
- [30:28]
Philip Nash
Another great question, by the way, in case I forget to say, she tried to wangle a seat on Wilkie's plane, that converted B24 liberated bomber called Gulliver. For people who don't know, Wilkie failed in 1940, but he was tasked with FDR with basically touring the world during the war. He traveled something like 31,000 miles. And then what he learned on that trip, he wrote into this, this book which came out what 1943 called One World, which I don't know if it's still the greatest selling book ever, but certainly during World War II, it sold, I think, over a million copies. It was, it was an unbelievable. And by the way, it's very telling, right? I mean, a book about world unity selling a million copies in a Country where, you know, people are much more interested in things like cartoons and movies. It's pretty impressive. Anyway, she wanted to go on that trip and she was not allowed to. But that's a great question, because in 1940, both she and her husband, Henry Luce, they are gaga over Wilkie because he is going into the campaign. He's the dark horse, but he's the leading internationalist within the Republican Party. The other leading lights, like Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey, they're isolationists. And it's. To me, it's one of the great what ifs. What if an isolationist is nominated by the Republicans in 1940, and then the fall campaign becomes a referendum on whether to aid Britain or whether to risk war. Wilkie's an internationalist. So it took that. That issue basically off the table, with a couple of exceptions. But for the Looses, Wilkie was the ideal candidate because he was conservative. He hated the New Deal and thought it would lead to socialism, which is what the Looses thought. But he believed that we had to aid Britain even at the risk of war. We needed to stand up and fight if necessary in a world of risk, domination by Adolf Hitler and by Japanese militarism. And so that's why they were so Pro Wilkie by 1944, when Wilkie is interested in running again. And by the way, he gets. He doesn't get anywhere. And he gets thumped in the spring 1944 primaries. And by the way, it's probably a good thing because he dies before the election in any case, tragically at the age of something like 48. But by that point, the Looses had soured on him. And I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect the one worldism has a lot to do with it because that was too. That was going too far for the Looses. I think they also were unhappy that Wilkie seemed to be so close to fdr, like maybe a little too bipartisan, a little too eager to reach across the aisle and cooperate with Roosevelts. And so by 1944, they've moved on to, well, in that case, who do they back? They back. Well, Claire in particular is a big fan of Douglas MacArthur. And personally, I can't imagine a worse person to consider being President of the United states than Douglas MacArthur. But, yeah, they had a long string of backing. Either the person who loses the general election or gets thumped in the primary, they're going to support Arthur Vandenberg in 1948. They're not big fans of Thomas Dewey. Never in 1948. I don't think Claire certainly does not stump for him.
- [33:59]
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- [34:01]
Philip Nash
So good.
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Victoria Phillips
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- [34:58]
Philip Nash
Which is interesting, even though she speaks at the convention. So yeah, they're not big fans of Thomas Dewey, but yeah. So I think they turned on Wilkie because I think they think he went too far to the left. If you look at Claire in Congress, she first makes her big splash in that Same Year in 1943. It's where she famously coins the term global oni. She does it in the context of condemning Vice President Henry Wallace's proposal for an internationalization of civil aviation, which really ended up not being much of an issue. Claire, by the way, was transparently carrying water for Pan American Airways and worried about post war competition. But I think importantly it fits into this broader picture where Claire Boothe Luce was very wary of sort of liberal internationalism. She was never entirely comfortable with the United nations, even in its early years. I portray here, I borrow from Tom Knock, who wrote this great book about Woodrow Wilson in the context of the Versailles Treaty, where he talks about conservative internationalists. And I think it's a real important concept because, I mean, I think we've gotten away with it, but I think also in the general public we tend to have this very blunt and sort of false dichotomy between isolationists and internationalists. There is at the time, in the 1940s, there was this third category, I'll call them conservative internationalists. They wanted a United States active in the world, risking or waging war if necessary, but not going too far down the road toward internationalism, being very wary of any infringements on US sovereignty, avoiding quote unquote entangling alliances. So she's trying to adopt this middle position. And I think it's one of the reasons she said as much. One of the reasons why she quickly grew tired of Congress is she was tired of being attacked by both sides. The isolationists would attack her as an internationalist, and the liberal internationalists would attack her as being too much of a sort of a social Darwinian, too much of a skeptic of the United nations, et cetera. So she basically fell between two stools, and then you basically alienate everybody in the context of that broader debate.
- [37:17]
Victoria Phillips
Fascinating. Looking at network analysis, she seems like a prime candidate for all those nodes and lines that would come up. You loose and Eisenhower and the dull.
- [37:29]
Philip Nash
So, you know, play six degrees of clear booth loose.
- [37:32]
Victoria Phillips
Yeah, yeah. What about the women? You know, how, what were her relationships like there with, say, Eleanor Roosevelt? I happen, you know, I know that she, there was some relationship with Eleanor Lansing Dulles, the sister of the Dulles brothers. But, you know, were there any political allies or foes that she had who were women?
- [37:58]
Philip Nash
You have an unbroken string of great questions. It's funny because just online, just recently, someone asked basically, basically. So she hated other women. Right. She certainly had that reputation. And she certainly got into spats with women, which she immediately regretted. And then later, it's interesting, she took steps to avoid them. Like, for example, she got into it with Dorothy Thompson in the context of the 19th campaign. And she, she gave this really nasty speech, by the way, and part of it is she felt betrayed. Dorothy Thompson had supported Wendell Wilkie and then in the fall switched backing Roosevelt for a third term. And so she basically, she was an apostate. You know, she was a pretty conservative woman. Her hugely popular column was syndicated in right wing newspapers. And so Clare Boothloos went after her and in a speech basically without saying so, implied that Dorothy Thompson was suffering from menopause. Yeah. And there, there I think you see sort of the, the downside of her, her wicked wit. And by the way, the two of them later patched it up. But you know, especially in the, in the sexist age where people in the press are constantly looking for the quote, unquote, cat fight, remember? And then you see it less today, I think, but back at the, back in the, in the day when women can't have a, can't have a debate, it's a cat fight. Men have a debate, women have a cat fight. And people were constantly trying to stir those up involving her. People were declaring a cat fight to be underway when there wasn't and there's this real interesting relationship she has with Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was another celebrity who entered Congress. In fact, she was picked partly as the Democratic Party answer to Clare Boothe Loose, which is, by the way, another form of sexism. But they quickly arranged not to have any. Have any debates with each other, even though people, the people in the press certainly wanted it to happen. They got along even though they were ideological polar opposites in Congress. At the same time, she had a very good relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, which I think you alluded to. You know, I wouldn't call them chums, you know, and there's a. There are. Morris, I think, implies that Klibothus didn't have many, if any close friends. She certainly had a lot of friends. Her voluminous correspondence attests to that. But a lot of her friends were women. You know, someone like Buff Cobb. They were friends going back to their teenage years. I'm less. You probably know more about her relationship with Eleanor Dulles. I don't think there was that much there. Yes, there was that important. You know, you write about it and I write about it. That important opening of the concert Halle in Berlin in 1957. I don't know if it's relevant at all. I know that Claire Boothluz did not get along very well with John Foster Dulles. He certainly did not think very highly of her. And there's some real awkward moments. And it's also really weird too, because when she's looking for a subsequent ambassadorship, circa 1957, 1958, all the business is conducted with her husband, John Foster Dulles. I don't know. I don't have to read between the lines. It's possible he didn't want to deal with Claire personally, but it's all done to her husband, which is, you know, once again, typical of the age and very sexist, etc. But. So I wonder if the fact that she was never really tight with John Foster might have meant that she wasn't so tight with Eleanor. I don't know. That's just my. She had certainly had a better relationship with the President Dwight Eisenhower. And that as with other political appointees, including the. The female ambassadors who I write about in my other book, the fact that they were almost all them were political boities, I argue, was actually one of the great strengths and helped get these women off on the right foot. Because political employees for whatever other flaws they often bring to the table and political appointees have been disasters, including in recent years, some of them Some of them been the best ambassadors ever. Right. It's a mixed bag, but typically, because they're political appointees, they. What they bring to the table, which career ambassadors never, ever have, is a personal relationship with the president. And in the case of Italy, where Claire Boutluse was sent as ambassador in 1953, the first female US ambassador to A, quote, unquote, major ally, a lot of Italians, especially in the Foreign Office, were incensed. One of them said to an American counterpart, and this is virtually a quotation, picking her doesn't make us a second rate country, it makes us a third, third rate country. And one of them said, who do you think we are? Luxembourg. Which was a reference to cl. Sorry, Pearl Mesta. Where Harry Truman had sent. Who. Whom Harry Truman had sent to Luxembourg. Luxembourg. Why they to this day is a country that has. We have sent more women to than any other, which is not a coincidence. We tend to send women to small, less important European countries. That's part of our sexist appointment policies. In any case, the Italians, many of them, were not happy with the appointment. A lot of them quickly overcame their disappointment when they realized that she had a direct line to the White House, which paid enormous dividends for them, for example, and most prominently in the settlement of the Trieste crisis in 1953, 54, which could have led to a European war. It was that bad. But Claire, she has to share the credit with a lot of other people, but the initiative, the setting the ball rolling on the solution to that crisis was in large part her doing. And the Italians quickly came to realize, wow, we have an ambassador here who has clout that most ambassadors don't have. And that that's. And I argue in the broader context of female ambassadors, that's a real important way that an otherwise rough journey was smoothed. You see, in other cases, too, not just with Luce in Rome.
- [44:22]
Victoria Phillips
That's fascinating. Continuing with the ambassadorship, there are those who have said that her claims of illness and being poisoned is just, you know, one more example of, you know, female, you know, pathological, becoming pathological about women's disease and that there really was something, or she really wasn't ill, but she claimed to be. At any rate, can you speak. And then, of course, there was these recent problems in other embassies. Can you speak a little bit about the ambassadorship and also how this whole issue of disease was treated.
- [45:07]
Philip Nash
How she was basically attacked by her ceiling. Yeah, it's a pretty famous story. I've run into people who basically, it's the only thing they know about her mastership is that she said she was poisoned. And it is an interesting story. And you're absolutely right. There were people who questioned this because it is a fantastic story. And so there were people who immediately who didn't like her people, people like Wesley Westbrook Pegler, who was a completely hateful columnist in this period. He basically said that this was a lie to cover a trip home for a facelift. And there were later on there, this is an interesting bit of attempted payback. There were a couple of times reporters, sorry, Time magazine reporters, so they worked for her husband later on who basically said that this, this story was all bs, that it was to cover, you know, a trip home for dental surgery or whatever. Everything I've seen, certainly from Morris, certainly from the people in the embassy, including people from CIA, the CIA who investigated this because you know, when she first showed these bizarre and severe symptoms that didn't have any obvious explanation, the CIA, CIA worried that she was being deliberately poisoned. And they kept this very hush hush for a long time. The CIA investigated and they found out that she was in fact being poisoned by her ceiling. And people wondering what the hell does that mean? Her residence, the Via Taverna in Rome was a building that went back to the 15th or 16th century. It was a very, very old building. And she, every day she worked in bed for hours. She going back to early in her career. This is just how, this is just how she rolled. She would get up, she'd have breakfast in bed and then she'd work in bed. She would dictate letters to her secretary or she'd read her coffee, read up on memos and articles, or she'd draft memos. But she would sit there for hours. And there was actually one point in Rome where she took a sip of her coffee and she said jokingly, this tastes like poison. It turns out that. And it's maybe because on the floor above her there was a washing machine that vibrated. But basically it was making the floor above shake and it was shaking loose. The a, the ancient paint on the ceiling which was sort of creating dust and flakes that was ending up in her food. And this, these flakes and this dust had arsenate of lead in it because of the old paint that was used. So she was being progressively bit by bit, you know, and I'm sure it came on very, very slowly because she's not, it's not one massive dose, it's little, little doses over weeks and months. So she's been being progressively poisoned by her ceiling. And I mean I can't think of any other story like that in diplomatic history. It's pretty bizarre. But, you know, she overcame it. This is by 1956. She was tired. She had other health issues not related to the arsenate of lead, and she wanted to step back and so she did. But you also raises the question about her ambassadorship in general. I would say her record as an ambassador is sort of mixed. If you look and they, the people in the White House and State Department in this period, they're constantly evaluating their ambassadors. She did not get the very highest marks. I would say she ranks probably in the middle of the early female ambassadors that I look at. She had a very difficult job. Italy was a major post on the front line of the Cold War, working in an ally, whereas there was a large and powerful Communist party, which of course in the Cold War got all the attention from the Eiser administration. She was an advocate of what was called opening to the right. Right. Italy, post war Italy, was a democracy. It was a parliamentary democracy. We had a long, long, complicated string of coalition governments. It was basically a center right coalition. Her attitude was to battle the communists and to make for a more stable democracy. You reach out to the right, you incorporate some of the monarchist, maybe not the pseudo fascist parties, because there were successors to Mussolini after, after 1946, but not in power, obviously. But she wanted the opening to the right and a lot of Italians resisted this. And later on you're going to see the opening to the left. In other words, they moved to the, to incorporate the center left parties, which seemed to me anyway, a more successful approach. So she really didn't, really didn't achieve her policy goals. She was a very, very popular ambassador in Italy. She was a household name not just because of her celebrity or her good looks. Apparently 200 Italian families named their daughter Claire in her honor. A lot of, for example, young Italian women looked up at her as a great role model, as a lot of women did around the world, by the way, throughout this period for almost two decades. She ranks very, very highly among the most admired women in the world, judging from opinion polling. But I think she was a pretty effective ambassador. She was popular in the embassy. She won over a lot of skeptics among the career foreign service officers, who, as you might imagine, some of them, were not happy when they found out that she was being sent as their new boss. In fact, her predecessor in Rome apparently had to sit the staff down and basically scold them for all the badmouthing they were doing. She won them over. I think she was a pretty effective boss and you know, even though she could be a tyrant and especially later in her life, if you look how she treats some of her household staff, it's really appalling. But I get the sense that she was a pretty good person to work for in the embassy and like I said, she played a key role in solving the Trieste crisis. And you know, she, she was good. She was offered a second ambassadorship to Brazil in 1959, which she kept for three days. I don't know if it's the shortest ambassadorship. It probably is. I've, I've seen a reference to the idea that it doesn't officially start until you actually show up in your host country. So in that sense she was never ambassador to Brazil, but yeah, she was confirmed and then she backed out. And it's, it's partly because she decided she didn't want, she didn't want the job. And she credits this partly to lsd. And I don't know if you don't want to get into this, why not? Right. In the late 50s, she and her husband Henry, they both took LSD under the direction of their psychiatrist as part of their therapy. They took it on numerous occasions. Occasions. They took notes of their experiences which are now available in their papers in Library of Congress. They were not available for a long time, as you might imagine. And it's also interesting, there's a great. I think his name is Stephen Siff, wrote a great article about this that even through the 60s, when LSD had been adopted by the counterculture and hippies, LSD got surprisingly, if you consider their political views and their place in society, surprisingly favorable coverage in magazines like Time and Life. And it's worth wondering whether that has something to do with how big fans loses were of LSD. In any case, in 1959, the spring 1959, her marriage was near collapse again. Her health issues had returned. She didn't know whether she wanted the position the post in, in Brazil and she took lsd and she later she wrote a very interesting letter to her psychiatrist later in that year and she basically credited LSD with rebuilding her psyche and giving her the strength to walk away from a job she didn't want. And because otherwise it's a bizarre episode like why did you. By the way, she prepared assiduously. She was ready to go to Brazil. There was a bruising confirmation fight. She was approved by the Senate. I think the vote was 79 to 11. You know, it wasn't unanimous, but it was, it was a healthy victory. She. There's no reason why she couldn't have proceeded to Brazil, but she decided she didn't want the job, and so she credited LSD with giving her the strength to walk away from it.
- [53:23]
Victoria Phillips
Just from. I am fascinated. What were the notes like? In other words, were they.
- [53:29]
Philip Nash
Yeah, I didn't read through all of them. They're basically just. It's sort of a chronicle. Basically. Here's what I'm seeing in front of my eyes right now, right here, describing the images, et cetera, et cetera. Like I said, they were released. I mean, I wasn't going in great length about her experience with relying heavily on that article. And the notes were not. Were not available to me when I was writing initially. So I really can't speak to them in great detail, but I have glanced at them, and I know that they do talk a lot about basically, you know, took the hit of acid. Here's what happened. Here's what happened. Here's what happened. Wow.
- [54:08]
Victoria Phillips
Yeah, Fascinating. If you were going to either develop a syllabus around Clara Boothe Luce or place it in a class on foreign policy or theater history or women, you know, where. Where would you put it and where. How would you use her?
- [54:34]
Philip Nash
Wow, that is. That's not a great question. Because it's a really difficult question. Damn you for asking that. That's a really great question. Because partly it's in the nature of the beast because her life has so many disparate chapters. You could argue that it's. It's basically everything and nothing. In other words, you could argue that it doesn't belong in any particular course. I think if you were teaching a course on American women in the 20th century, it might fit best there, because you do. Throughout the book, I think you do get a sense of what it was like to be a woman in the professions. And how do you get ahead in life when you're an ambitious woman and very few professional opportunities are open to women? You know, in. In one sense, like, for example, 1. In one sense, it wasn't such a bad thing that she didn't get a college degree because women with college degrees and they did exist, typically didn't have professional outlets for them, certainly not circa 1920, when she would have gone to college. And she always. She. She blamed her mother for this, in retrospect, but her mother basically had finally sort of, in a way, gotten out of poverty by my hanging out with and ultimately marrying wealthy men. And she insisted that her daughter do that, too. And so at age 20, she married George Brokaw, who was a very wealthy New Yorker and a horrible alcoholic. And she was miserable. Even though she certainly enjoyed the wealth and the access and the entree to New York high society, she certainly appreciated that they had. They had one child, but the marriage only lasted six years. And she later said, I'm quoting, mother poisoned my life. But if you had a daughter, if you were ambitious for your daughter and your daughter herself was ambitious, there weren't many opportunities. If you were, for example, brilliant, with very few exceptions, you couldn't just go get a PhD and get a job teaching at a university. You couldn't do that. Those avenues were not open. And so it is miraculous and an indication of her talent that she becomes managing editor of Vanity Fair before she turns 30. The idea that someone could get that position without a college degree, it's pretty impressive to me. So, in a way, she overcomes a lot of these barriers that women faced in this time period and is constantly. She's constantly battling the sexism, constantly battling the double standards, the put downs, especially in Congress. It's unbelievable, some of the things that, that men would say about her on the floor of the House, by the way, not just in the cloak room, but I quote some of them in the book. That the sexism would make your head spin or maybe wouldn't. But that she was able to put up with this for years and continue to make contributions in all these fields, I think is a testimony to her character for as many flaws as it had.
- [57:50]
Victoria Phillips
I'll tell you one place where I would love to put it is to reframe a foreign policy class about presidents and kind of show her as a precursor to, and maybe even a better, certainly Trump. But Ronald Reagan. You know, I think that, Yeah, I think that would be really, you know, to look at the unusual as the 20th century usual. @ any rate, she seems like such a great character. All right, just to sum up or to finish off, what was the most surprising thing that you found? Where was the unexpected aha moment, either in the archives when you were there and, or, or in your research?
- [58:46]
Philip Nash
Yeah, I don't, I don't think there was any single aha moment. I think what. Well, a couple of things surprised me. One certainly is how complicated she is and meaning. And I mean that in several ways that she's very hard to pin down, that ideologically she's not nearly as orthodox as you might think. I mean, I, I think I, as, I think in some ways, I'm sort of a typical person on the left. And I think I came to her with a common understanding that she's just this fire breathing, super right wing reactionary, you know, across the board, and she's not that at all. I was impressed certainly by her feminism, you know, and it's interesting in the generalizing to a great deal. I think over the course of her life she becomes politically more conservative, but she becomes more feminist at the same time. Like for example, if you look at the content of her plays, like let's take the Women, for example, where the protagonist Mary Haynes, she wins in the end by returning to her cheating husband. And then you fast Forward to around 1970 when she writes. It's a one act play that first appears in Life magazine, then appears under a different name as a standalone play, but in Life magazine it was called The Doll's House, 1970. And in the thrust of that is this woman is trapped in this horribly misogynist marriage. Her husband is almost this sort of ridiculous caricature of the knuckle dragging male chauvinist, and the woman wins by getting out of the marriage. And to me, to me that reflects Loose's, if I can say this, her evolution toward the left when it comes to feminism. And to me, one of the more interesting documents I have at the end of the book is a transcript of her appearance on William F. Buckley's public television show Firing Line. She was a very, very popular guest with him. They were pretty good friends, by the way. And basically in this appearance they're talking about religion and she declares that Jesus Christ was the first feminist, which certainly 1975 is a pretty bold statement. And she backs it up and she runs circles around William F. Buckley and including, you know, she could do this because they were friends, but she puts him down on his own show and it's hilarious to read. And you know, she was, by this point, she's in her 70s, she did not lead the women's movement, certainly she was not active in feminist organizations. But in terms of her writing and her speeches, like I said, she's in good company with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. At the same time, she is staunchly defending Richard Nixon and Watergate, opposing detente, trashing Jimmy Carter and welcoming a renewed Cold War under Ronald Reagan. So, you know, to get back to your other question, one of the reasons why that might be a difficult fit for any particular college course is that that she's, she, she's here I am undermining my own book. She's so heterodox and so complicated. That she's. She'd be hard to. Hard to put in anyone. Anyone pigeonhole. But I would. I would say certainly a course on American women in the 20th century, a course on American politics in the 20th century, and a course on American foreign relations in the 20th century. I think she would complement any of those courses. And partly because even though she's only one person, and I know a lot of people hesitate to sign biographies generally. I know biographers, I'm sure you've run into this. Biographers often have to sort of defend their work. Like, why are you doing that? Almost like it's illegitimate in some circles. She was so involved in so many important things for such a long period. I think in this case, even if you're skeptical of biographies, you should make an exception.
- [62:49]
Victoria Phillips
Excellent. So anything else that I missed, anything you would like to say? How do you want to sum up?
- [62:57]
Philip Nash
I mean, I would. I would urge people to buy the book. It's very, very short. I tried to make it as acceptable. Sorry, as. As accessible as possible. It does. It doesn't require any primary knowledge. She led a fascinating life, you know, and the LSD and the. The poison ceiling. Those are just two little details. There are many, many others. She rubbed shoulders with so many people. She slept with so many different, including very prominent men like Bernard Baruch and Joseph B. Kennedy and Lucian Truscott, and on the Italian front, World War II. So, I mean, her personal life, even though I don't spend a lot of time on it, is fascinating, but her professional life is too. I mean. I mean, how many. How many hit Broadway playwrights end up as an ambassador to a major US Ally? It doesn't happen very often. How many. How many managing editors, Vanity Fair, end up in Congress? You know, by the way, the first woman to represent Connecticut in Congress. So she led a fascinating life, even though, like I said, she's. She's sort of a wide character rather than a deep character. I think she still deserves our. Our attention.
- [64:08]
Victoria Phillips
Well, thank you so much. I highly recommend the book.
- [64:12]
Philip Nash
I appreciate that.
- [64:13]
Victoria Phillips
Buy it.
- [64:15]
Philip Nash
Thanks so much. By the way, it's called. It's called Claire Booth Luce, American Renaissance Woman, which to me was, to me was the obvious title.
- [64:23]
Victoria Phillips
Thank.
- [64:35]
Philip Nash
You.