Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,107

This is the grave of Henry and Clare Boothe Luce.

Born in 1898 in Tengchow, China, Henry Luce was the son of missionaries to that nation, which would influence him profoundly through his life. He stayed in China until he was 15. Like many missionary families, he came from some money and so in 1913, they sent him back to the U.S. for the rest of his education, putting him up in a fancy Connecticut boarding school. He had a stutter, which could not have made that transition easier. There was an heiress named Nancy Fowler McCormick who liked to fund the study of missionaries kids, so she became his patron.

Then Luce was onto Yale. He was already interested in journalism and worked on a paper in Springfield, Massachusetts the summer before starting. So that was going to be his life. He did not volunteer for World War I, but joined the ROTC. He spent a year at Oxford after graduating, though failed to get a Rhodes scholarship. Then he went to Chicago to work as a reporter. He and a high school buddy named Briton Hadden, who also went to Yale, had talked about starting their own publication for a long time and in 1922, they plunged into it. This became Time.

Luce and Hadden made Time the most important magazine in the country by the time of World War II. But that wasn’t Luce’s only interest. He was also deeply interested in Republican politics. Being a missionary kid, he wasn’t down with the isolationism many felt in the 1930s and early 40s. In 1935, he married Clare Boothe, divorcing his first wife to do so. She was born in 1903 in New York City. She didn’t grow up with a lot of money and her parents were unmarried. She was a suffragist as a young woman who married the millionaire George Brokaw. He was a drunk and they divorced in 1929. By this time, she was a well-known socialite. She wrote the very popular play The Women in 1936, which George Cukor adapted as a supremely excellent film in 1939. She became managing editor of Vanity Fair.

The Luces became, second only to the Roosevelts, the biggest power couple in the country. They were liberal Republicans, though they became more conservative over the years. Clare moved right after her daughter was killed in an auto accident in the mid-40s and she embraced religion. Henry was all in on Chiang Kai-Shek and became the biggest hack for the Chiang government in the nation. They were totally unable to see what a violent corrupt hack he was and that most Chinese people hated him. But Madame Chiang, who was educated in America and was very charming, manipulated them very effectively. She was effectively the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. during World War II and Luce was happy to republish her propaganda as “news” in Time. Now, they were very effective proponents of American involvement in World War II, her at least as much as him, since he was an awkward weirdo and she one of the most charismatic people of the age. That point actually made their marriage difficult, as he was even awkward around her and jealous of her.

In 1942, Clare decided to run for Congress and won a solid Republican district in Connecticut. By this time, she and FDR hated each other. She accused him of not being man enough to lead the U.S. into the war. They actually agreed on lots of things, including the UN and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, but this was personal. It’s interesting generally to me how little real difference there was between the Luce version of the world and the Roosevelt version of the world, but they sure hated each other. Take Henry Luce’s 1944 editorial in Time, “The American Century.” His vision of an America dominating the world through ideas of democracy and freedom, how different was that than what Roosevelt wanted in his foreign policy and through the United Nations? Not much at all. But the rich hated FDR for what he represented as being a class traitor through allowing unions to exist and things like this and his relative populism more than for his actual policies.

Of course, the Luce hatred of the Democratic Party just grew after Mao won in 1949 and they led the “who betrayed China, oh it was the Dems” line that helped Republicans a lot in the 1950s. Never mind that all the actual China experts knew what was up. Nope, Madame Chiang told us otherwise. Total nonsense. Meanwhile, Clare really became a major foreign policy player of her own in the 1950s. Increasingly right-wing, she fit in very well with Eisenhower’s men. The Eisenhower administration ws far, far less moderate than the popular imagination remembers. Genial old Ike was a good way to cover up just how far right a a lot of these people were. So Clare Booth Luce was named ambassador to Italy in 1953 and was very active in interfering in Italian politics, putting herself extremely close to Pope Pius XII and freaking out about the communists in Italy. She ran covert financing in the country to promote right-wing parties. She was furious that Americans would make a film such as Blackboard Jungle that she thought was communist propaganda that showed America as something other than the paradise it in fact was very much not. So she wanted to boycott the Venice Film Festival in 1955 when it was shown.

In fact, Clare became controversial enough that when Eisenhower then nominated her to be ambassador to Brazil in 1958, Oregon senator Wayne Morse led a one-man crusade against her. She was actually confirmed, but Morse threatened to continue to fight her on everything and so she withdrew before ever going to Brazil.

Also, let’s not forget Clare Boothe Luce’s other contribution–Life was initially her idea. The magazine actually existed and Henry Luce bought it in 1936 because he wanted the name to call his company Time Life. Kinda dumb really. But she had pushed him to publish a popular magazine to go along with serious news magazine Time.

Henry Luce died in 1967 at the age of 68. He had a heart attack. Clare had a ways to go yet. She kept moving right, funding anti-Castro groups in Cuba and eventually becoming a huge backer of Goldwater and Reagan. They had both kept pushing anti-communist leaders after China. They both loved Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam. Like a lot of American leaders, they liked him not only because he was anti-communist because he was a Catholic and thus one of us. This was true of not only the Luces, but Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and the Kennedy brothers. The inability of any of these people to see that a Catholic ruling Vietnam could be a problem shows the enormous blind spots the most powerful people controlling American foreign policy had.

When Reagan gave Clare Boothe Luce the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983, he stated:

A novelist, playwright, politician, diplomat, and advisor to Presidents, Clare Boothe Luce has served and enriched her country in many fields. Her brilliance of mind, gracious warmth and great fortitude have propelled her to exceptional heights of accomplishment. As a Congresswoman, Ambassador, and Member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Clare Boothe Luce has been a persistent and effective advocate of freedom, both at home and abroad. She has earned the respect of people from all over the world, and the love of her fellow Americans.

Sure, if you ignore all the horribleness.

Clare Boothe Luce died in 1987, of brain cancer. She was 84 years old.

Henry and Clare Boothe Luce are buried in Luce Family Cemetery, Moncks Corner, South Carolina. This is a huge property–in fact, it was originally the plantation of American Revolution figure Henry Laurens–that they eventually gave to the Catholic Church. It’s now a Trappist monastery. Sadly not the beer brewing Trappists, as it turns out.

If you would like this series to visit other American magazine publishers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Raoul Fleischmann is in The Bronx and Clay Felker is in Sag Harbor, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.