Assignment: Rome

President Eisenhower last week announced that he will nominate Connecticut's former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce as U.S. Ambassador to Italy. She will be the first woman ever appointed to a top U.S. Embassy, and the first woman ambassador ever appointed to Rome from any nation.

The White House indicated that Mrs. Luce will take over her new job in late spring--after the Italian elections. This will permit the present U.S. Ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, to carry through the close watch which he has already begun on the critical Italian election campaign, the date of which has not yet been set.

On the Front. Clare Luce, 49, is the wife of Henry R. Luce, editor-in-chief of TIME, LIFE & FORTUNE. To enter politics in 1942, as a Republican candidate for Congress from Connecticut's Fourth District, she switched from a career as a successful author and playwright (The Women, Kiss the Boys Goodbye, Margin for Error). In her first campaign she showed a sureness of political touch and a flair for the dramatic political phrase which delighted her audiences, and got her elected. When she arrived in Washington as a freshman Congresswoman, she was appointed to the important House Military Affairs Committee. During the term she kept up a sharp, running attack on the New Deal, voted a prolabor, pro-civil-rights record, and went home in 1944 to win reelection.

Clare Luce spent Christmas 1944 along the "forgotten front" in Italy, came back to Washington to campaign for increased aid for war-ravaged Italian civilians and for a rotation plan for the U.S. Army doughfoot. As the war neared its end, she was one of the first to give clear public warning of the struggle that lay ahead.

In October 1944, when the U.S. wanted to believe that peace could be permanently achieved by the mere setting up of a United Nations organization, Congresswoman Luce gave the problem a fresh appraisal. For the New York Herald Tribune Forum she traced the history--and weak points--of Utopian peace plans, from a Chinese try in 546 B.C. up to the League of Nations. "Those who refuse to remember the past are condemned to repeat it," said she. In May 1945, long before the U.S. got around to a foreign policy of "containing" Communism, she warned: "If we want to stay out of war with Communism we must not appease Communism. And we dare not appease Communism." In the days when the Communists could have been stopped in China, she dueled bitterly, on & off the floor of the House, with the New Dealers who defended a U.S. policy favorable to Communist China.

Importance of Legislation. In July 1946 she rose in the House to argue in favor of the bill establishing the Atomic Energy Commission (which provided for civilian control of the atom). Her remarks were free of the hysteria which then (as now) beclouded the atomic-energy problem.

"Let us get this quite straight in our minds," she said. "It is not what men discover that changes the structure of society. It is how men legislate upon those discoveries which change the structure of society . . . The discovery of nuclear fission has not changed, and will not solve, one underlying problem of the world today . . . Energy and matter, which we now know to be one, are both amoral. Man only is moral or immoral. We have only to reflect that if all the large nations of the world were led today by moral men, instead of immoral ones, [development of] atomic energy . . . would not require such totalitarian legislation as this."

Clare Luce decided not to run for re-election to Congress in 1946, primarily because she did not want her imminent conversion to Roman Catholicism to be interpreted as a political act in heavily Catholic Connecticut. "I have turned eagerly back to my typewriter and books," she wrote. In 1949 she wrote the original story for the movie Come to the Stable. Last year she edited a series of essays by contemporary U.S. & British authors, Saints for Now (TIME, Sept. 29).

Symbol of Determination. The prospects of an Eisenhower campaign brought her back into politics last spring. Weeks before the G.O.P. Convention, she began stumping for Eisenhower's nomination because he "is the one living symbol of U.S. determination to defend itself and Western civilization against the political and military forces of Communism." (She failed in an effort to get a Republican nomination in Connecticut for U.S. Senator.) In all, she delivered 47 radio and TV speeches during the Eisenhower campaign. The most effective: a coast-to-coast telecast on the Administration's record on Communism in Government. Into her speech she cut newsreel clips and phonograph records of testimony from Whittaker Chambers, Communist Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and others.

Last month the Gallup poll reported that she ranked fourth in U.S. favor as the world's "most admired woman." (Front runners: Eleanor Roosevelt, Queen Elizabeth II, Mamie Eisenhower.) Like any woman in politics, Clare Luce has frequently presented the woman's viewpoint on public questions. But her main contribution to public discussion has been free of feminist special pleading. Deeply read in philosophy, she has brought a clear, practical mind and a gift for forceful expression to the central problems of world political strategy.

"In Upper Reaches." News of her appointment brought statements of approval from her associates in Congress, and from the Italian press. From another woman, New York Times Columnist Anne O'Hare McCormick, came a careful appraisal of the job Clare Luce has to face.

"Today," wrote Columnist McCormick, "Italy is more important than it has ever been--a crucial spot in the cold war, a testing place of American policy, a center of Mediterranean defense and of Mediterranean problems, including the thorny issue of Trieste.

"Mrs. Luce will have to overcome many prejudices and deal with very difficult problems. But she goes fortified by ten years' experience in American politics, an unusual knowledge of Italy, acquired during the war and since, and a large fund of shrewd ability leavened by charm. Moreover, she has the confidence of the Administration, a matter of great interest to the Italians, and as a pioneer in the upper reaches of diplomacy she is likely to rise to one of the biggest challenges ever offered to a woman."

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