The Compromised Mission

Not since the late Senator Joe McCarthy's virulent attack on Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker* had the nation witnessed such a bitter and protracted personal assault by a member of Congress. Last week, in the memorable clash of the Senator v. the Ambassador, a presidential mission was compromised, and from the floor of the Senate reckless charges were cast against the integrity of U.S. diplomatic policy. Chief figures in the Page One drama:

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE, 56, playwright (The Women, Margin for Error), wife of Editor in Chief Henry R. Luce of TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE, sometime G.O.P. Congresswoman from Connecticut (1943-47) and Ambassador to Italy (1953-57), who was nominated by President Eisenhower in late February to be Ambassador to Brazil.

WAYNE LYMAN MORSE, 58, third-term Senator from Oregon, onetime law professor, longtime political migrant who has been in turn a Progressive, Republican (until late '52), Independent and Democrat; credited with one of the Senate's keenest forensic minds; famed on Capitol Hill for windiness (he once orated nonstop for 22 hr. 26 min.), unpredictability, ferocity in debate, and a capacity for nursing grudges.

"Very Intemperate." When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took up Clare Luce's nomination in mid-April, it seemed likely that confirmation would be a simple formality; she had been confirmed unanimously by the Senate for her mission to Rome in 1953, and had come home with the praise of the Italians, of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and many a Democratic Senator. This time both the President and Secretary Dulles had given her warm endorsement, and Brazil's government and press had welcomed her appointment to Rio with notable enthusiasm.

But from the start the open hearing was unexpectedly rough. Out of the blue, Arkansas' Democrat William Fulbright, committee chairman, began carping about the witness' G.O.P. partisanship in old political speeches. Then Wayne Morse took over. He lashed at Mrs. Luce's statement, voiced during the 1944 presidential campaign, that Franklin Roosevelt was "the only American President who ever lied us into a war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it." Witness Luce conceded to Morse that "the language was very intemperate, and would not have been used by me if I had the experience which I now have." Unmollified, Morse badgered her about her statement in the 1948 political campaign that Harry Truman was "handpicked by big-city bosses."

Switching to Italy, Morse accused the witness of having used her influence as U.S. ambassador to try to get the Italian government to change its oil policy and let private capital into oil exploration and development. Said Mrs. Luce: "I was the instrument of my country's policy. I had no private policy of my own, and certainly I had no oil policy of my own ... I tried, as my predecessor had tried ... to persuade the Italians that they would be far better off if they would develop their own subsoil riches, and that this could be most quickly done, since they did not have the capital, with capital from abroad."

When the committee got around to voting on whether to okay Nominee Luce, the tally was 16 to 1 in favor. Wayne Morse's was the only nay.

Torrent of Abuse. With such a lopsided committee endorsement. Senate confirmation seemed likely to be routine. Then, day before the confirmation vote, Wayne Morse took the Senate floor, orated for 32 hours--through some 20,000 words--against Clare Luce. Commented Connecticut's Republican Senator Prescott Bush when it was over: "I doubt there has ever been a more severe and bitter attack upon an individual who has been nominated by a President for a high post in the service of this Government." Samples of the Morse attack:

P: "Is she honest? Is she reliable? I am satisfied that Mrs. Luce does not meet either criterion."

P:"There is nothing in her record to indicate to me that Mrs. Luce is qualified to be a diplomat . . . The role for which I believe she is well qualified is that of political hatchetman; she does very well at making inflammatory and demagogic political speeches; she and her husband contribute heavily to the Republican coffers. And for this she is being rewarded with an ambassadorship."

Morse accused her of "instability" and of many other things, culminating in "sinister subversion." Her nomination was a "horrendous mistake," and to send her to Rio would be "utter folly." He charged her with "extreme partisanship" as Ambassador to Italy. He attacked her "relationship to TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE," declaimed about the "intertwining of Luce policy and Eisenhower policy in conducting the vital affairs of the U.S." Morse even suggested that a TIME story quoting an anonymous U.S. official's rueful jest about dividing up Bolivia--a quote in TIME'S Latin American edition that was used as provocation for riots in Bolivia (TIME, March 16)--was a sinister attempt to cater to Brazilian designs on Bolivian territory.

But most of Morse's torrent of abuse dealt with the same excerpts from Mrs. Luce's old political speeches (the latest from 1952) that he had attacked earlier at the committee hearing, especially her "lied us into war" remark about Franklin D. Roosevelt. Morse's case against that one sentence, spoken 15 years ago, sprawled over 17 small-print three-column pages in the Congressional Record. He called the remark "subversive," "evil," "sinister," "untruthful," "hysterical" and "unpatriotic."

Comic Relief. The day after Morse's speech, Illinois' Minority Leader Everett Dirksen provided some unintentional comic relief. Arguing that it was unsporting to hold Mrs. Luce's old political speeches against her, Orator Dirksen cried: "Why thrash old hay or beat an old bag of bones?" As the galleries guffawed, Minnesota's Democrat Hubert Humphrey played for laughs. "I must rise to the defense of the lady," he said.

Dirksen. I am referring to the old bag of political bones, these old canards.

Humphrey. I object! [Laughter.]

The comedy done, the Senate finally--after a debate that took up some 65,000 words in the Congressional Record--got around to confirming Clare Luce as Ambassador to Brazil. The vote: a lopsided 79 (33 Republicans, 46 Democrats) to 11 (all Democrats*).

"Vendetta Politics." That same day, sensing the results that would flow from Morse's attacks on his wife, Henry R. Luce issued a statement. "For 25 years in the course of her public life," said he, "my wife has taken not only the criticisms provoked by her own views and actions but also many punches which were really intended for me or for the publications of which I am editor in chief. The attack of Senator Wayne Morse is perhaps the most vitriolic example of this." Mrs. Luce, he recalled, had offered to resign after TIME became a factor in the "Bolivian incident." Christian Herter, then Acting Secretary of State, refused the offer. "Almost unanimously the press of Brazil asserted that even if a few U.S. Senators were unable to do so, the Brazilian people were quite capable of distinguishing between Bolivia and Brazil, and between Clare Boothe Luce and Mr. Luce."

Mrs. Luce's mission to Brazil, said her husband, "has now been profoundly compromised." There is a question "whether she can now hope to accomplish the delicate mission assigned to her by the President in a climate of uneasiness which the smears and suspicions have created . . . Senator Wayne Morse and others have devoted themselves to undermining Mrs. Luce's usefulness. Senator Morse happens to be the chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee, which has cognizance of inter-American affairs and Brazil.

"As an ambassador, she will not be able to defend herself from vendetta politics at home which makes common cause with anti-Americanism in South America. Therefore, I have asked my wife to offer her resignation."

Meanwhile, the news wires were already humming with Clare Luce's own terse comeback at Wayne Morse. "I am grateful for the overwhelming vote of confirmation in the Senate," she stated. "We must now wait until the dirt settles. My difficulties, of course, go some years back and began when Senator Wayne Morse was kicked in the head by a horse."*

"This Slanderer." Compared to Morse's 20,000-word tirade, Clare Luce's 22-word wisecrack was a pebble slingshot against a ton of brickbats. But it stung Wayne Morse. As soon as the Senate wound up its close REA vote (see The Congress), Morse stood up. Not so soon, said Morse, "did I expect that those of us who voted against the nomination of Clare Boothe Luce would be proved so right." He read off her horse-kick comment, argued that it showed he was right all along about the "emotional instability on the part of this slanderer." Three Democratic Senators who had voted for Mrs. Luce--Ohio's Frank Lausche, Texas' Ralph Yarborough, Wyoming's Gale McGee--solemnly announced that if they had known of her comment beforehand, they would have voted against her.

"The belief is," replied Illinois' Dirksen, "that she may have had some provocation--among other things, Wayne has made her out to be a liar and dishonest." Next day Dirksen finished the debate off by revealing how low the Morse attack had fallen. Morse, he said (and Morse later verified it), called Mrs. Luce's physician in New York in an attempt to find out whether she had ever been under psychiatric care. Dirksen, quoting the doctor, said: "She-isn't and wasn't."

"Esso Envoy." At his press conference President Eisenhower called Mrs. Luce's comment "illadvised" but "perfectly human." He saw "no major impairment of her usefulness for the post we intended." In Italy, said he, she "operated very successfully [and] her work ... on the Trieste question I think was brilliant." Since the big blowup with Morse, he had run a private survey in Brazil, "and the answer there is quite clear that she would be welcome." Soon afterward he signed her commission of office. Press Secretary Hagerty announced that she would "shortly" be sworn in. Said ex-President Harry Truman, when a newsman asked him to comment on the affair: "No comment. Enough harm has been done our foreign policy without my butting in."

Clare Luce also knew of the ingrained damage done by Morse's attacks. It was evident in the Brazilian press. Wayne Morse, said Rio's Diario da Noite, "provided our extremists, who are so active, with plentiful arguments to combat her mission in Brazil." The Communist Novos Rumos, quoting Morse as its authority, headlined: CLARE LUCE--ESSO ENVOY

AND AMBASSADOR FOR OIL TRUSTS. And ahead of her, if she went to Rio, stretched the bleak prospect of trying to carry out her mission, now more difficult, with Wayne Morse's hand in diplomatic affairs as chairman of the Subcommittee on Latin American Affairs.

Seeds of Suspicion. Two days after the Senate confirmed her, Clare Luce drafted her resignation. "It is no longer possible for me," she wrote to the President, "to accomplish the mission which you have entrusted to me." In the U.S. Senate, "the climate of good will was poisoned by thousands of words of extraordinarily ugly charges against my person, and of distrust of the mission I was to undertake."

She was aware, Clare Luce went on, that public opinion in both the U.S. and Brazil had discounted the attacks against her. "Yet it would be imprudent of me --and no true service to you--to ignore the fact that the broadcasting of these mean charges has planted the seeds of hostile suspicion. For all through the course of my mission, these seeds could be watered carefully, either by their author, for unknowable motive, or by any political element, with the clear motive of discrediting America by the simple device of disparaging an American ambassador. And so--most easily--there could be denied any chance of attainment of fruitful accords between our two countries." ("Accords," needed to be reached in the near future, include financial arrangements to stem the tide of inflation and other economic problems in Brazil.)

Next morning Clare Luce met with the President at the White House. He argued that she ought to go to Rio despite the attacks on her. But he was impressed with the logic of the arguments in her letter, and finally regretfully accepted her resignation.

Regret in Rio. The news jolted Brazilians. Said the Brazilian Press Association's prestigious President Herbert Moses: "It was distressing. Mrs. Luce has gained greater prestige than ever. We respect her attitude and her reasons for resigning, but we cannot help regretting that she is not coming to Brazil."

In the U.S., newspapers generally agreed that in view of Morse's attacks, Clare Boothe Luce had done the best thing for her country. "In offering her resignation," said the New York Times, "Mrs. Luce has shown a greater degree of good judgment and personal responsibility than was displayed by her chief antagonist in this controversy. The tactics pursued by Senator Morse of Oregon in this whole affair seem to us to have been beneath contempt."

*General Zwicker, commander of Camp Kilmer, N.J. and wartime Battle of the Bulge hero, annoyed McCarthy in early 1954 by okaying an honorable discharge for an Army dentist with Communist ties. McCarthy called him "not fit to wear that uniform," hounded him so unendurably in committee hearings and on the Senate floor that the Army counterattacked in the battle that led to the Senate resolution censuring McCarthy in December 1954. Zwicker is now a major general, commander of the XX Reserve Corps. *The nays, aside from Morse: Alaska's E. L. Bartlett and Ernest Gruening, Colorado's John A. Carroll, Montana's James E. Murray, Nevada's Howard W. Cannon, Ohio's Stephen M. Young, Pennsylvania's Joseph S. Clark, South Carolina's Olin Johnston, West Virginia's Robert C. Byrd and Jennings Randolph. *In August 1951, by a scared mare that Morse was showing at a fair in Orkney Springs, Va.

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