v Primary Sources v

Ann (Clare) Boothe, the daughter of William Franklin Boothe, a patent-medicine salesman, and Anna Clara Schneider, a dancer, was born in New York City on 10th April, 1903. Her unmarried parents separated nine years later. Her mother later married Albert E. Austin.

Clare was privately educated in Garden City and graduated from Miss Mason's School in Tarrytown in 1919. Later she briefly attended Clare Tree Major's School of Theatre.

Clare married George Brokaw, the heir to a New York City clothing fortune, the on 10th August, 1923. The following year Clare gave birth to a daughter Ann. Brokaw was an abusive alcoholic and the marriage ended in divorce in 1929. The following year she joined the staff of the fashion magazine Vogue, as an editorial assistant. In 1933 she became managing editor of Vanity Fair. The following year she resigned from the magazine in order to concentrate on her career as a playwright.

Clare began an affair with Henry Luce, the owner of Time Magazine and the business magazine Fortune. He divorced his wife, Lila Ross Hotz, in September, 1935. According to Robert E. Herzstein, the author of Henry R.Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (1994): "Lila was devastated when Luce confronted her with his intention to divorce her. But they maintained a closeness and were in constant contact, often discussing their children's education and careers, among other things.''

In November, 1935, Henry married Clare. The followed year he began publishing the picture magazine, Life. Over the next few years Clare was a successful playwright. This included The Women (1936), Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), and Margin for Error (1939).

In 1936 Laird Goldsborough, the foreign editor of Time Magazine, attempted to persuade Luce to take sides in the conflict in Spain. George Teeple Eggleston, who worked for the company at the time, has claimed that it was Goldsborough who persuaded Luce to support General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. According to Eggleston: "Time's conservative foreign news editor, Laird Goldsborough, promptly slanted all news stories in his department in favor of General Franco's rebel insurgents."

This approach was criticised by Archibald MacLeish, who worked on Fortune, another magazine owned by Luce, who "promptly bombarded Luce memos denouncing Franco's coalition of landowners, the Church, and the army". Goldsborough responded by arguing: "On the side of Franco are men of property, men of God, and men of the sword. What positions do you suppose these sorts of men occupy in the minds of 700,000 readers of Time?... They resent communists, anarchists, and political gangsters - those so-called Spanish Republicans."

Eggleston points out that Clare did not agree with her husband on this issue and supported the Republicans during the war: "Clare was violently anti-Franco and promptly contributed a thousand dollars to the pro-Communist Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was gathering volunteers in New York City to fight against Franco in Spain."

During the early days of the Second World War she reported for Life on events in Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, England and China. This included interviews with General Harold R.L.G. Alexander, Chiang Kai-Shek and General Joseph Stilwell. A book of these articles, Europe in the Spring, was published in 1940.

A member of the Republican Party Clare Luce was elected to Congress in 1942 and represented Connecticut for the next four years. In her maiden speech she launched a savage attack on the internationalism of Vice President Henry A. Wallace and as a result received a warm response from the isolationists.

On 11th January, 1944, Clare's daughter Ann, a nineteen-year-old student at Stanford University, was killed in a car accident. Devastated by the loss of her only child that she suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1946, Clare was convertion to Roman Catholicism. She retired from Congress and returned to writing. During this period Clare Luce developed extreme right wing views and became well known for her outspoken opposition to communism and her support for free enterprise.

Her husband, Henry Luce, shared these views. According to David Halberstam: "Luce's politics hardened in the postwar years and Time had become increasingly Republican in its tone. He had been stunned by Truman's defeat of Dewey in 1948. Then in the fall of 1949 China had fallen, the Democratic administration had failed to save Chiang, and that was too much; Truman, and even more Acheson, would have to pay the price. Time was now committed and politicized, an almost totally partisan instrument. The smell of blood was in the air. There was a hunger now in Luce to put a Republican back in power. It was as if Luce, between elections, stood as the leader of the opposition, a kingmaker who had failed to produce a king. The fall of China and the rise of a post-war anti-Communist mood had produced the essential issue to use against the Democrats: softness on Communism."

David Halberstam has pointed out in The Powers That Be (1979): "Luce's politics hardened in the postwar years and Time had become increasingly Republican in its tone. He had been stunned by Truman's defeat of Dewey in 1948. Then in the fall of 1949 China had fallen, the Democratic administration had failed to save Chiang, and that was too much; Truman, and even more Acheson, would have to pay the price. Time was now committed and politicized, an almost totally partisan instrument. The smell of blood was in the air. There was a hunger now in Luce to put a Republican back in power. It was as if Luce, between elections, stood as the leader of the opposition, a kingmaker who had failed to produce a king. The fall of China and the rise of a post-war anti-Communist mood had produced the essential issue to use against the Democrats: softness on Communism."

Henry Luce used his media empire to get Dwight D. Eisenhower elected as president. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed her ambassador to Italy; the first American woman ambassador to a major country. Claudio Accogli, a Italian historian, argues that luce was heavily involved in covert anti-communist activities with local cia personnel. Larry Hancock adds: "With no-holds barred political activism and heavy spending (including the support of the SIFAR/Italian Army Secret Service), Luce and the CIA managed to block the probable takeover of the center-left governments, an alliance between Christian Democrats (DC) and the Socialist Democratic Party (PSI)."

In 1959 Eisenhower appointed Luce ambassador to Brazil. The opposition to her appointment in Congress was led by Wayne Morse of Oregon. Clare commented Morse's actions were the result of him being "kicked in the head by a horse." This remark proved so controversial that Clare resigned the ambassadorship a few days later.

Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Luce were strong opponents of Fidel Castro and his revolutionary government in Cuba. They joined with Hal Hendrix, Paul Bethel, William Pawley, Virginia Prewett, Dickey Chapelle, Edward Teller, Arleigh Burke, Leo Cherne, Ernest Cuneo, Sidney Hook, Hans Morgenthau and Frank Tannenbaum to form the Citizens Committee to Free Cuba (CCFC). On 25th March, 1963, the CCFC issued a statement: "The Committee is nonpartisan. It believes that Cuba is an issue that transcends party differences, and that its solution requires the kind of national unity we have always manifested at moments of great crisis. This belief is reflected in the broad and representative membership of the Committee."

The Luce family also funded Alpha 66. In 1962 Alpha 66 launched several raids on Cuba. This included attacks on port installations and foreign shipping. The authors of Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of JFK (1981) argues that Clare Boothe Luce paid for one of the boats used in these raids: "The anti-communist blonde took a maternal interest in the three-man crew she adopted... She brought them to New York three times to mother them."

Luce later told Gaeton Fonzi that the attacks had been organized by her friend, William Pawley: "Luce said that Pawley had gotten the idea of putting together a fleet of speedboats-sea-going Flying Tigers as it were-which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on intelligence gathering missions. He asked her to sponsor one of these boats and she agreed." John Newman argues in his book, Oswald and the CIA (1995) that Pawley was working for the CIA in Miami. He argues that he was involved with Haroldson L. Hunt and quotes James P. Hosty as saying: "H. L. Hunt was backing Pawley's people, and they were also getting support from Henry Luce."

William E. Kelly, who has investigated the work of Luce, has argued: "Clare Booth Luce wrote a weekly column and an occasional photo feature for Life. The magazine ran articles on the impending invasion of Cuba before the Bay of Pigs, and in one column, a week before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Clare Booth Luce chastised the President for ignoring the evidence of offensive missiles in Cuba.... She also apparently saw the U2 photos leaked by the Air Force liaison to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, before they were revealed to the president. After the Cuban Missile crisis was successfully resolved, Luce began writing stories about Mongoose, the CIA’s covert operations against Castro, which you could have read all about in Life, as they ran photos and stories about Operation Red Cross (aka the Bayo/Pawley Mission), and other anti-Castro missions."

Luce's media empire was used against John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy was assassinated, Luce's Life Magazine purchased the Zapruder Film. Soon after the assassination they also successfully negotiated with Marina Oswald the exclusive rights to her story. This story never appeared in print. Luce published individual frames of Zapruder's film but did not allow the film to be screened in its entirety.

Clare remained active in right-wing politics and in 1964, campaigned for Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican candidate for president. Later that year Clare and Henry Luce retired to their home in Phoenix. He died there on on 28th February, 1967.

In 1975 Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, began investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two years later the House Select Committee on Assassinations was established. Soon afterwards Schweiker was visited by Vera Glaser, a syndicated Washington columnist. Glaser told him she had just interviewed Luce and that he had given her some information relating to the assassination. According to Gaeton Fonzi, who worked for Schweiker: "Schweiker immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed the story she had told Glaser."

In his book, The Last Investigation (1993), Fonzi points out that during the campaign against Fidel Castro in 1963 the captain of one of the boats they were using, was approached by Lee Harvey Oswald who offered his services as a potential Castro assassin. "He said his group didn't believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist, and they eventually penetrated his cell and tape-recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone". Fernandez also told Luce that Oswald then suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas.

In 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed Clare to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. With that, she moved from Honolulu to an apartment in the Watergate complex in Washington. She served on the board until 1983, the year Reagan awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Clare Boothe Luce died of a brain tumor on 9th October, 1987, and was buried at Mepkin Abbey, in South Carolina. A large sum of money was used to establish the Clare Boothe Luce Program. It has been claimed that the organization has given grants of more than $120 million to support over 1,550 women studying science, mathematics and engineering.

The Clare Boothe Luce Award, established in 1991 by the Heritage Foundation, for distinguished contributions to the conservative movement. Winners have included Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, William F. Buckley, Shelby Cullom Davis, Kathryn Wasserman Davis, Richard B. Cheney, Milton Friedman, James L. Buckley and Richard DeVos.

^ Main Article ^

(1) Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War (2011)

The most visible, and unlikeliest, incarnation of spiritual inoculation was Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut. A playwright, journalist, and onetime sex symbol for New York's literati, she had increased her influence substantially after marrying publishing mogul Henry R. Luce in 1935. Like many writers and intellectuals in the 1930s, she shunned organized religion and flirted with Communism only to reject Marx as the Red Decade waned. In 1942 a local political strategist convinced Luce to run for a Connecticut congressional seat. She won handily as a Republican and built her reputation on routine and sometimes entertaining assaults on Democratic foreign policy.

Her immunization and subsequent crusade against Communism did not begin with international observations or the forceful warnings of J. Edgar Hoover. It flowed instead from personal tragedy. In January 1944, her daughter, Ann, died in a car accident during her senior year at Stanford University. At the time Luce was in San Francisco visiting Ann, and in her initial grief she spontaneously ran to a nearby Catholic church. Kneeling alone and spiritually broken, she began a two-year journey toward conversion, aided by Fulton Sheen. As he had done with Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley, and other wayward souls, Sheen shepherded Luce away from the pitfalls of secularism and Communism into the welcoming arms of Catholicism. Luce had America's foremost anti-Communist teacher, but Sheen quickly realized the potential of his pupil. "She intuits," he wrote. "She sees things all at once." In February 1946, Luce was confirmed at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Following her conversion Luce decided not to seek reelection. Instead, she spent much of her final year in Congress advocating a religious solution to Communism. Separating genuine calls for sacralization from those born of political expediency was difficult in the Cold War, but few could doubt Luce's earnestness. Her rhetoric smoldered with zealous intensity. Following a long line of Catholic argument, she called Communism "the ultimate perfected religion of materialism." Widening her critique beyond card-carrying members of the Communist Party, she defined materialists as people who believed the "common man lives by bread alone." The New Deal had exalted the material over the spiritual. It had weakened America, Luce joked, by convincing men and women that "all will be good and happy when all have two cars in every garage, two chickens in every pot, and two pairs of nylons on every chicken." A citizenry of full bellies and empty souls was already halfway down the path to Communist conversion.

She continued the fight after leaving Congress in magazine articles and convention speeches. In a contest with Communism, Truman acknowledged, religion was part of the solution, but for Luce a Christian revival was the sine qua non of any victory. In her worldview faith was a constant - a requisite need for belief in something beyond reason that all humans shared. Against a burning faith, whether false or true, lukewarm opinions had little chance. "The yawning agnostics," she warned, "the sneering finger-drumming atheists, the drooling, sentimental, misty-eyed humanitarians... will not save us from the fiery sons of Marx." Only men and women who burned with an intense faith could withstand the challenge of Communism.

(2) William E. Kelly, Journalists and JFK: Real Dizinfo Agents At Dealey Plaza (May 2011)

With the new Democratic administration, Luce brought aboard a new publisher, C. D. (Charles Douglas) Jackson, an OSS hand and President Eisenhower’s personal administrative assistant on psychological warfare and Cold War strategy.

While Jackson would remain in the background, devising strategy, Clare Booth Luce wrote a weekly column and an occasional photo feature for Life. The magazine ran articles on the impending invasion of Cuba before the Bay of Pigs, and in one column, a week before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Clare Booth Luce chastised the President for ignoring the evidence of offensive missiles in Cuba. She says she had been told this by "her boys," who ran commando missions in and out of Cuba. But she also apparently saw the U2 photos leaked by the Air Force liaison to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, before they were revealed to the president. The NPIC U2 photos of missiles in Cuba were also shown to Sen. Keating (R. NY) by Col. Philip J. Corso, who later bragged about leaking it in his book The Day After Roswell.

After the Cuban Missile crisis was successfully resolved, Luce began writing stories about Mongoose, the CIA’s covert operations against Castro, which you could have read all about in Life, as they ran photos and stories about Operation Red Cross (aka the Bayo/Pawley Mission), and other anti-Castro missions. Clare was particularly proud of “her boys,” the team of anti-Castro commandos who ran maritime missions into Cuba in their speed boat, and she financially backed, though they were also supported by the CIA. They were based out of the CIA’s JMWAVE base in Florida, affiliated with the DRE and led by JulioFernandez.

On the night of the assassination, Clare Booth Luce says she was awakened from sleep by a phone call by Fernandez. He claimed to have exclusive knowledge of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, including recordings of him, and other records that appeared to substantiate his pro-Castro leanings i.e. the original Phase One cover-story., Castro did it. Luce told him to call the FBI. But he didn’t, or at least there is no record of him having done so.

(3) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993)

One of the first leads Schweiker asked me to check came from a source he considered impeccable: Clare Boothe Luce. One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Clare Boothe Luce was the last person in the world Schweiker would have suspected of leading him on a wild goose chase.

Yet the chase began almost immediately. Right after Schweiker announced the formation of his Kennedy assassination Subcommittee, he was visited by Vera Glaser, a syndicated Washington columnist. Glaser told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce and that Luce had given her some information relating to the assassination. Schweiker immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed the story she had told Glaser.

Luce said that some time after the Bay of Pigs she received a call from her "great friend" William Pawley, who lived in Miami. A man of immense wealth-he had made his millions in oil-during World War II Pawley had gained fame setting up the Flying Tigers with General Claire Chennault. Pawley had also owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana's bus, trolley and gas systems and he was close to both pre-Castro Cuban rulers, President Carlos Prio and General Fulgencio Batista. (Pawley was one of the dispossessed American investors in Cuba who early tried to convince Eisenhower that Castro was a Communist and urged him to arm the exiles in Miami.)

Luce said that Pawley had gotten the idea of putting together a fleet of speedboats-sea-going "Flying Tigers" as it were-which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on "intelligence gathering" missions. He asked her to sponsor one of these boats and she agreed. As a result of her sponsorship, Luce got to know the three-man crew of the boat "fairly well," as she said. She called them "my boys" and said they visited her a few times in her New York townhouse. It was one of these boat crews, Luce said, that originally brought back the news of Russian missiles in Cuba. Because Kennedy didn't react to it, she said she helped feed it to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public. She then wrote an article for Life magazine predicting the missile crisis. "Well, then came the nuclear showdown and the President made his deal with Khrushchev and I never saw my young Cubans again," she said. The boat operations were stopped, she said, shortly afterwards when Pawley was notified that the U.S. was invoking the Neutrality Act and would prevent any further exile missions into Cuba.

Luce said she hadn't thought about her boat crew until the day that President Kennedy was killed. That evening she received a telephone call from one of the crew members. She told Schweiker his name was "something like" Julio Fernandez, and he said he was calling her from New Orleans. Julio Fernandez told her that he and the other crew members had been forced out of Miami after the Cuban missile crisis and that they had started a "Free Cuba" cell in New Orleans. Luce said that Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached his group and offered his services as a potential Castro assassin. He said his group didn't believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist, and they eventually penetrated his "cell" and tape-recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone because he was "the greatest shot in the world with a telescopic lens." Fernandez said that Oswald then suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas. According to Luce, Fernandez also told her that his group had photographs of Oswald and copies of handbills Oswald had been distributing on the streets of New Orleans. Fernandez asked Luce what he should do with this information and material.

(4) John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (1986)

The nature of Arbenz's government, however, meant that Operation Success launched both the CIA and the United States on a new path. Mussadegh in Iran was left-wing and had indulged in talks with Russian diplomats about possible alliances and treaties. Arbenz, on the other hand, had simply been trying to reform his country and had not sought foreign help in this. Thus by overthrowing him, America was in effect making a new decision in the cold war. No longer would the Monroe Doctrine, which was directed against foreign imperial ambitions in the Americas from across the Atlantic or the Pacific, suffice. Now internal subversion communism from within - was an additional cause for direct action. What was not said, but what was already clear after the events in East Germany the previous year, was that the exercise of American power, even clandestinely through the CIA, would not be undertaken where Soviet power was already established. In addition, regardless of the principles being professed, when direct action was taken (whether clandestine or not), the interests of American business would be a consideration: if the flag was to follow, it would quite definitely follow trade.

The whole arrangement of American power in the world from the nineteenth century was based on commercial concerns and methods of operation his had given America a material empire through the ownership of foreign transport systems, oil fields, estancias, stocks, and shares. It had also given America resources and experience (concentrated in private hands) with the world outside the Americas, used effectively by the OSS during World War II American government, however, had stayed in America, lending its influence to business but never trying to overthrow other governments for commercial purposes. After World War II, American governments were more willing to use their influence and strength all over the world for the first time and to see an ideological implication in the "persecution" of U.S. business interests.

(5) Lisa Pease, Probe Magazine (March-April, 1996)

During the Church committee hearings, Senator Richard Schweiker's independent investigator Gaeton Fonzi stumbled onto a vital lead in the Kennedy assassination. An anti-Castro Cuban exile leader named Antonio Veciana was bitter about what he felt had been a government setup leading to his recent imprisonment, and he wanted to talk. Fonzi asked him about his activities, and without any prompting from Fonzi, Veciana volunteered the fact that his CIA handler, known to him only as "Maurice Bishop," had been with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas not long before the assassination of Kennedy. Veciana gave a description of Bishop to a police artist, who drew a sketch. One notable characteristic Veciana mentioned were the dark patches on the skin under the eyes. When Senator Schweiker first saw the picture, he thought it strongly resembled the CIA's former Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division-one of the highest positions in the Agency - and the head of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO): David Atlee Phillips.