Clare
Boothe Luce, the daughter of a successful businessman, was born in
New York City on 10th April, 1903. Clare
was privately educated 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 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. Later she became managing editor of Vanity
Fair.
In November,
1935, Clare married Henry Luce. He was the
owner of Time
and the business magazine Fortune.
The following year he began publishing the picture magazine, Life.
Over
the next few years Clare Luce was a successful playwright. This included
The Women (1936), Kiss
the Boys Goodbye (1938),
and Margin for Error (1939). 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.
In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower
appointed her ambassador to Italy; the first American woman ambassador
to a major country, she held the post until resigning in 1957. Two
years later Eisenhower appointed her 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 and
Henry Luce were strong opponents of Fidel
Castro and
his revolutionary government in Cuba.
This included the funding of Alpha
66. In
1962 and 1963 Alpha 66 launched several raids on Cuba. This included
attacks on port installations and foreign shipping.
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 her husband retired to their
home in Phoenix, Arizona.
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.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Forum Debate: Life Magazine and the Assassination of JFK
Forum Debate on Watergate
(1) 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.
(2) 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.
(3) 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.
(4) Gaeton Fonzi, interviewed on 8th October, 1994.
Veciana was introduced by name to Phillips twice, once in the banquet hall and once in the hallway. Phillips even asked that it be repeated and then, when Veciana asked him, "Don't you remember my name?" Phillips responded, "No." As Veciana himself later point
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