New Face

Connecticut Yankees--G.O.P. variety--last week opened their convention by nominating able, energetic Raymond Earl Baldwin for the Governor's chair he distinguished from 1939 to 1941. This week they closed their sessions with news that made a real splash: for Congress, from the Fourth district, they nominated Playwright Clare Boothe (the vote: 84-to-2), and thus set squarely on the political scene a Congressional candidate like no other the U.S. has seen.

Connecticut citizens of all stripes hailed the news with delight--whether they were for her or ag'in her, this nomination meant the campaign would be one of the most interesting in the U.S. Their reason was simple: the New York Daily News had dubbed Miss Boothe the 3-B candidate (blonde, beautiful, brilliant), and the conventional, the historic standard for Congressional candidates is much more like bald, baggy and bumbling.

They also began to see, as they had watched the pre-convention growth of Miss Boothe's candidacy, why a woman who apparently has everything a peacetime woman might want--including an established, successful career in the tricky business of playwriting--should choose to plunge herself into the unremitting grind of politics, by seeking a job that calls for a great deal of drab, grim and unrewarding work.

The answer to the riddle had begun to appear in the reasons she had earlier given for declining the nomination. She then wrote: "In these puzzling and heart-breaking days a Congressman must go to Washington, not to occupy a sinecure, but to assume a heavy burden of responsibility. . . . I knew that this job was a challenge to stouter hearts and better brains than mine. Nevertheless I felt, in all humility, that in the event I were nominated and elected to Congress, I was more qualified by experience to deal with it than any candidate who has so far presented himself in Fairfield County. I have seen the horrors of total war close at hand on the battlefronts of the world. I have eyewitnessed the tragic mistakes of European politicians which have made these horrors inevitable for their people. . . ."

And, significantly, the nomination came to her because Connecticut Republicans wanted the Fourth District represented by someone who was concerned about national, rather than local, affairs.

The spotlight of national attention was now sharply focused on Clare Boothe, the politico. Thousands had read her book, Europe in the Spring (1940, Alfred A. Knopf), which set the pattern for a flood of I-saw-democracy-dying books; millions had heard her on the radio as the most-in-demand Willkie speaker in the autumn of 1940; thousands had seen her plays, The Women, Kiss the Boys Goodbye, Margin for Error, and millions had seen the movies from the first two.

Thousands had read profiles of her in national magazines, had followed her around the battlefields of the world as a new kind of war correspondent, one who might be a little uncertain as to the exact military nut-&-bolt details of tanks, planes and materiel, but who wrote with feminine sympathy about the men she found in those tanks and planes, from field marshals to grease-monkeys.

Miss Boothe was born on Riverside Drive, lived in Memphis, and in her teens wrote a cycle of poems about Woodrow Wilson; once she ran away from home, and worked for two months making paper flowers for Dennison & Co. in New York; she has seen much of the world (two large exceptions: South America, Russia). She began her career as $20-a-week editorial assistant on the Conde Nast publications, and rose in three years to become managing editor of Vanity Fair. She is married to Henry R. Luce, editor of TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE; she has a daughter, Ann Brokaw, 18, by her first marriage to Socialite George T. Brokaw; she has a cool certainty of poise that tongue-ties men; she likes chocolate milkshakes, and often writes in bed.

Oldtime GOPoliticos did not quite know what to make of this new--and nicer--political face as Convention Keynoter Boothe stood before the microphone, slim and cool in a black silk dress, occasionally gesturing gently with a pair of blue-rimmed harlequin spectacles. (Murmured one: "She can even wear glasses!") As keynoter of the Connecticut convention, she clearly stated her concern with the terrible necessity of making democracy work in the middle of the war-to-end-civilization, and the editors who saw that she had ably stated the general concerns of many citizens reprinted here & there her text in full. Excerpts:

"We know tonight, as we stand here, that the walls of this hall shut out a horrible vision of human suffering. All over the world, with every tick of the clock, hundreds of people are dying. Everywhere, as we talk, men are maiming, mutilating, burning each other and blasting each other into all eternity. Women are being buried with their babies in their arms under the ruins of their bombed homes. Whole peoples grow sunken-eyed, bare-boned, rickety--easy preys to pestilence, after famine. And with every breath we take in, some starved child breathes out its last. . . .

"It is in the face of this awful reality of what is being endured by our American fighters that we are gathered here tonight. . . .

"We Republicans are here tonight for one purpose above all--to pledge our words and our acts as the American people here pledged their fortunes, their careers, their unceasing labor and their lives to victory. That is our pledge to the living.

"I think that we had also better make a pledge to the dead. To those we do not see, but who are also listening. To the spirits of all those killed at Pearl Harbor and after, our pledge is this: They shall not have died in vain. We pledge them total victory, which is not only the military defeat of their enemies but a just and fruitful peace and a better world for their children. The future of their children is the only stake that our American dead have left in their country now."

Miss Boothe drew a bead on the Administration for talking a "tough" war but fighting a "soft" war. She demanded as essentials in toughening up the U.S. war effort: the appointment of a unified military command; a unified economic command; a unified political command.

Her outline for a Republican program to help achieve total victory:

1) Give total support to the President in all his final decisions. ("If our Commander in Chief fails, in the two years ahead, then America fails. And that is the price not even the most hidebound Administration enemy would be willing to pay for 'embarrassing the President.' ")

2) Criticize the Government's policies, on the grounds that there is no conflict between patriotic cooperation and patriotic criticism. ("Only fools or Fascists think so.")

3)"See to it that the two-party system survives" (because political liberty "boils down to a very simple idea: have two big parties").

Said the New York Herald Tribune, No. 1 G.O.P. organ: "In contrast to the obstructionist tactics which featured Republican strategy in Congress before Pearl Harbor, we sense now an encouraging swing of the pendulum in support of the struggle for victory. . . . Today the signs that it has come full circle are too impressive to ignore. One of them is the eloquent and significant speech of Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce. . . . Mrs. Luce . . . is one of several hundreds seeking election or re-election to the House. But no one to date has spoken more clearly for her party."

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