"This Fragile Blonde"

When Clare Boothe Luce stepped off the Italian liner Andrea Doria in April, 1953 to become U.S. ambassador to Italy, she walked into a nation in crisis. The Italian national elections were just coming up. Communists and monarchists were closing in from left and right on the teetering Christian Democratic government of Premier Alcide de Gasperi. The Communist daily L'Unita, eager to slander the U.S., hooted at her as a "comicopera ambassador." A rightist magazine hailed her arrival with a full-page cartoon of an American flag trimmed with lace. Last week when Clare Luce, 53, resigned as ambassador, it was perhaps the most meaningful tribute to her work that L'Unita, now representing a splintered, vastly weakened Communist Party, confined itself to a one-sentence notice without editorial comment. And the monarchist-fascist press, spokesman for a disappearing force in Italian politics, said absolutely nothing.

As ambassador, Clare Luce began with a background as journalist, playwright and Congresswoman. Many skilled U.S. diplomats considered her experience insufficient for the Italy of 1953. They thought their doubts justified when Clare Luce, upon her arrival in Italy, warned of the "grave consequences" that might follow if Italian voters "should fall unhappy victims to the wiles of totalitarianism of the right or left." The wisdom of this apparent interference in Italian domestic politics is still hotly debated, although no one yet has been able to demonstrate that it did any harm.

Close to the Ideal. What Clare Luce did not know about the art of diplomacy she learned--fast. Sometimes working around the clock at her office in the Palazzo Margherita, she dealt with policy problems, administered consulates and agencies with staffs of more than 1,600. She traveled over 30,000 miles inside Italy, visited more than 30 Italian cities, popped up in towns and villages where ambassadors are never seen, launched ships, opened universities. In a recent two-month period, she saw 69 state visitors and 416 members of U.S. congressional groups, entertained hundreds of other dignitaries in her stately Rome residence, Villa Taverna.

Added up, her work came close to fulfilling the ideal of modern U.S. diplomacy: to promote and expound the policies of the U.S., and in doing so, to strengthen the forces for independence, freedom and stability in the nation to which an envoy is accredited. Both Washington and Rome credit her with major achievements:

P: Recognizing that the ancient feud between Italy and Yugoslavia over Trieste was a potential source of war and was distracting Italy from other serious problems, she 'helped get U.S. backing for a brass-tacks London negotiating conference, meanwhile worked hard in Rome to help iron out details of a Trieste settlement that still works ("No one will ever know," wrote Milan's major daily Corriere della Sera, at the time of the Trieste settlement, "how much Italy owes to this fragile blonde").

P: When it came time to allocate U.S. foreign aid, she quietly pointed out to the Italians that her country frowned on foreign aid for Communist-dominated enterprises, helped open the eyes of Italian businessmen to the fact that they did not have to accept supinely the Communists' control of labor unions. Italian business leaders, led by Vittorio Valletta, president of the big Fiat auto works, began to speak out plainly against Communist labor domination. Result: the Communists were ousted from dominance in Fiat's big Turin plant and scores of other factories; in the last two years the Italy-wide ratio of Communist to non-Communist union membership has decreased from 65%-35% to 50%-50%, with a 3-to-2 anti-Communist majority in plants where the U.S. is spending most of its money.

There were other accomplishments. She negotiated the NATO status-of-forces agreement, which gives the Western forces a firm military anchor in Italy. And she coordinated diplomatic overseas planning for the potentially hazardous--but successful--evacuation of some 2,800 Americans from the Middle East, principally by the U.S. Sixth Fleet under Vice Admiral Charles R. Brown.

But in the long run, Clare Luce's major diplomatic achievement may well be the warm kinship she built up for herself and her nation with the Italian people--many of whom, at the beginning, were frankly skeptical about having a woman as U.S. ambassador. She learned to speak proficient Italian, was interviewed, photographed, talked about wherever she traveled. Her popularity rose to a peak when, ten days after a disastrous crash of an Italian airline plane (Linee Aeree Italiane) in New York, she calmly boarded an LAI plane for a flight home. An Italian public-opinion poll once reported that half of the Italian people knew Clare Luce (normal ambassadorial batting average: 2%).

Notable Example. When she resigned last week, Italy's Premier Segni cabled: "You have served with success the cause of Italian-American friendship." Wrote Rome's Il Tempo: "She has given a notable example of how well a woman can discharge a political post of grave responsibility." Added influential Il Populo: "News of her departure is met with regret everywhere in Italy."

At home, the New York Times saluted her for winning Italian "respect and gratitude"; the tough New York Daily News editorialized: "We're sorry to see her go." And from President Dwight Eisenhower, who said he would miss her reports, came congratulations for "a job superbly done."

Nominated to succeed Clare Luce as U.S. Ambassador to Italy was San Francisco's James David Zellerbach, 64, board chairman of the $450 million Crown Zellerbach Corp., world's second-largest paper-products firm. An indefatigable worker, Ambassador-designate Zellerbach recently held five simultaneous chairmanships, 23 directorships, seven trusteeships and 25 memberships in an awesome array of companies, foundations, councils and clubs.

Appointed by Harry Truman as chief of the Marshall Plan special mission to Italy in 1948, with the rank of minister, he too started off by stepping on Italian toes with some blunt talk about the government's land-reform plans. Before he left in 1950, Italy had come to respect him as much as he respected Italy.

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