THE ADMINISTRATION: 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:

¶ 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").