ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Clare Boothe Luce covers the early years of World War II for Life magazine and becomes a political activist for the Republican Party. Her war reportage took her first to Europe during the “Phony War,” which put her in the path of the German Blitzkrieg when it struck Belgium in May 1940. The successful book she based on her travels, Europe in the Spring (1940), helped fuel interventionist sentiment in the USA. Luce then engaged in political activism for the first time that fall, quickly becoming a prominent stump speaker for Republican presidential nominee, Wendell Willkie. Further activism and war reporting followed as the USA entered the war, with Luce writing from the Philippines, China, Burma, and Egypt. As a war journalist, however, Luce never matched her success as a playwright, and in 1942, her path took another turn, this time into elective politics. She secured nomination as the Republican challenger for a US Congressional seat in her Connecticut home district. Running against the Roosevelt administration’s conduct of the war, she won a narrow victory in November and thus became the first woman to represent Connecticut in the US House of Representatives.
