Word: luce
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...Luce was not one to take such condescension calmly. Immovable in her beliefs and intrepid in expressing them, she quickly established herself as one of the most implacable foes of the New Deal and especially of any and all appeasement of the Soviet Union. When Vice President Henry Wallace suggested a postwar policy of opening the skies to every plane, Luce dubbed his brainchild "globaloney." As for F.D.R., she said, he had "lied us into a war into which he should have led us." Small wonder, then, that hers was one of the most hotly contested seats in the country...
...part because of the death in a car accident of her only child Ann at the age of 19, she turned toward Catholicism and decided in 1946 not to run for re-election. Needless to say, a Luce retirement was hardly a rest: the years that followed found her explaining her conversion in a series of articles titled "The Real Reason"; memorably denouncing the Democrats as a speaker at the 1948 Republican National Convention; receiving an Oscar nomination in 1949 for her original story for the gentle comedy Come to the Stable, about two nuns setting up a hospital...
That same year, she returned to the public stage as Washington's emissary to Italy, the first American woman to be named ambassador to a major power. As usual, Luce made a spectacular entrance and exit: in her first major speech, just a couple of weeks before the Italian general election, she broke nearly every unwritten rule by eschewing diplomatic platitudes in favor of a pointed warning about the "grave consequences" for voters if they became "unhappy victims of totalitarianism of the right or of the left." Four years later, she resigned for reasons of health: dust laced with lead...
...usual, the dramatic gestures and splashy headlines (ARSENIC AND OLD LUCE) obscured many of her more significant achievements in Rome. By the time she left, Luce had played an important role in persuading Italian businessmen to fight Communist labor domination; had helped resolve a decades-old dispute with the signing by Italy and Yugoslavia of the Trieste settlement in 1954; and had seen Italy join the United Nations. Luce's predecessor had been recognized by exactly 2% of the Italian population; "La Luce" was known...
Although her departure from Rome marked the end of Luce's official roles, she was not offstage for long. In the years that followed, the irrepressible campaigner mastered scuba diving, took up painting and constantly peppered the press with salty jeremiads. After her husband died in 1967, she pursued her interests as energetically as ever. In 1971 she dusted off a couple of past incarnations with a new play, Slam the Door Softly, that was characteristically full of tart one-liners ("I don't want alimony; I want severance pay"). A year later she held a reception for President Richard...