An Analysis of the Speech Given by Clare B.

Luce to the Women’s National Press Club in 1960

Clare Boothe Luce was an American author, politician, and journalist. In 1960, she was

asked to give a speech criticizing the American press to the Women’s National Press Club.

Luce’s speech addressed her concern with the tendency for news organizations to spread

artificial stories, information, and drama spread in their pursuit of profit, casting the principle of

journalistic integrity aside. In its prelude, Clare begins by building rapport with her audience

through jokes and pop-culture references. Shifting in tone to define journalism, she establishes

its purpose in finding and delivering the truth to the public. Finally, she asks her audience to bear

with her throughout the rant, explaining how, despite her incoming criticism, she still believed

that the American press was the best press in the world. Clare Booth Luce uses humor,

communicates with her audience, defines journalism, and ultimately compliments the very

establishment she is tasked with attacking in order to foreshadow her speech’s topic- that the

spreading of sensationalist stories violates journalistic integrity.

Clare uses figurative language and humor to establish her goodwill towards the audience.

In the first lines, she acknowledges her position and expresses her appreciation, saying “I am

happy and flattered to be a guest of honor… but looking over this audience tonight I am less

happy than you might think and more challenged than you could know. I stand here at this

rostrum invited to throw rocks at you.” (Luce, lines 1-6) Using the timeless setup-punchline

structure of a joke, Clare’s humor helps her build a connection with her audience by being self-

aware of their perception of her task. Further ahead, she utilizes a pop-culture reference to

further acquaint herself with the spectators, explaining how “The delicate art of giving an

audience hell is always one best left to the Billy Grahams and the Bishop Sheens.” (Luce, lines

15-17). Billy Graham and Bishop Sheens were famous evangelists who broadcast their sermons
on radio and television. The use of popular culture in a speech makes the speaker more “human”

to the audience, proving to them that they have similar knowledge and subsequently building

their bond with the orator. Concluding her opening remarks, she turns the “self-awareness” onto

her listeners, explaining how they themselves wouldn’t be satisfied with a speaker who pandered

to them, “a speaker who tried to fawn on it (Journalism), butter it up, exaggerate its virtues, play

down its faults, and who would more quickly see through any attempt to do so (Than

journalists)”(Luce, lines 18-23). This further builds the connection between speaker and

audience because Clare is, in a way, complimenting the audience. She knows that they don’t

need any positive reinforcement for their jobs and explicitly tells them. She implies that she’s

doing them a favor by being so “brutally honest”. Luce also foreshadows her upcoming message.

By saying reporters can easily see through artifice, through someone attempting to “fawn on” a

subject, she establishes the relation between journalists and the “truth”. She ends her introduction

with “I ask you only to remember that I am a volunteer for this subject tonight, you asked for it!”

(Luce, lines 23-25). This final remark reminds her crowd that they sit there to be criticized and

shows that Clare only wants the best for them, not berating them because she wants to, but

because she “has to”.

The central body of her introduction opens with Luce’s definition of good journalism,

what she proclaims it is “all about”. At length, she says that good journalism “On a working,

finite level is the effort to achieve illuminating candor in print and to strip away the cant… It is-

to use the big word- the pursuit of and effort to state the truth” (Luce, lines 27-40). Her long

expression about the purpose of journalism is the first real hint at her message, showing how it

has something to do with the “effort to state the truth” and the effort to “illuminate the candor

and strip away the cant”. “Candor” being defined as an honest expression and “Cant” being
defined as a dishonest expression. It is also important that Clare establishes this definition to the

audience so that later in the speech she can show them how its integrity- the pursuit of the truth-

is even able to become desecrated. If she didn’t explain what she means when she refers to “good

journalism”, then some audience may be confused, operating under different assumptions and

definitions. As if continuing her earlier address towards the character of her audience, Luce says

that “No audience knows better than an audience of journalists that the pursuit of the truth and

the articulation of it is the most delicate, hazardous, exacting, and inexact of tasks. Consequently,

no audience is more forgiving to the speaker who fails or stumbles in his own pursuit of it. The

only failure this audience could never excuse in any speaker would be the failure to try to tell the

truth, as he sees it, about his subject” (Luce, lines 41-49). First, she verbalizes both her and the

assembly’s awareness of the difficulty in finding and explaining the truth: the difficulty of

journalism as an occupation. She expresses that the virtue of even trying to practice “good

journalism” forgives the failure of finding it, but in making the failure to try telling the truth

inexcusable, Luce reveals the message of her speech. In the reveal of her speech’s purpose, Clare

not only establishes the definition of “good journalism”, but also the ability of journalists to

separate truth from artifice. Ultimately, the train of reason which begins here will lead to her

proclaim the journalistic heresy of producing artifice.

Clare’s conclusion to the introduction of her speech has to do with communicating her

overarching belief that the American press is still great despite all its flaws. She opens with “In

my perilous but earnest effort to do so here tonight, I must begin by saying that if there is much

that is wrong with the American press, there is also much that is right with it.” (Luce, lines 50-

53). She says this because she wants the audience to know her criticism is founded in a genuine

desire to improve the press and that she speaks from her heart, telling the truth “as she sees it”.
Clare, as she has extolled throughout her introduction, wants to leave no doubt that she

appreciates journalism and understands how difficult it is. This builds the bond between her and

her audience even further. She follows with “I ask you to accept some of the good with the bad-

even though it may not make a good copy for your newspapers.” (Luce, lines 55-57). This is a

coy way of both foreshadowing her upcoming message about sensationalism for profit- “Even

though it may not make a good copy for your newspapers”- and as another plea for her audience

to listen to her criticism. She is trying her hardest to make the upcoming criticism be received as

genuinely as it can be by begging her audience to “hear her out” as much as she does. Then, she

ends with “For the plain fact is that the U.S Daily press today is not inspiringly good; it is just far

and away the best in the world.” (Luce, lines 58-60). Her conclusion reinforces her idea that the

press is already in a great position despite its flaws and even presents the thought that America,

as the bastion of free speech throughout the world, doesn’t have a perfect press. She is, in a way,

asking the audience to help make the press “inspiringly good” to serve as a better example to the

rest of the world by saying that. It also, of course, puts a cherry on top of her continuing

compliments made to her journalist audience, which further shows them that she knows who

they are and what they do, building that speaker-listener connection further and beyond to the

stars.

Clare does a wonderful job of foreshadowing in her speech. Her flow throughout the

introduction plants the relevant ideas of journalistic integrity into her audience with delicate

humor and graceful banter. She compliments her audience by preparing them for criticism,

basically telling them “you’re about to be insulted, but you wouldn’t have it any other way, you

intelligent journalists you”. Through that dynamic, she’s reminding them what they do and what

reporters are good at: finding the truth from a web of lies. Her speech is about sensationalism-
about journalists making up “news” to get rich. Clare reminds her audience that it’s fine to fail in

finding the truth after searching for it; To shoot for the moon, but in falling short land among the

stars. She makes it clear, in exact words, that her audience of journalists could never excuse

someone “who failed to even try telling the truth, as they see it, about their subject”. In her

conclusion, she makes sure that her admiration for the press isn’t going to be lost in her criticism,

but clearly establishes that it is not “inspiringly good”. Luce uses her introduction to establish the

ideas necessary to understand her upcoming speech and hints at its deeper meaning through the

clever use of a silver tongue, but nonetheless manages to captivate her audience with perfect

pace and an obvious passion for her subject.