"Actually, I've always called myself an eastern-seaboard international liberal," Clare Boothe Luce declared last week, as she explained why she had threatened to enter the race for the U.S. Senate from New York as the Conservative Party candidate. "My slight diversion about the Senate a few months ago," she went on, "was never very serious. Obviously, I couldn't win, so I never more than considered running."

The real reason she threatened Senator Kenneth B. Keating with her opposition, Mrs. Luce said, was that "in unity there is strength. I thought it was dangerous for the Republicans and Conservatives in New York to be split in this election, so I tried to get them together." Robert Kennedy triumphed "for a number of reasons, but partly because Keating failed to support Goldwater."

Clare Boothe Luce was not born a Republican; she watched the Republican party swirl around her and settle in her lap. She states boldly that she voted for Al Smith in 1928 and campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932; but she has been a Republican of various stripes since that time. In fact, Mrs. Luce was twice elected to Congress as a Republican from Connecticut in heavily Democratic years. Her election under the Republican standard and later service as an Eisenhower ambassador to Italy have endeared her to the GOP, and with these credentials she set out upon her valiant election-year attempt to save the party.

But the means of rescue is puzzling, at best. She originally favored former ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge for the Republican Presidential nomination but decided he had no reasonable chance of gaining it. Then she apparently figured the odds, laid her ideological convictions aside and decided her duty was to second Senator Barry Goldwater's nomination. She is convinced now that Goldwater's campaign for the nomination was a "mistake," but is certain that no one else would have done any better. ("Rocky might not have carried any states at all, and how would we [Republicans] all feel about that?")

Although she and Goldwater share a concern with the moral tone of American life (as evidenced by her Life cover story "What Killed Marilyn Monroe?"), Mrs. Luce was thoroughly disgusted with the Presidential campaign. She complains that "almost no issues were discussed." "For example, we haven't had a China policy in fifty years." In this ideological vacuum, according to Mrs. Luce, "Republican doom-crying was so much less effective than Democratic prosperity-shouting."

Mrs. Luce prophesies doom for the Republican party. "If neither the hard-core conservative wing nor the moderate wing can gain control of the GOP," she muses, "they must either split or compromise once again on me-too leadership." But "me-too leadership" would be unfortunate, she goes on, so the only solution seems to be a "tremendous charismatic leader." Then again, "rah-rah" talk for any single leader won't bring victory, she insists. And even if a national conference to settle policy questions were a reasonable possibility, it would never work, adds Mrs. Luce.

The only time the party can be re-energized, Mrs. Luce declares, will be "when issues emerge and the leaders are clever enough to grab onto them and put them to the public before the opposition does." Despite all her efforts toward party unity, Mrs. Luce concedes that she would have "no objection" to the realignment of American parties according to the British system. Where would she stand? "What I would call myself now I don't know."