The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  The article, written mostly by Whittaker Chambers, was relatively kind to Stilwell himself. It blamed the Roosevelt administration, not the general, for giving Chiang an ultimatum that “no self-respecting head of state could countenance.” But Chambers made little reference to White’s dispatches (which Chambers boasted he routinely dropped in the wastebasket without reading). The story as published was not about the war against Japan but about what Chambers considered the much more important war against the Chinese Communists. “Stripped to the bare facts,” Time proclaimed, the “situation was that Chungking, a dictatorship ruling high-handedly in order to safeguard the last vestiges of democratic principles in China, was engaged in an undeclared war with Yenan [the headquarters of the Communist forces], a dictatorship whose purpose was the spread of totalitarian Communism in China.” The piece continued with a gratuitous attack on “the tone long taken by leftists and echoed by liberals” in supporting Stilwell. And it concluded with a dark warning:

  If Chiang Kai-shek were compelled to collaborate with Yenan on Yenan’s terms, or if he were forced to lift his military blockade of the Chinese Communist area, a Communist China might soon replace Chungking. And unlike Chungking, a Communist China (with its 450 million people) would turn to Russia (with its 200 million people) rather than to the U.S. (with its 130 million) as an international collaborator.19

  White heard nothing about the Stilwell piece until well after it had appeared in Time, and then only through scattered quotations from it that were broadcast over several Chinese (and Japanese) radio stations. But what he heard alarmed him, and he cabled Luce desperately. If the radio reports were true, he wrote, “I shall probably have to resign as I have no other way of preserving my integrity.” “Keep your shirt on until you have full text of Stilwell cover story,” Luce wired back dismissively. “Then roll up your sleeves and cable us what you regard as specific inaccuracies.” But by now it was already too late for agreement between them on the Stilwell piece—or on almost anything else related to China. Both men had moved too far from their earlier, more compatible stances.

  Luce continued to believe that Chiang “may have greater influence than any other single human being of our age,” and he was determined to defend him on almost all points regardless of circumstances. His enthusiasm was stoked further by the sensational visit of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek to the United States in 1943, a visit Luce helped organize (with the help of David Selznick) to raise money for United China Relief. (Her public appearances across the country, Time wrote gushingly, had created “more effect than anything which has yet happened, in giving one great people the kind of understanding of another great people that is the first need of a shrinking, hopeful world.”) White—unimpressed by the Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang both—was convinced that Chiang was a hopeless failure and an insuperable obstacle to victory.

  The outcome of this disagreement was, of course, foreordained. “I do not think it becomes you to get angry if for once your editor does not instantly follow your instructions,” Luce wrote coldly. His colleagues attempted to soften the tone of Luce’s cables to White, but Luce was in no mood for conciliation. “Having for many years been for Chiang,” he wrote to one of his colleagues, “White is now against him. Suppose our London correspondent was actually against Churchill or Moscow against Stalin.” White responded with a thirty-page critique of the Stilwell piece, repeating his threat to resign from Time, to which Luce responded vaguely that “you will receive a statement of China policy as clear as cable discretion permits.”

  At about the same time, in what was perhaps a reckless effort to challenge Luce (and Chambers) directly, he sent a long dispatch reporting on the Communists in Yenan in mostly glowing terms. Where Chiang was corrupt and inept, the Communists, he claimed, were disciplined and committed. They had “an empirical wisdom that comes of ten years of civil war and seven years of anti-Japanese war. Within themselves they are trying to weed out the sins of intellectual dogmatism … [they] proclaim their friendship with America…. [T]hey are sincere and if reciprocated the friendship can become lasting.” Time editors ignored his memos. White, now almost frantic, wrote Tom Matthews: “Our columns on China ever since the publication of the Stilwell cover, have been indistinguishable from the official propaganda of the Kuomintang party.”20

  White was far from alone in finding fault with Time’s uncritical view of Chiang. “You glorify Chiang Kai-shek,” one of many outraged readers wrote. “All competent observers seem to agree that Chiang has about as much respect for democracy as Hitler or Mussolini.” The journalist Richard Watts, stationed in China during the war, wrote in the New Republic that Time Inc., in its “policy toward the Kuomintang Party … abandons its lofty scorn for wide-eyed admiration.” In February 1945 Luce—aware of the growing controversy—asked one of his researchers in China to explore reactions to the magazine’s recent coverage. “Although the Stillwell [sic] cover on TIME … did not lack for readers,” she wrote, “they certainly lacked for defenders…. A very large segment of the U.S. Army stationed from Delhi to Chungking operate on the theory that the Chinese government is composed of thieves and cutthroats.” And the reporters in Chungking, she noted, “feel Teddy was sold down the river, should have made his resignation stick.” Luce circulated the memo among his colleagues in New York—and entirely rejected its findings. “For myself,” he wrote them, “I have not the slightest doubt that our policy has been right.”21

  Through the remaining months of World War II, Luce never wavered in his steadfast support of Chiang. He rarely allowed even faint criticisms of the Kuomintang to appear in his magazines. His 1943 comment on Pearl Buck’s Life article—that there was “a very real question whether Pearl’s article would not do much more harm than good”—suggested even then how far he was moving toward using the news for his own purposes. Reporting the truth was taking a backseat to doing “good” for the causes he believed in, and it was not long before this stance shattered his relationship with White. “Luce in a dither about Teddy White’s ‘partisanship’ against Chiang,” Billings wrote in his diary in August 1945, “—and he wrote him a stern cable.” It was stern indeed. “I suggest you make supreme personal effort to give us nonpartisan news of Chiang in what we hope will be week of victory,” Luce wrote caustically as Time prepared another cover story on Chiang Kai-shek (which White opposed). “We realize this might be an unreasonable request in view [of] your avowed partisanship.”22

  White hung on in Chungking through the end of the war, unable to get any material into the magazine that even hinted at the weakness of the Kuomintang. He began to focus instead on local-color stories and the fighting itself, and he remained in China to cover the Japanese surrender in August 1945. A few weeks later he was back in New York, hoping for a rapprochement with Luce. (“I would have done anything I could to keep or regain his affection,” he recalled in his memoir.) He took a leave of several months to write a book—Thunder Out of China, coauthored with his colleague and friend Annalee Jacoby. In the spring of 1946 he sent a copy of the manuscript to Luce “as a courtesy,” still hoping for some sign of approval. But the book, as White himself described it, was the story of “the inevitable collapse of Chiang Kai-shek.” Neither friendship nor persuasion could have prevented Luce from feeling angry about, and even betrayed by, its contents. A few weeks later White presented himself at Time Inc. to request a new assignment. Luce was “terribly angry,” called him an “ingrate,” and lumped him together with another of his “disloyal” star writers, John Hersey, whose remarkable account of the bombing of Hiroshima had recently appeared not in the Luce publications but in The New Yorker. Luce gave White an ultimatum: Remain at Time Inc. with a willingness to accept any job assigned to him, no matter how menial, or leave the company. White protested that he would be of no value to Luce except as a foreign correspondent. He wanted to go to Moscow. But to Luce the issue was loyalty, not utility. (“We must resist the tendency to think of Time Inc. as a plum pudding from which ev
eryone is concerned only to extract the plums of his choice,” he wrote in a bitter memo shortly after the confrontation.) On July 12, 1946, White informed Luce’s deputy, Charles Wertenbaker, that he “could not continue on Luce’s terms.” Unknown to White, Luce had already told Wertenbaker that “the bases of a satisfactory deal do not exist” (a euphemism for dismissal). White left the building no longer an employee of Time Inc.

  The friendship between Luce and White, and its bitter unraveling, was the product less of their differences than of their similarities. Both men were somewhat disingenuous during their disputes in 1944 and 1945, because neither really aspired to “objective” or “nonpartisan” reporting. They saw journalism as a form of advocacy; and as their opinions diverged, their relationship inevitably frayed and ultimately collapsed precisely because they both had passionate views that they believed needed to be expressed. For White the termination of his job at Time Inc. was simply a small interruption in a brilliant career. A few days after leaving the company, he learned that his book was a selection of the then-mighty Book-of-the-Month Club. He was, for the time being, financially secure. And for the next four decades he successfully continued to combine brilliant reportage with his own deeply held opinions. For Luce the breach with White not only destroyed an important friendship but marked another significant step away from his willingness to tolerate a diversity of views within his organization.23

  It was not only Russia and China that drew Luce more deeply into battle. His concerns extended to American politics and the state of the world. The nation’s entry into the war, far from calming Luce’s fears, had launched him into a period of ideological and political crusading far more fervent and dogmatic than during any earlier period of his life. The hard certainty of his own views—about how to fight the war, about how to plan for peace, and about who should lead the nation—made him increasingly vocal, both in his own public statements and in what he demanded of his magazines.

  Among other things the war years intensified Luce’s already strong dislike of Franklin Roosevelt. His contempt for the president was based in part on Luce’s assessment of Roosevelt as a man without conviction or principle, unreliable and frequently dishonest, unfit for the great moral project that Luce believed the war demanded. He was not alone in finding Roosevelt frustratingly evasive. Even the president’s own aides and allies understood that he confided fully in no one and that he was a fundamentally political man despite his occasional flights of idealism. But most of those who knew Roosevelt well recognized the great strengths of his political nature and believed that he was moving the nation in the right direction, even if not always boldly. Luce had no such faith in the president’s aims, and he was constantly incensed by what he considered the administration’s failure to move forcefully and clearly enough into the fray. At least equally important was his deep personal dislike of Roosevelt—a dislike that was clearly mutual.

  The feud between Roosevelt and Time Inc. picked up in January 1942 almost exactly where it had left off the previous December, with a new dispute over the coverage of Latin America. A story in Life, published shortly after Pearl Harbor, made an erroneous reference to a “U.S. [Air] Field” in Brazil. A few weeks later a Time article entitled a story on a Pan-American Congress in Rio de Janeiro as a “Big Roundup” and referred to “corralling the 21 American republics into a homogeneous herd.” The Brazilian and Chilean governments both protested, and Roosevelt once again lashed out. “Honestly I think that something has got to be done about Luce and his papers…. What to do about this attitude, which is definitely unpatriotic in that it is harmful to the U.S. to a very great degree.” Even some of Roosevelt’s aides were surprised at the strength of the president’s anger, and they worked to calm him down. Stephen Early, the president’s press secretary, told him that, “in all fairness,” Luce had received approval from both the American and the Brazilian governments for the material in question. The editors at Time also argued about how to respond. Eric Hodgins urged his colleagues to use more “sedate language” in describing South American affairs, but Manfred Gottfried, Time’s managing editor, snapped back that they should “tell F.D.R. to go jump in the Potomac … the hell with sedate language!”24

  Days later George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, summoned Luce to Washington and (as Billings recorded Luce’s account) “gave him and the company the devil, just on general principles…. Marshall raked up all the past grievances—and warned that the Luce papers must behave themselves.” Everyone assumed that it was Roosevelt who had ordered up the “verbal caning.” Several weeks later the president continued to fume about the “Luce papers” and ordered Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to file a “formal protest with Mr. Luce” on all articles “which in any way hurt the Good Neighbor policy with Latin America or tend to promote disunity among any of the United Nations…. In other words, it is time to build up a complete case.” Welles, like Early, tried to assure Roosevelt that Luce was being cooperative, but to little avail.25

  Luce was enough of a realist to understand that a public fight with the president in wartime was not in his own or his company’s interest. But like the president, his hatred continued to burst to the surface time and again, even though, also like the president, he faced constant efforts by his staff to keep him calm. “A session in Larsen’s office … on Luce’s anti-Roosevelt attitude,” Billings wrote early in 1942. “You can’t fight the Prex. Of the U.S. in wartime and expect to win.” But Luce would not be deterred. Although he grudgingly permitted favorable coverage of Roosevelt by reporters and editors who admired the president, he pushed continually for more negative portrayals: “Do you realize what it means to have the President of the U.S. treated as a ‘battleship’ …?” he told his editors in 1943. “Nothing is doing more to create a misunderstanding between the U.S. and other peoples than the exported adulation of F.D.R. The notion that F.D.R. is adored by all Americans (except a few evil millionaires) is not only a dangerous lie; it is also just a plain lie.” He did not restrict his complaints to his own staff. He wrote testily to other journalists about their attitude toward the president. “Has Ray Clapper bowed down to the doctrine of the Indispensable Man or Men?” he asked the prominent columnist. “Are we hereafter helpless without Fuhrers singular or plural?”26

  But Luce’s hatred of Roosevelt was not just political. It was also intensely personal, and nothing stoked his resentment more effectively than the president’s decision to bar him from traveling abroad during wartime. Roosevelt was careful to announce the ban as a matter of general principle: “On account of the extreme stringency of transportation, credentials at present are not being issued … to publishers, editors, and executives who wish to make visits to combat areas.” Roosevelt’s dislike of publishers was long-standing and well founded, and the new policy had the advantage of barring many people he disliked from traveling and finding new ways to criticize him. He was certainly as eager to keep the rabidly anti-Roosevelt publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Col. Robert R. McCormick, from traveling to the war zones as he was to bar Luce. But the ban, which was announced just as Luce was applying for permission to travel to China, was primarily directed at him—as Secretary of War Henry Stimson, unhappily saddled with the job of explaining the ban to him, privately confirmed in his diary: “It arose apparently out of the White House’s rumpus with Luce.” For almost three years he battled to have the restrictions lifted. “I am not, to be sure, a regular correspondent,” Luce wrote Army Chief of Staff Marshall, whom Roosevelt had asked to enforce the ban. “But I take personal responsibility for reporting the war to upward of 20,000,000 Americans…. Surely it should not seem odd or unreasonable that I should have an occasional opportunity to visit the fighting fronts.” The relatively reasonable tone of his imploring letters to Washington only occasionally revealed how distraught and angry he was. “It is, I am sure, unnecessary to point out to you how painful this situation has been for me personally,” he wrote Marshall at one low moment. To others he s
poke privately about what he considered a “deliberate insult,” an act of “petty retribution,” and an example of “vindictive and arbitrary power.” Eventually the White House gave him permission to visit England, using the pretext that Britain was not technically a theater of war. But the ban on traveling elsewhere remained in place until after Roosevelt’s death.27

  If Roosevelt believed that barring Luce from the war zones would limit his ability to attack the administration, he was badly mistaken. Had Luce been allowed to travel, he would likely have spent much of his time visiting battlefields, writing enthusiastically about the American military, and serving as a cheerleader for the war. But stuck in New York, he was led by his anger at Roosevelt and his own frustration at being isolated from the most important event of his lifetime into a sullen period of hard-edged partisanship.

  He insisted that the president had “fumbled the crisis.” He expressed contempt for “the idea that Roosevelt alone did his job with anything more than average courage or average efficiency.” The president’s consistent “deceit” was something that “even my tin-lined stomach can’t quite digest.” The administration was “tired and stale in seventeen symptoms.” Roosevelt exhibited a “capacity for cheapening the finer traditions of America.” Luce wrote particularly harshly about the emerging consensus that Roosevelt had been a skillful steward of foreign policy leading up to the war. On the contrary, Luce charged, the president “was in the 1930’s the high priest of the isolationist-pacifism of that decade.” Claims to the contrary were the result of “successful, almost completely untruthful propaganda.” Roosevelt, he wrote toward the end of the war, “has so confused war and peace that it is doubtful at this point whether we will ever unscramble the two. This Rooseveltian achievement is, of course, wholly in character, being simply a part of the 12-year-old Roosevelt technique of maintaining perpetual crisis.”28