The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Luce was growing increasingly impatient with his own writers and editors, who were not, he complained, “observing the Editor-in-Chief’s China policy.” (Evidence of the problem, he believed, was the sandbagging of Murphy’s Chiang profile, even though Luce himself had been complicit in the killing of the piece.) He set out again to express his own views of the situation in China, which should, he insisted, become part of Time Inc.’s “policy.” He spent part of his trip home from China writing by hand an outline of his central precepts. What were the “fundamental motivations of Chiang Kai-shek?” Luce asked. Chiang aspired to “establish a China which shall be 1) united, 2) free of foreign domination, 3) progressively modern, hence a) strong, b) democratic.” What stood mostly in the way of this “double purpose,” he concluded, was a single problem: the Communists. Hence the principal goal of the United States must be to stop them so as to give Chiang the opportunity to achieve his “life purpose—the ‘unity’ of China.”51

  Back in New York he continued to bombard his editors with the urgency of the task. “Luce came to my M. E. [managing editor] lunch and talked steadily about China—almost a repeat of yesterday’s lunch,” Billings wrote. Matthews also received a memo from Luce complaining that Time-Life International was “not paying enough attention to China…. Nearly all the correspondents in China are doing a poor job.” Hardly a day went by without a chiding memo to his senior editors: “It seems to me Time has paid awful little attention to [Wellington] Koo,” he complained on one day. On another he wrote that “we need to focus again … on the prospects for success or failure, progress or chaos in China.” Editors frequently found Luce “in a huffy unhappy mood about some Life text on China,” or “suffering visibly over China.” So harried did the editorial staff feel under Luce’s pressure that they began to compile evidence that they were in fact reflecting his own strong views. The Time editors sent Luce groveling proof of their loyalty in April 1947 by listing the ways in which they had followed the editor in chief’s line:

  The former U.S. policy of mediation had been invalidated by Chiang’s “brilliant military victories,” the increased stubbornness of the Communists…. Adoption of the new Constitution proved Chiang’s democratic intention and justified increased U.S. support…. China would find it difficult to solve her currency problem without U.S. Aid…. The crisis … has been brought on by the lack of a positive U.S. Policy and by Marshall’s “stiff-necked insistence that the Nationalist Government must be purified before the U.S. would give it decisive help in putting down a Communist revolution.”52

  A little more than two months after Luce’s return from China, Marshall moved from Nanking to Washington and became secretary of state. President Truman, members of Congress, and the majority of the public gave Marshall credit for attempting what turned out to be an impossible task, and most Americans slowly began to prepare themselves for the likely defeat of the Chiang regime and the triumph of the Communists. But to Luce, and to other strong supporters of the Nationalist cause, Marshall’s failed effort was part of a great and tragic betrayal—the willful abandonment of China to Communism through incompetence at best and a traitorous conspiracy at worst. Even before China fell, the recriminations began—and continued for a generation. The last years before the fall of Nationalist China produced stores of ammunition for those who were coming to constitute what became known as the “China Lobby.”

  Luce was never as fevered a member of the China Lobby as were many others. He continued to admire George Marshall, despite his great disappointment with the general’s actions in China. He did not often accuse those he opposed of traitorous motives, and he seldom associated himself with the more hysterical press lords of the pro-Chiang right—William Randolph Hearst, Col. Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, and others. But beginning in the last years of Nationalist government on the mainland, and continuing for many years after, his bitterness toward those whom he believed had failed China in the greatest crisis of its history steadily increased. The folly of allowing China to fall, Luce believed, was so self-evident that only weakness, stupidity, or—worse—disloyalty could explain America’s course. “The measure of degradation of American policy in the Pacific,” he wrote bitterly in early 1948,

  is the fact that a few guys like [Minnesota representative Walter Judd] and me have to go about peddling a vital interest of the United States and a historic article of U. S. Foreign policy as if it were some sort of bottled chop suey that we were trying to sneak through the Pure Food Laws…. [T]oday an American Government, attempting to “lead” the world—seems not to be in the slightest degree embarrassed by its total neglect of Asia.53

  Like many critics of the Truman administration far to Luce’s right, he began to characterize his opponents not as people with legitimate disagreements but as dupes of the Communists or worse. “Where’s the agrarian democracy in mainland China that ‘experts’ … attributed to the … Communists?” he said contemptuously in the early 1950s. “On what basis,” he asked, did “… so many people on the left, and so many people in the State Department, come to believe that Mao and his allies were potential allies of the United States?”—repeating the longstanding canard that admiration for Mao was a principal cause of America’s abandonment of Chiang. In the heat of his despair he at times lost his ability to express disagreement—even with the people he most admired—in a restrained and respectful way. “I cannot think of any utterance which ever hurt me so much as your recent statement about Chiang Kai-shek and China,” he angrily wrote Henry Stimson, who had, like Marshall, expressed a lack of confidence in the Nationalist regime. “I would like to think that you found it painful to write what you did. But perhaps you only wrote carelessly and irresponsibly.” Increasingly he built on his already intense hatred of Franklin Roosevelt by joining the escalating right-wing criticism of the Yalta accords. “Suspicious as I was of Yalta,” he wrote in reference to what he considered the secret betrayal of China, “I couldn’t imagine that it was such a new high in Rooseveltian deceit…. I wonder if Time has yet become as indignant about Yalta as perhaps it ought to be.” And even while he continued trying to persuade the leaders of government, he also began to reach out to people who shared his views on China, including some with whom he had little else in common—socially or intellectually.54

  Luce’s slow, cautious, but steady movement into the world of conspiracy theories was reflected by, among other things, his souring relationship with an organization he had helped to create: the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR), a quasi-academic foundation in New York dedicated to helping Americans understand Asia and the Pacific. Luce had been a founding member in 1930 and had considered it an organization that “always strove for objectivity and the presentation of different sides of a problem, [which] were useful as references to Time and Fortune.” He had attended occasional conferences, offered modest financial support, and maintained a cordial and supportive relationship with the institute’s director, Edward Carter. In the early 1940s Luce joined an effort to construct an imposing new building for the institution, Pacific House, which would give the IPR a more important public face and would draw more attention to issues relating to China. Luce organized a dinner in 1943 to promote the idea. He recruited Juan Trippe, the president of Pan American World Airways, to head the fund-raising drive. And he assigned one of Time Inc.’s staff to assist with the effort. Despite his help, the project failed. But his supportive relationship with the IPR, even if somewhat strained, continued.55

  In the spring of 1946 Alfred Kohlberg, a wealthy textile manufacturer who had significant investments in Asia and now feared that they were in danger, began a campaign to discredit the people he believed were participating in a vast conspiracy to undermine the Kuomintang and ensure the victory of the Communists. Among his principal targets was the IPR, of which he was a longtime but seldom-seen member. Kohlberg was an aggressive ideologue, and to him the IPR’s openness to multiple views, which included some sympathetic depictions of the
Chinese Communists, seemed tantamount to treason. He began spending long days in the New York Public Library uncovering IPR documents that supported his view. The people who managed the IPR’s publications and research, he charged, “showed their bias by affiliation with a host of Communist and Communist front organizations.” In August, Carter invited Kohlberg to a meeting to “clear the air.” It only increased the animosity between them.56

  Kohlberg had not been the first to warn Luce about Communist influence in the IPR. In 1943 his Fortune colleague Eliot Janeway had claimed to have discovered that the institution was “really manipulated by a group of dubious Communists and near-Communists who are intriguing madly behind a good front of respectable research men.” Carter, he said, was “a stooge for these gentry.” Luce, who usually respected Janeway’s opinions, had ignored him. Kohlberg, by contrast, was the kind of man—brash, crude, vindictive, impassioned almost to the point of fanaticism—with whom Luce under ordinary circumstances would never have associated. Kohlberg had once even implied that Luce himself was a Communist dupe. But by late 1946 Luce had become largely intolerant of divergent views on China and was thus more credulous of Kohlberg’s accusations. A Time Inc. colleague prepared a report for Luce on the activities of the IPR and concluded that the organization did not take a “communist line” and was, at worst, not wholly vigilant in keeping Communists and fellow travelers from publishing left-leaning material.

  But Luce took no comfort from this mild and qualified defense. When Carter asked him for help in discrediting Kohlberg, Luce replied coolly that Kohlberg was “not ‘discredited’ in my opinion…. I am afraid, I would find that the Institute of Pacific Relations output had been of very little help in informing us on those aspects of Soviet or Communist behavior which present real challenges both to American ideals and American interests.” A shaken Carter quickly assembled evidence of the IPR’s substantial studies of the dangers of Communism, but Luce brushed it aside. “The main trouble with this letter is that it should have been written several years ago … the so-called Kohlberg charges are perhaps far from being judicial, nevertheless I am convinced that the question he raises with regard to I.P.R. cannot be brushed off with easy strokes of whitewash. In so far as I.P.R. has taken a ‘line,’ it is a line with which I disagree considerably.” He was, he concluded, resigning from the organization and cutting off his financial support.

  Carter unwisely replied by warning him of “the loss that would accrue more to you than to IPR if you became identified in the public mind with such [far-right] critics of the IPR as Kohlberg, [the writer] Upton Close, and Hearst.” Luce did not communicate with him again, and Carter’s plaintive letters were thereafter answered by surrogates. Less than two years later Carter resigned from the IPR. “The sad story of the Institute of Pacific publications,” Luce wrote ruefully in 1949, “is one that I know all too much about—but I learned it too late!” Luce’s own repudiation of IPR was certainly part of what led Carter to resign.57 As the situation in China deteriorated, both Harry and Clare developed an unlikely friendship with Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who had served for a time as Chiang Kai-shek’s military chief of staff and had then succeeded Stilwell as commander of American forces in China. Wedemeyer was a talented and respected officer of highly conservative views. He shared Luce’s conviction that a Communist victory in China would be an unacceptable danger to America. One of the few high-ranking American officers with significant experience in China, he was repeatedly proposed for new missions there. But time and again, he believed, his hopes were thwarted by officials in Washington who found him too hostile to the Communists (with whom Marshall was continuing to negotiate) and too committed as well to the increasingly discredited Chiang regime. Out of Wedemeyer’s experiences (and out of Luce’s characterizations of them) emerged some of the foundations of the conspiracy theory of the Nationalists’ fall.

  In the spring of 1946 Secretary of State James Byrnes proposed Wedemeyer as ambassador to China, a position that had remained unfilled since 1941. To prepare himself the general began communicating with Luce, over dinners when he was in New York, through correspondence when he was away. “When I take over,” he wrote Luce,

  I predict that the Communists will seize upon this opportunity to abrogate agreements and of course in the minds of the public, both in China and abroad, they will attribute dissensions and confusions to me…. Of course the degree of wholehearted and straightforward cooperation I receive from the State Department will strongly influence my ability to accomplish our objectives.

  Months later Wedemeyer learned that he would not receive the ambassadorship, which would go instead to Leighton Stuart. Wedemeyer himself was “disappointed but not angry,” one of Luce’s deputies reported. But he did show some bitterness, and he claimed that John Carter Vincent and others in the State Department had fought his appointment “to the bitter end.” Luce himself, of course, had been to a large degree responsible for Stuart’s appointment as ambassador. But that did not stop him from being drawn into the group who saw Wedemeyer as a martyr to the cause of China.58

  A year later, at about the same time that Bullitt went to China for Life, Luce learned from Wedemeyer that Marshall had asked him to return to China and prepare a report on how “to salvage the rapidly deteriorating situation.” It is difficult to understand why Marshall decided to entrust such a sensitive assignment to Wedemeyer, whose views were very different from his own. But the decision likely reflected Marshall’s respect for Wedemeyer’s military prowess. “It is obvious to you,” Wedemeyer wrote to Luce, “that although our government has committed itself openly and firmly to counter the spread of communism through the Balkans and in Western Europe, paradoxically we are refusing to apply a similar policy in the Far East.” He was, he said, “determined to submit recommendations [to Marshall] … that will embody ideas that have been evolved as the result of years of study of history.”59 On his return from China Wedemeyer offered Luce a summary of his findings. Much of it, to Luce’s dismay, was harshly critical of Chiang and his government: terrible relationships between officers and enlisted men in the Kuomintang army; “widespread corruption and incompetence” in the government; the blindness of Chiang and other Nationalist leaders to the dire condition of his regime. “I doubt seriously that [Chiang] realized the true conditions that prevail,” he wrote. But Wedemeyer nevertheless strongly recommended the provision of up to ten thousand military “advisors” to the Chinese army, a United Nations guardianship of northeastern China (a stronghold of the Soviets and the Chinese Communists), and significant additional American aid to the Chiang regime unconnected to reforms in his government. The report—which Luce and others eagerly awaited as a last chance for moving American policy toward a stronger defense of Nationalist China—did not appear, despite Luce’s strenuous efforts to persuade Marshall to release it. “Pressure from every facet is being placed upon me,” Wedemeyer told Luce. His efforts, he said, were being “stultified by vacillatory or European-conscious State Department officials…. I have pointed out to [Marshall] the implications of delay concerning the implementation of my recommendations, but so far nothing has happened.” Luce directed his editors to insert an ominous and incendiary note into Time:

  A fortnight ago, Lieut General Albert C. Wedemeyer returned from his mission to China as a factfinder for the U.S. To the State Department he submitted a report of China’s political, military and economic situation. On this report, presumably would be based one of the most important lines of U.S. foreign policy—what to do about China. Lieut. General Wedemeyer has always been anti-Communist…. His report on the Chinese could not be anything but anti-Communist, and probably favored U.S. aid to China. If so, it was big news to both countries. What (or who), Americans wondered last week, was holding up its publication?

  The answer, as Luce obviously suspected, was the State Department. Unhappy with Wedemeyer’s aggressive recommendations and, particularly, with his proposal to deploy American military advisers in Chin
a, Marshall and his colleagues first asked the general to amend his report, and then, when he refused, buried it.60

  Not until two years later did the Wedemeyer report become public, deep in the annexes of a massive State Department white paper defending American policy. The white paper defended the “suppression” of the report in 1947 by claiming that Wedemeyer’s criticisms of the Chiang regime would have demoralized the Chinese government. The heart of the white paper, however, was a sharp rebuke to Luce and others who continued to claim that American policy was responsible for the defeat of the Nationalists. The blame for the “fall of China” fell, it argued, squarely on the shoulders of the Kuomintang, which “had apparently lost the crusading spirit that won them the people’s loyalty during the early years of the war.” Nationalist China had “sunk into corruption … and into reliance on the United States to win the war for them…. The reasons for the failures of the Chinese National Government … do not stem from any inadequacy of American aid…. [The Kuomintang’s] leaders proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops had lost the will to fight, and the Government had lost popular support.” This assessment, not surprisingly, enraged Luce and many other supporters of Nationalist China and greatly increased the bitterness that the Communist victory had already created. The “suppression” of the Wedemeyer report in 1947 and its eventual replacement by the State Department’s white paper became still more fodder for the belief that there had been a government-inspired conspiracy to undermine the survival of a non-Communist China.61