The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  By early 1948 the situation in China was beginning to seem irretrievable; and while the Truman administration continued to insist that it was committed to the Nationalist government, material support from the United States was diminishing. Marshall had come to believe that defeating the Chinese Communists in the field was “an absolute military impossibility.” (Hence his ultimately unsuccessful effort to defeat the Communists politically, through a coalition.) He was also convinced that the Nationalist army would not fight and that providing them with weapons was the same as arming the Communists. “Thirty-three divisions laid down their arms without a battle,” he told a group of reporters in a private meeting, “so their equipment—the stuff we supplied them out of our reserves—is now in communist hands without a struggle.” But the grim military prospects were only part of the calculation. Marshall and Truman also believed that the stakes in China were not high enough to justify an American intervention that was certain to be costly and had no assurance of success. “There are only four great centers of resources outside the U.S. which concern me a whit,” Marshall told the reporters. “These are in Japan, Germany, England, and Russia. China has no resources other than manpower, and there is a real question in my mind whether this great mass of manpower is an asset or liability.”62

  For Luce, however, and for many others, no price could have been too high to defeat the Communists in China and preserve the Nationalist government. The cost of failure would be not only the loss of what Luce considered a great ally that could become an important asset to the democratic West. It would also be the beginning of Soviet domination of China and, eventually, all of Asia—a fundamental shift in geopolitical power. The unraveling of Kuomintang China was an almost unbearable prospect for Luce, especially as he saw many of the people who shared his commitment to China begin to turn away from the great project of saving it. “Time itself has not always been right,” the disillusioned Time Inc. reporter William Gray wrote from Shanghai, “and I hope your approach does not indicate any upcoming claim of omniscience on China…. In China even American businessmen accuse Time … of giving a ‘distorted picture without ever telling a specific lie.’” Luce ignored Gray’s evaluation in much the same way that he had rejected White’s.63

  In May, Luce persuaded the Truman administration to send Charles Stillman, the president of the recently created Henry Luce Foundation, to China to help distribute American aid. “Charlie Stillman is the greatest single contribution which we of Time Inc. could make to the cause of upbuilding China…. He is not a diplomat or a college professor or a parlor pink or a rabble rouser,” he wrote. “He is a businessman.” But like the many other military officers, diplomats, reporters, businessmen, and philanthropists who had tried to rationalize the funding of the Nationalist government, Stillman found himself an impotent witness to the corruption and incompetence of the Kuomintang regime.64

  As one effort after another collapsed, Luce became increasingly desperate and bitter. He used his magazines to express his own more and more isolated views. “American behavior in and toward China has been the most completely disastrous failure of U.S. foreign policy since the war,” he wrote in Life. He leaped at even the most implausible proposals—including a vague and quixotic plan to energize Christians in China (“a simple concrete idea which … might help to solve the vexing problem of America’s relation to China”). He used memos to his staff to vent his frustration. “What happens next in China?” he wrote angrily in August 1948. “What, if anything, does the U.S.A. prefer to have happen? One answer, of course, might be that the U.S.A. doesn’t and shouldn’t give a bloody damn.” As the end approached and all hope vanished, he began to make the case for what might have happened had the United States acted more forcefully. The Truman administration had made three mistakes, he later wrote: “not to take Communism seriously enough … not to take China seriously enough …[and] to permit a personal distaste for Chiang Kai-shek to influence U.S. policy toward his government.” Had the United States not given up on the Kuomintang too early, if the Soviets had not been allowed to enter Manchuria, if American forces had remained in China after the war, everything might have been different. And perhaps most of all he sought, almost wistfully, to rehabilitate the now-widely discredited Chiang, whom Luce continued to revere as one of the great figures in history. Chiang, he insisted, had retained the support of the Chinese people until war (and ungenerous critics) undermined him:

  There were a lot of good men in the [Kuomintang] government at all levels trying to do a good job…. The idea of “progress” express[ed] itself in manifold forms before the war as well as during it. Not just economic ideas, but ideas like the “emancipation of women.” … The Chiang government … was even so well regarded that it was made one of the “Big Five” in the postwar world.65

  As the dark year of 1948 progressed, Luce clung to a single hope: a Republican administration that would surely, he thought, commit itself more effectively to the defense of China. He was a strong supporter of Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a onetime isolationist who had converted to the new internationalism of the postwar era. But Vandenberg was never a serious contender, and Luce eventually had to place his hopes in a candidate he had never much liked: Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, running for president in his second consecutive election. “We lack big men, leaders or potential leaders, men of talent and integrity,” Luce had complained in 1946, clearly remembering the death of Willkie and his disappointment in Dewey in 1944. But he eagerly embraced the great opportunity he believed the Republicans had. Democratic unity, he said, was “coming apart at the seams.” The country was “clearly in a more conservative mood.” And Truman himself was so deeply unpopular that even Democrats were dismayed. (Time described the audience’s reaction to a Truman speech at a Democratic fund-raiser as “polite, bored tolerance toward the man they are stuck with in 1948.”)66

  Luce began a speech in the spring of 1948 with an almost cocky certainty: “On January 20, 1949, the businessmen of the United States will celebrate the [Republican] party’s return to power after sixteen years in the wilderness.” His own certitude drove Time’s reporting, which also threw caution to the wind. With unusual rashness the magazine repeatedly presented Truman’s candidacy as doomed to defeat. “Only a political miracle or extraordinary stupidity on the part of the Republicans,” the magazine claimed in March, “could save the Democratic party, after 16 years of power, from a debacle in November.” Dewey and his running mate, California governor Earl Warren, constituted “the kind of ticket that could not fail to sweep the Republican Party back into power.” Occasional stories toward the end of the campaign noted reviving enthusiasm for Truman, but Time never wavered in its confidence in the outcome. As late as November 1, the magazine crowed that the day of the Republican return to power was “surely at hand.” Life prepared a single photograph for its postelection cover: a smiling Dewey—but fortunately for the magazine, it was not ready in time for publication before the election. “Time was just as wrong as everybody else,” the magazine sheepishly reported once it was clear that Truman had won.67

  By then, however, the chances of reversing the course of events in China had already vanished. Not even a committed Republican administration would have been able to save Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. “Our Christmas skies are darkened this year by the disasters which have overtaken your country,” Luce wrote Chiang on December 24. “Be assured that your friends here know, as history will surely make clear, that you have fought with integrity of purpose for a cause you have cherished more dearly than any personal fate.” On the same day he told colleagues at Time Inc. more bluntly that China was “down the drain, and what can the U.S. do about it?” Someone suggested “gunboats,” but Luce said no, “that’s 19th century British policy.” And yet even then Luce could not abandon hope. Once again he made the lonely rounds in Washington, where all the officials he met continued to state the administration’s official position: “There is no disposition
on the part of the U.S. government to give up China as a lost cause.” But it was obvious to almost everyone that these pronouncements meant nothing, that the United States was helpless to reverse the Communist victory. The government was continuing to support a non-Communist China only to defend itself from criticism.

  Luce outlined a course for Chiang that he still believed might change the outcome. If there could be “massive evidence that there does in fact exist in China a wide-spread will and determination to resist Communist domination,” the regime might still survive. For that to happen Chiang would need to “declare that the Yangtze will be defended under your personal leadership,” that he should “give to the ablest man in China not counting yourself the task of forming an entirely new government whose primary requisite shall be a capacity to govern,” that there should be “a mighty demonstration of loyalty to this government by governors of provinces, mayors of cities, leading intellectuals and other representative men.” But even as he wrote this hopeful, hopeless proposal, the man he was attempting to persuade was preparing for his exodus to Formosa. Chiang’s response to Luce was friendly but pointedly evasive: “Your implicit faith in the cause of China’s prolonged struggle against world totalitarianism will not fail to cheer the bleeding hearts of my people.” Meanwhile, at a managing editors’ lunch that Luce did not attend, Max Ways, the Time foreign editor, said bluntly: “We have lost China. The Communists do provide ‘law and order,’ and hence temporary prosperity. I suspect Luce has led us into folly and dead-ends with his China ideas during [the] last fifteen years.” No one contradicted him. Luce was now almost alone in his own company.68

  XII

  Cold Warriors

  The twenty-fifth anniversary of Time magazine in 1948 coincided with Luce’s fiftieth birthday. Despite the lavish celebratory dinners and the generally positive coverage of these landmarks, both events seemed to hit him hard. His marriage was in disarray. His company was beset by troubles. His beloved China was slipping from his grasp and into the hands of the Communists. To his colleagues he seemed even more restless and impatient than usual—frustrated by his inability to shape events as he wished, overwhelmed with ideas for which he could find no adequate outlet.

  Allen Grover, one of Luce’s closest associates, believed after spending several weeks traveling with him in Europe that Luce was “getting bored with his office job at Time,” that he felt that he had “nobody to talk to in the U.S., nobody of his intellectual level.” Grover continued:

  Luce is a good man on the great issues…. But on the small issues, the personal relationships, he is a very bad man, thoughtless and arbitrary…. He has such intellectual arrogance that he does not believe anybody can tell him anything…. [H]e has so lost the art of conversational give and take that he has become a colossal bore…. Pleasant social conversation is just not in him anymore.

  Billings, Grover’s partner in analyzing Luce’s state of mind, wrote of “the depth of [Luce’s] professional melancholy.” His conversations were “practically impossible to transcribe…. So much of his communication is by gesture and expression … nobody would believe it…. He says that it is no use talking to stupid people and most people are stupid. He is utterly arrogant in his manners; his tempers are sharp and awful…. We wondered if, for all his brilliance, he was going crazy.”1

  Grover and Billings were not alone in their views. A Business Week reporter, interviewing Luce for a twenty-fifth-anniversary story on Time, recorded his impressions of their conversation:

  I have never in all of my reasonably gregarious life sustained a conversation with anyone so incoherent…. All of his sentences, many of his words are broken … put together in a non-logical pattern…. His incoherence comes from the many ideas in his head racing to get out of his mouth and getting in each other’s way.

  Stories abounded of Luce’s increasing distraction. Colleagues reported that at lunches and dinners, he would talk almost incessantly, shoveling food into his mouth as he did so, and then—at the end—having no memory of having eaten and asking indignantly why the meal had not yet been served. At one lunch he overlooked the meal he had ordered and unthinkingly ate only a platter of green beans that happened to be near his seat. When a soufflé was presented at Luce’s table at an opulent meal in Paris, he took a forkful and waved it over the dish interminably while his dismayed guests (and the chef) watched the soufflé collapse. He dressed expensively, but it was not usually noticeable. His secretary frequently called Luce’s home and had items delivered to his office because he so often wore unmatched shoes or socks.2

  By 1950 Luce appeared to be considering alternative paths in life. Early that year Connecticut Republicans approached Clare to see if she would be a candidate for the U.S. Senate. She declined but suggested trying to recruit Harry. And for several weeks, despite his previous refusal in the 1940s, he thought seriously about running. He had a “definite interest,” Luce told the New York Times in January. “Several Republican leaders who seemed very much to want me have asked me to think about it, and I am thinking about it.” He discussed the possibility with his editorial staff, insisting that he was unlikely to run but talking at length about the attractions of doing so. He felt, he said, “like a Pentagon general of propaganda who had a chance to get up under fire on the front lines.” How could he say no? But at other times he claimed to be miserable at the prospect of entering politics. “I shouldn’t have gotten into this and it’s going to take a lot of coping for me to get out,” he complained. Part of what worried him was the prospect of running against his friend and Yale classmate, William Benton, who was up for reelection. But the real obstacle was his fear of giving up his magazines and the power they gave him—power that he rightly believed was greater than any he could wield in the Senate. Weary as he may have been with running the company, he could not give it up. Early in February he announced he would not enter the Senate race.3

  In the late summer of 1950 he announced that he would take a year’s leave from Time Inc. “to collect his thoughts and travel.” Billings would run the company in his absence and would even move into Luce’s own, palatial office as a symbol of his new, if temporary, authority. But as with the Senate race, Luce wavered, even after he had announced his decision. “He just sits in his office, doing nothing and staring off into space,” Grover reported. “He seems in the depths of gloom: certainly the happy prospect of a year off hasn’t lifted his spirits…. [He] hates New York because he has been a personal failure here, has not established himself and Clare socially among New Yorkers. True! True!!” (Luce even talked at times, probably not very seriously, of moving the company out of the city—to Indiana, or Texas, or Westchester.) His longtime secretary, alarmed at his pending departure (and the disruption of her own routine as a result) began telling Billings what had once been carefully guarded secrets about Luce’s life and his marriage. “Clare has no friends, and neither does Harry,” she confided. Ed Thompson, the editor of Life, said that Luce was “very lonely.” Billings wrote that Luce’s “nerves are shot…. He’s in bad shape.” Once his sabbatical formally began, Luce continued to find excuses to return to the building, many of them connected to the roller-coaster course of the Korean War. Early in 1951 he abandoned the sabbatical altogether, moved back into his office, and tried to pretend nothing had changed.4

  But things had changed. More than ever Luce felt isolated in his own company, unable to control the magazines as he wished and unable fully to articulate his own aspirations for them. As was often the case, he responded to frustration with travel—serious, purposeful, almost obsessive travel that would, he believed, help him understand the new postwar world that he still hoped to shape. “He seems to feel happily useful,” Billings told Grover, “only when he is on large tours of inquiry, shooting through the firmament like an inquisitive comet.” Luce took exhausting trips around the United States, calling on mayors, governors, business leaders, and what he liked to call “characters”: “my favorite College President … [a]
rich, civilized land owner … a busy country doctor … the civic-leading Rotarian … three fine, salty female characters.” In the space of a few weeks, he visited Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Boise, Seattle, Portland. On a later trip he went to Cincinnati and to Dallas, Fort Worth, and Snyder, Texas, and then, on another, to Chicago, Anaconda, Butte, and (again) Seattle and Portland. These travels seemed at least temporarily to refresh him, and he wrote back to his editors with enthusiasm about the “new America” he was discovering. Even in the smallest, least lovely towns, he found inspiration: “The Americans of Butte, Montana … do a job—a whale of a job, and they seem to be doing their big job with a) a considerable amount of fair and friendly dealing with each other; and b) a belief in progress.”5

  His trips outside the United States were even more frequent and more frantic. He often claimed that he did not want to spend his time meeting with important people, but in fact he did almost nothing else. The hapless Time Inc. correspondents in the cities he visited often spent nervous weeks organizing his meetings and events before confronting the tornado of his presence. “Our Mr. Luce … came and went, leaving us, among other things, completely limp and worn out,” one of his Time Inc. hosts wrote after a Luce sojourn in Brazil. It turned, she said, “into a mad whirl for all concerned and toward the end took on … gigantic proportions.” In the course of only a few days, he met with the president, a cardinal, the American ambassador (for a state dinner), ministers, business leaders, and one of the country’s biggest ranchers. In England he met with both Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, the first Labour Party prime minister, and left encouraged that Britain was not in fact turning into a socialist society. After a trip to the Continent—where he visited Germany and Austria—he wrote ebulliently about the progress American reconstruction had made and noted that there was “more political vitality in Europe of a non-Communist or anti-Communist nature than I had supposed.” Grover, after reading Luce’s copious memos of his travels, warned his colleagues that “the Boss has rediscovered Europe.” Having made the rediscovery, Luce made repeated return visits. After a 1949 trip his office compiled a list of the people he had met—more than a hundred, among them the pope, the presidents or prime ministers of Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and France, princes and princesses, statesmen, writers, and artists, Charles de Gaulle, Jean Monnet, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. After a trip around the “rim of Asia,” he compiled another such list of those he had spoken with “at serious length”: the presidents of South Korea, Nationalist China, and the Philippines, the emperor and prime minister of Vietnam, the prime minister of Japan, and more than a dozen other governors, ambassadors, and ministers. “After all these encounters,” Luce noted proudly, “I flew in 33 hours, 8,000 miles from Singapore to London to dine at 10 Downing Street with Winston Churchill.”6