The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Harry and Clare flew together on the still relatively new Pan Am Clipper service to Hong Kong and arrived at the end of April 1941 in a nation at war. By then China and Japan had been fighting for more than a decade, beginning with the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931, and escalating sharply in 1937 when the Japanese army swept through eastern China. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s leader since 1928, moved with his army far inland to Chungking, where the government regrouped. The war with Japan was not the only conflict Chiang faced. Civil strife had plagued China since the early twentieth century—conflicts between warlords and the Kuomintang (the Nationalist revolutionary party Sun Yat-sen had created in 1912), and later a conflict within the Kuomintang itself, between Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists. In 1928 the Communists—under the leadership of Mao Zedong—left the Kuomintang and formed a government and an army of their own, which Chiang considered as dangerous an enemy as the Japanese invaders. Despite appeals from many sides that the factions unite to fight Japan together, Chiang was never able (and perhaps never willing) to cooperate with the Communists, a failure that would have momentous consequences throughout the war and beyond.

  After arriving in Hong Kong, the Luces flew in the dead of night to Chungking on what Harry called “the most dangerous [airline] in the world”—a five-hour journey in a darkened plane, most of it over Japanese-occupied territory. They landed in a dry riverbed outside the city, and the passengers were carried up the steep bank in sedan chairs. That same day Luce watched a Japanese air raid from the terrace of the American Embassy and was struck less by the violence than by the efficiency with which the residents took cover. A similar optimism colored virtually everything he encountered during his weeks in China, finding silver linings in almost every cloud. The government’s desperate escape to Chungking, he wrote, “has now brought modern ideas and methods to the vast agricultural hinterland … and has also served to give all the Chinese people an idea of what their total nation is…. The Chinese are discovering, in these years of bitter suffering, their own potentialities.” Shortly after his arrival he observed that while “China is seething with political factions,” it was also “accomplishing miracles in their defense of the country.” The Nationalist army, he wrote, “is the best thing in China, morale is magnificent against appalling difficulties.”60

  But nothing contributed more to his optimism than his first encounter with Chiang Kai-shek, whom he was already describing as “the greatest ruler Asia has seen since Emperor Kyan Hsi [Kangxi] 200 years ago.” He and Clare had received an invitation to visit Madame Chiang to discuss United China Relief. She was, Harry wrote, “an even more exciting personality than all the glamorous descriptions of her…. What instantly convinced me of her greatness was her delivery of the most direct and unrestrained compliment to my wife’s beauty I have ever heard.” Sometime during their conversation, Luce sensed a door opening, and moments later he saw “a slim wraith-like figure in khaki [moving] through the shadow”: the Generalissimo joining him for tea. Harry presented him with “a portfolio of photographs of himself and Madame,” and Chiang “grinned from ear to ear … as pleased as a boy.” They left after an hour of conversation “knowing that we had made the acquaintance of two people, a man and a woman, who, out of all the millions living, will be remembered for centuries and centuries.”61

  A few days later the Luces boarded a tiny Beechcraft and flew to the headquarters of a Chinese army division on the northern front, across the Yellow River from a Japanese encampment. It was a harrowing flight, traversing three steep mountain ranges while buffeted by high winds. There was no active combat under way during their brief visit, but they trekked through the encampments and entrenchments to the riverbank and looked across at the Japanese forces. Despite the terrible damage inflicted on the towns and villages near the front, Luce was again impressed by what he considered “as fine a morale, as strict discipline and as intent an expression as ever characterized any army in history.” Clare took pictures to illustrate a story on the war she would later publish in Life. Harry took notes to send back to his editors. And even in the midst of the disarray of an active front, Chinese officers managed to organize teas and dinners to cement their relationship with a man they knew only as a powerful American in a position to help their cause.62

  Luce’s trip to China had a profound effect on his view of the war—and of the world. It renewed and intensified his love of the country and his faith in its ability to join the family of successful nations. Every place he went, no matter how damaged or desperate the surroundings, he took note of signs of progress: bankers demonstrating knowledge and sophistication in the management of the currency; soldiers in trenches working on primers as they tried to learn to read; officers helping them study “the doctrine of democracy with the teaching of Sun Yatsen and the American constitution as text books;” generals reading Clausewitz and other Western classics of military strategy; and many members of the Kuomintang elite—including Chiang Kai-shek and Mme. Chiang—converting to Christianity. “What strikes me about these far inland cities,” he wrote of a brief stop in Sian, a large provincial capital, “is how modernized they have become … I see America and the 20th century stamped all over them.” On his return to New York he began working furiously to raise money for United China Relief, which very rapidly met and exceeded its initial goals. UCR raised over four million dollars in 1941, most of it in the last four months of the year, the beginning of an impressive multiyear total of nearly fifty million dollars. But his most important task, he now believed, was to heighten American consciousness about the crisis in China and make the war in the Pacific as important to Americans as the war in Europe. “As long as the Army of the Republic of China remains in being,” he said in one of a series of speeches he made shortly after his return to the United States, “Japan is doomed to defeat and disaster no matter what policy she tries.” It was “absolutely certain that without China we cannot achieve a victory.” In his discussions with his colleagues at Time Inc. he was even blunter: “I’m still convinced as I always have been that we must win the war in Asia first…. I wonder whether we have taken China seriously enough…. What about a full-out consideration of full-out aid to China? … When is the time to put Chiang Kai-shek on the cover again?”63

  Luce’s 1941 visit to China launched another important relationship. Waiting for him as he descended from his plane to the dry Chungking riverbed was a young man wearing khaki shorts and a sun helmet: Theodore H. White, known to everyone as “Teddy.”

  Only relatively recently had Time abandoned its tradition of simply rewriting news borrowed from other organizations. But by the late 1930s the magazine was posting correspondents in numerous areas of the United States and the world. The war rapidly expanded that effort. By the time World War II had begun, the staff of correspondents was already large and growing rapidly. White, then Time’s principal China correspondent, was someone about whom Luce was already curious. White was then twenty-six, short, wiry haired, round faced with oversize glasses and an infectious smile. He had grown up in what he later called the “Jewish ghetto” in the Dorchester area of Boston and had graduated from the famed Boston Latin School, open to the brightest of the city’s children and an avenue of social mobility for the lower middle class. In the fall of 1934 he entered Harvard on a scholarship and almost by chance took up the study of Chinese, which soon led him to John King Fairbank, a faculty member only three years White’s senior and soon to be the most influential historian of Chinese-American relations of the twentieth century. He became White’s longtime mentor and friend. White graduated summa cum laude and was awarded two Harvard traveling fellowships, which he used to finance a trip to China. Shortly after he arrived he accepted a position in the China Information Office, the Kuomintang’s propaganda agency in Chungking. A few months later he encountered John Hersey, then a Time editor visiting the city in search of correspondents. He hired White more or less on the spot, offered him ten dollars a dispatch, and allowed
him to continue his work for the Chinese government at the same time. White’s lengthy, copious memos quickly attracted attention in New York, and soon he was on the Time Inc. payroll full-time.64

  White was Luce’s kind of correspondent, despite the great social differences between them. Like Luce, White loved China with an almost romantic passion. Also like Luce, he loved to talk, to argue, and to push the intellectual boundaries of conversation. Perhaps even more important, he had no qualms about using his dispatches to convey his own opinions and sentiments. “The chief fault that you are liable to find with my production is a pro-Chinese bias and a Chinese enthusiasm,” he wrote to his editor in New York. As if to prove his point he wrote in one of his first dispatches, published in Time almost unaltered, that the “present Chinese Army has spirit. It glows. The men are willing to die. They mix and tangle with the Japanese with a burning hate that is good.” He was for a time an ardent admirer of Chiang Kai-shek and his government. Chiang’s “personal record,” he wrote, “is one of the most positive and virile of any government leader today.” Under Chiang’s leadership, he observed, “China made such magic strides toward self-consciousness.” And while White was observant enough to see the many flaws in Chiang and the Kuomintang regime, he kept his reservations mostly to himself. He had an obligation, he believed, “to say nothing at all that might help the Japanese … and to say nothing that might hurt the cause of China in American eyes,” a position that he conceded “made impossible the telling of the rank corruption, inefficiency and stupidity that exists in high places in Chungking today.” Little wonder that Luce found him so appealing. The two men spent much time together and formed an unusual friendship. White showed little of the timid deference that characterized Luce’s relations with most Time Inc. employees. They were “Harry” and “Teddy,” a mismatched pair who interacted—at least in Chungking—almost as equals. When it came time for Luce to return to New York, he brought White with him and appointed him the Far East editor of Time, a post he held for only a few months before returning to China to cover the war. Luce viewed him as an indispensable asset in the effort to generate support for the Chinese government, someone who shared his own view that, as White wrote shortly after his return to America, “If the United States must face the Axis on two fronts, it can do so for just one reason: that a Free China is fighting the Battle of the Pacific.”65

  Luce’s publication of “The American Century” and his reengagement with China greatly increased his commitment to driving public debate over intervention in the war. His magazines attacked the “isolationists” and “appeasers” with almost gleeful vigor, and they continued to lambaste the Roosevelt administration for what Luce considered its timid and erratic path to war. Time even criticized the legendary Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s secretary of war, for being too old and feeble to run the military. “The whole civilian defense machinery,” the magazine wrote, was “running without any responsible head” and was pursuing “uncertain policies … fresh confusions piled on stale confusions.” Time referred so often to the “fog” in Washington that the Harvard Lampoon ran a parody: “Fog settled down over Washington last week. Coming by way of Chesapeake Bay at a mean rate of 10 m.p.h.”66

  Luce’s simmering feud with Roosevelt burst into the open once again in November 1941 over what was, in fact, a trivial issue. Time had run a short notice about Chilean president Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who was encountering political troubles. “While the Popular Front swayed,” Time wrote, “bushy-mustached President Aguirre felt more and more like a man who does not govern but merely presides. He spent more and more time with the red wine he cultivates.” A few days later Aguirre died. The Chilean consul general in New York protested, and Roosevelt seized on the issue to do something he had long talked about but had never done: go after Luce. “The Government of the United States has been forced to apologize to the Government of Chile for an article written in Time magazine,—a disgusting lie,” he wrote. “This article was a notable illustration of how some American papers and writers are stocking the arsenals of propaganda of the Nazis to be used against us.” Luce seemed mildly shell-shocked by the ferocity of the attack and responded meekly and defensively that “no one had [previously] said anything in Time’s report was untrue.”67

  By the beginning of December, after a series of failed American efforts to thwart Japanese expansion, Luce—and many others—came to believe that war in the Pacific was imminent, perhaps inevitable. “Everything was ready,” Time proclaimed in the December 8 issue (published on December 1):

  From Rangoon to Honolulu, every man was at battle stations…. A vast array of armies, of navies, of air fleets were stretched now in the position of track runners, in the tension of the moment before the starter’s gun…. A bare chance of peace remained. This bare chance was that the Japanese would remain immobile on all fronts but the Chinese. Very few men who were in a position to know thought much of this chance.68

  On December 7 the Luces hosted a luncheon for twenty-two people at their home in Greenwich—an event typical of their lives ever since Harry’s marriage to Clare. Among the guests were diplomats, theologians, business leaders, and some of Luce’s colleagues from Time Inc. It was a crisp, clear day, and the guests were in good spirits, avoiding too much talk of war and enjoying the meal, the august company, and the lavish surroundings. Shortly after dessert was served, the butler—violating a strict rule never to interrupt a meal—handed Clare a folded piece of paper on a small tray. She glanced at it, tapped her glass, and said, with a tone of mockery perhaps unsuited for the occasion, “All isolationists and appeasers, please listen. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.” Most of the guests rushed to the radio or the telephone. Harry raced to his car and within an hour was back in his office in Manhattan. Both Time and Life were already in production for the following week. Luce interrupted the press runs and helped remake the issues. For Time, he created a new department on the spot: The U.S. at War, and oversaw a lead story that called the attack “premeditated murder with a toothy smile.” He added that “the war came as a great relief, like a reverse earthquake, that in one terrible jerk shook everything disjointed, distorted, askew back into place. Japanese bombs had finally brought national unity to the U.S.” Luce and Billings completely remade Life as well, with a new lead cover story on Pearl Harbor—although forced to use photographs taken well before the attack. Louis de Rochemont and his staff hurried to recut the December March of Time.69

  Sometime late that day Luce called his father in Pennsylvania to talk about their shared relief that the war had finally begun. “We will now all see what we mean to China and China means to us,” Rev. Luce told his son. After hanging up, Harry, Sr., told his wife how reassuring it had been to hear from their son. Not long after the conversation he retired for the evening and died quietly in the course of the night. Harry left no record of how he viewed the symbolism of these two enormous events—one global and one personal—occurring on the same day. “My father was profoundly shocked by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor,” he later wrote a friend. To others he noted only that “it was wonderful that he lived long enough to see America and China as allies.”70

  A few days later Luce wrote to Roosevelt, offering something short of an apology for his earlier criticisms but a modest effort at conciliation. “We wished to do every last thing in our power, to strain every nerve, to assist our country to face the ordeal and triumph of it,” he wrote of the months preceding Pearl Harbor. “We have made mistakes and fallen short of our best intentions. But … no company of men and women … have ever worked harder … to do their duty as they saw it.” Time Inc. would, he promised, not only comply with wartime regulations but would “think of no greater happiness than to be of service…. For the dearest wish of all of us is to tell the story of absolute victory under your leadership.” In a handwritten note attached to the letter, he was more frank. Referring to the president’s attack on Time’s recent coverage of Chile, he wrote: “The drubbing you h
anded out to TIME—before December 7—was as tough a wallop as I ever had to take. If it will help you any to win the war I can take worse ones. Go to it! And God bless you.” Roosevelt wrote back that he liked the letter, that it “combines honest patriotism with genuine sportsmanship…. The waters of Pearl Harbor have closed over many differences which formerly bulked big.” But this warm truce in their long and sometimes bitter feud did not last for very long.71