The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  When he journeyed to more remote places, in which the famous and powerful were rare, he became an avid travel writer, producing long personal accounts of the landscapes, the people, and the cultures he encountered. On a trip through the Middle East, during which he visited Iran and the lands along the southern border of the Soviet Union, he wrote of the exoticism of the region: the “endless void” of the Persian deserts, the crude construction techniques of railroads in Tabriz, the strange markets in Azerbaijan, the shapes of mountains, trees, orchards, the lives of border patrols, men riding donkeys. But when he arrived later in Beirut, he reverted to his usual tendency to admire what was most “American” about the rapidly changing world. He was dazzled by the modern, business-driven city and its “American-minded” people. Its Western universities (most prominent of them the American University in Beirut) were, he said, “wonderful advertisements of what we like to think of as the ‘best’ in American life.”7

  Luce almost always considered the places he visited of enormous interest and importance, but he had a particular and somewhat gloomy fascination with the Arab world. The creation of Israel, he wrote, “was a shocking surprise to the Arabs and produced a reaction of bewildered disillusionment and hostility to the U.S. The Arabs are unable to explain the U.S. intervention except on the theory that America is literally ruled by the Jews.” U.S. support of Zionism had, Luce said, left “a trail of social injustice and the smell of injustice.” But always the optimist, he felt certain that “this bleeding can be stopped” if America would choose to act. “A Theodore Roosevelt, I believe, could settle this matter in a week.”8

  Luce’s travels proved to be only intermittent distractions from the growing troubles facing his company in the dawning years of the Cold War. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers—no longer Time’s foreign editor but still a “special writer” for the magazine—testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and accused Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, of having been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. At first the accusation seemed wholly implausible. Hiss was a respected diplomat who had accompanied Franklin Roosevelt to Yalta, had helped draft the United Nations Charter, and was a friend and associate of Dean Acheson, soon to become secretary of state. Hiss heatedly denied the charges and insisted he had never met Chambers (although he later conceded that he might have known him under another name). Given the contrast between the smooth, sleek, well-dressed Hiss and the rumpled, overweight, agitated Chambers, many people doubted the charges. But dogged Republicans, chief among them the first-term representative Richard Nixon, continued to pursue the case and kept it alive. In October, Hiss sued Chambers for libel. Chambers responded by making a new and explosive accusation. Hiss, he said, had not just been a Communist but also a spy for the Soviet Union. To support his claim he presented several reels of microfilm, which he had hidden in a pumpkin in the garden of his Westminster, Maryland, farm. The “pumpkin papers” seemed to support Chambers’s story, and Hiss—although not yet without influential supporters—began his long, lonely years of prosecution, imprisonment, disgrace, and struggle for vindication that continued, unsuccessfully, for the rest of his life. (Classified Soviet documents released in the 1990s seemed to confirm Chambers’s claim that Hiss had participated in espionage.)9

  The Hiss-Chambers controversy shook Time Inc. badly, but only after months of escalating pressure. The left-leaning writers and editors who had so despised Chambers a few years earlier were mostly gone, eased out by Luce’s increasing intolerance of them. The remaining staff, including Luce, admired Chambers, believed his story, and for a while sought to defend him. When Chambers offered to resign at the time of the first HUAC hearings, Luce replied, “Nonsense. Testifying is a simple patriotic duty.” He told his colleagues that “Chambers is an honest man and we must give him our faith.” Others at Time, among them Roy Larsen, were “deeply disturbed” about the reputational damage that Chambers’s continued presence might cost the company. Tom Matthews, who vacationed in Newport, Rhode Island, reported that people he met there were asking about Chambers: “Who’s this Communist who runs Time that just got arrested?” Billings, despite his belief that “the weight of credibility is now in Chambers’s favor,” worried that the case would be “an ordeal for us…. Has Time suffered a moral slip?”10

  The October revelations of the “pumpkin papers” changed Luce’s view. In accusing Hiss of espionage, Chambers had implicated himself as well by admitting that he had been one of Hiss’s handlers. Luce was already becoming uneasy about defending Chambers as a result of the many gleeful attacks from such longtime enemies as Walter Winchell, Westbrook Pegler, and the Chicago Tribune, who accused him of “harboring a communist.” (“It’s our No. 1 public relations problem,” Billings wrote. “We are under constant, nagging attack for having Commnists in our midst.”) The Chambers case had become a “pain and embarrassment,” Luce complained. And so he seized on the unsurprising revelation of Chambers’s own role in espionage and used it as his reason for dismissing him. “Goddam it Whit,” he said during a brusque final meeting with Chambers in December, “you told me you had been a Communist, but Jesus, Whit, you didn’t tell me you had been a spy?” Chambers, who considered Luce’s astonishment to have been disingenuous, replied with characteristic melodrama: “You know, Harry, when you took me on, I began to have some hope for America. I despair for it now.”11

  But the ghost of Chambers continued to haunt Time Inc. for years. The Hiss trial, and the huge attention it attracted, dragged on through 1949, and the controversy went on much longer, creating continuing awkward publicity for Time Inc. In the spring of 1950 Chambers began to show around the manuscript of his new book on the case, which he titled Witness. Luce tried to buy the serialization rights for Life, convinced (correctly) that the book would create a sensation. Some of his colleagues had doubts. “Chambers writes like an angel,” Billings said, “but I don’t know whether I believe him or not.” Luce offered Chambers sixty thousand dollars for the rights. But a few days later Chambers signed on with Life’s fading rival, the Saturday Evening Post, sparking speculation among the Time Inc. editors that an embittered Chambers was wreaking public revenge. Most damaging of all, however, was that the Chambers issue had raised accusations that Time Inc. had been weak in the then-raging battle against Communism.12

  “Communism is the most monstrous cancer which ever attacked humanity,” Luce wrote the Time Paris correspondent in 1949, “and we shall do our best, however feeble, to combat it at all times and all places.” He was, like most other Americans, an adamant Cold Warrior in the battle against world Communism. But he was also a participant in the campaign to identify Communist influence within the United States. As early as 1946 Luce was berating his editors for being “such a bunch of softies that they aren’t able to fire anybody, especially if he’s a Communist sympathizer…. I don’t want any Communist sympathizers working for Time Inc.” And so Time Inc. began slowly (and mostly quietly) to purge at least a few employees who had, or seemed to have had, Communist connections or sympathies. Luce tried to prohibit using the word “leftist” in the magazines, because he considered it a respectable but misleading euphemism for Communism. He lashed out at his editors for not being tough enough in print on radicals. Paul Robeson, he complained in 1949, “has … displayed his full traitorous attitude to the U.S.,” but the Time Inc. publications had “never spelled it out.”13

  Luce was particularly hostile to those responsible for what he considered the “great betrayal” of his time: the failure to prevent a Communist victory in China. Two of his principal targets were John Carter Vincent and Owen Lattimore, both of whom, Luce believed, had misled policy makers in ways that facilitated “China’s tragic disaster.” He stopped short (barely) of calling them Communists. But Time, reflecting Luce’s determination to drive them both out of any role in making policy, attacked them with a steady drumbeat of denunciations and innuendos.

  Vincent was a
career diplomat and the director of the State Department’s East Asia desk during the civil war in China. He was, Time said, in “a perfect position to exercise enormous influence over our policy in China,” and he had used that influence disastrously to press Chiang “into a coalition with the Chinese Communists.” While the magazine grudgingly conceded that Vincent might not have been a Communist, it insisted that he had been as damaging to the national interest as any Communist could be. He was, Time stated, “one of the chief architects of a policy that led to a triumph for Communism [in China] and a disaster for the U.S.” Because he had been charged by Truman’s own Loyalty Review Board with having expressed “studied praise of Chinese Communists and equally studied criticism of the Chiang Kai-shek government … there is reasonable doubt as to his loyalty.” Vincent left the foreign service in 1953, and Time made certain to report that the new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had accused him of “a failure to meet the standard which is demanded of a Foreign Service officer.”14

  If anything, Luce had even more contempt for Owen Lattimore, an Asia scholar and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, whom Luce had once briefly recruited as an expert adviser to his magazines. His sense of personal betrayal may have intensified his hostility. In the aftermath of World War II, Lattimore, like Vincent, had advocated a coalition government of the Nationalists and Communists in China and had been harshly critical of Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. And so as with Vincent, Time avoided few opportunities to discredit him. The magazine portrayed Lattimore as a man enmeshed in “a powerful Communist web of propaganda and persuasion” that had a significant influence on policy. When congressional committees called Lattimore in to testify, Time noted that the case against him was made up entirely of hearsay. But the magazine added that while Lattimore “had not been proved a Communist … he had not proved that he was not one.” That characterization mirrored Luce’s own private comments about Lattimore: “The important point it seems to me is that, whether or not Lattimore is a Communist, the damage which his ideas have done to our country’s cause is very great.”15

  Even so, Luce’s attitude toward Communist subversion in America was more nuanced than that of many hard-core anti-Communists, as his reaction to Senator Joseph McCarthy made clear. A World War II veteran who ran for election in 1946 by egregiously exaggerating his war record and distorting his opponents’ positions, McCarthy neared the end of his first term in the Senate with no achievements of consequence. But in 1950, having rejected other strategies to bolster his reelection chances, he chose anti-Communism—an issue of relatively little interest to him in the past—and used it to create a personal crusade that made him for a time the most famous figure in the search for Communist influence within the United States. McCarthy attracted an enormous constituency of passionate supporters, who saw him as he liked to portray himself—a tough street fighter taking on a sinister and dangerous elite. But McCarthy’s recklessness also generated strong opposition, even from people who might otherwise have supported him.16

  Luce was not opposed to exposing Communist influence in America, as his purging of his own company and his attacks on IPR, and on Vincent and Lattimore, made clear. But his broader interest in Communist ideas in America was an intellectual one, and he devoted most of his anti-Communist efforts to countering the arguments of the Left and making the case for his own more conservative liberalism. “I think we have a definite obligation to help the anti-totalitarian liberals find their proper signals in this day of the confusion of liberalism,” he wrote in 1947 in an admiring account of the anti-Stalinist magazine the New Leader. “How I cheer for [Sidney] Hook’s use of the word ‘muddle-heads.’” At the same time, however, he developed an early and very strong distaste for McCarthy. His dislike was partly cultural. McCarthy, was a crude and coarse man who embraced the kind of simplistic populism that Luce had always disdained. But he also disliked McCarthy because Luce believed that his excesses threatened to discredit more legitimate anti-Communist activities. The search for Communist infiltration of America “has become too much the … scapegoat of everything that’s wrong with us,” he wrote in 1950, as if his own attempted purge of Communists within Time Inc. had never happened. “The fact is that Communism is no longer a real issue, even indirectly, in America.” Just as Prohibition had taken the public’s mind off more serious problems in the 1920s, Luce felt, the fear of domestic Communism was doing the same in the 1950s. McCarthy’s focus on elite leaders and institutions threatened the world Luce himself inhabited. Luce also considered McCarthy a great distraction, drawing the public’s attention toward a minor issue (domestic subversion) and away from the most important challenge of the era (the struggle against the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism in the world). What the nation needed, Luce argued, was a coherent strategy for combating global Communism, not a witch hunt for subversives in America.17

  As the United States struggled to build a strategy for dealing with Soviet Communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, three broad groups competed to define the new paradigms of American foreign policy. The weakest, and most maligned, of these groups was the coalition of left-leaning liberals and those who were known as “Communist sympathizers” or “fellow travelers,” who continued to believe that a peaceful and cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union and the Communist world was possible and desirable. Their leader for a time was former vice president Henry A. Wallace, a harsh critic of the increasingly combative view that government leaders were taking toward the Soviet Union. In 1948 he helped create a new Progressive Party, whose principal goal was to defuse the Cold War. There were significant Communist influences in the party, but most of its supporters were what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., called, in his 1948 book The Vital Center, “doughface liberals,” people who were not Communists but whom Schlesinger considered too weak and gullible to take a stand against the enemies of democracy.18

  A second group argued that the United States had no choice but to confront Communism aggressively and forcefully, by war if necessary, so as to ensure its ultimate defeat. This was the position of Joseph McCarthy, but it had much broader support than that, mostly in the conservative wings of the Republican Party. For almost two decades this coalition’s view of the Cold War was best expressed in a phrase that became the title of a campaign tract used as late as Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign: “Why Not Victory?” Their goals were the “rollback” of Communism where it presently existed and a greater readiness to use nuclear weapons in battles with Communist nations. They were strongly opposed to the third, and dominant, American strategy of the Cold War era: “containment.”19

  “Containment” emerged in response to the bewildered uncertainty that gripped the foreign-policy community in the last months of World War II and the first years of the tense and fragile peace. Its principal creator was a previously obscure American diplomat, George F. Kennan, who was stationed in Moscow in the 1940s. Kennan had a brilliant, astringent intellect that enabled him to discern patterns and strategies few others could easily see, and he helped transform American policy with a cable—known famously as “the long telegram”—that he sent to the State Department in February 1946, and with a subsequent article published anonymously in Foreign Affairs magazine. Kennan offered a rebuke to the Wallace “progressives,” who thought that the Soviet Union, if treated well, could become a “normal” nation capable of cooperating with the West. In contrast, Kennan saw the Soviet Union as a profoundly ideological nation fundamentally different from the United States. “At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs,” he wrote in the abbreviated language of his telegram, “is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity…. Thus Soviet leaders are driven by necessities of their own past and present position to put forward a dogma which pictures the outside world as evil, hostile, and menacing.” Hence the militarism of the Soviet state and its fear of internal subversion and opposition. The Soviet Union, Kennan believed, was, in effect, a “conspi
racy,” which sought to extend its power through duplicity and intrigue. It was

  a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.20

  Kennan’s assessment of the nature of the Soviet Union was largely consistent with that of the anti-Communist right. But his cautious, pragmatic prescription for how America should respond to Communism was very different. The Soviet Union, he argued, was opportunistic but also risk averse. When challenged by a superior power it was likely to retreat as long as its vital interests were not in danger. “In these circumstances,” he wrote, “it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” At the same time the United States, through its own “spiritual vitality” in the world, could slowly help shape the future behavior of the Soviet Union. Once Russia could be made to feel “sterile and quixotic” in contrast to America, the “hopes and enthusiasm of Moscow’s supporters must wane” and “added strain” would be placed on Soviet foreign policy.21