Kennan’s views had a dramatic influence on the Truman administration, by providing both an explanation of Soviet behavior and a strategy for confronting it. A year after the Foreign Affairs article appeared, the president endorsed at least some of its central findings. In the face of Communist threats to Greece and Turkey, the president announced the “Truman doctrine,” which declared that the policy of the United States was “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”—not to confront the Soviet empire directly, not to attempt to liberate countries already within Moscow’s orbit, but to prevent Communism from spreading beyond its present borders. Containment—a policy that rejected both the hopeful view of a Soviet-American partnership and the combative call for an aggressive effort to destroy Soviet power—became the framework for the next half century of American foreign policy. (Kennan had not, in fact, advised resisting Communist expansion everywhere, but only into areas of “strategic interest” to the United States, by which he meant the great industrial powers, primarily Western Europe and Japan. Truman and his successors had a broader view of where to draw the line.)22
Luce was enthusiastic at first about what he considered Truman’s long-overdue commitment to a strategy to counter Soviet power, as illustrated by the president’s support of the struggles of Greece and Turkey against Communist threats. The president had finally abandoned what Luce considered the “confused” and “soft-headed” policies that had characterized Truman’s first years in office and had acknowledged the necessity to combat Soviet ambitions. Luce supported the Marshall Plan and its ambition to combat Communism in Europe by rebuilding the economies of Western Europe. And his magazines embraced the containment strategy with considerable zeal. “Communist imperialism must be contained,” Time declared in 1947, not long after Kennan’s article had appeared. “U.S. influence must expand to contain it.” Similar language emerged repeatedly in memos and meetings in the first years after the war. “The No. 1 issue: Soviet Communism,” Billings wrote of an editorial meeting with Luce. “We all quickly agreed it must be contained.” Luce began discussing tactics that would undermine Communism from within—exactly the kind of approach that Kennan had recommended. “The big new thing in U.S. policy,” he wrote in 1950, “should be to reach the people behind the Iron Curtain, to keep in touch with them, to handle the refugee problem on a big scale, etc.”23
But while Luce and his colleagues accepted some elements of the containment policy, they chafed at its restraints and more often than not sided with those who believed that the policy was too timid for the gravity of its time. Their dissent began with long-standing grievances: the failure to support Nationalist China adequately, the culpability of Marshall and Acheson in those decisions, and the absence of a “moral” basis for America’s foreign policy. “Marshall is a senile dodo, too conservative in this crisis,” Billings complained. “Acheson is the symbol of error and disaster,” Luce wrote. “He has no conviction that Communism can be stopped and pushed out of most of Asia in the foreseeable future.” And even more damningly, in 1948: “I charge Truman and Marshall with endangering the future of humanity by their incompetence.” Luce was slowly moving toward a different approach to the Cold War: the growing demand from the right for a policy that would do more than contain, that would, rather, “liberate the captive nations” and “roll back” the Iron Curtain.24
The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 elevated Luce’s anxiety about the global crisis. Would the conflict lead to an “all-out atomic” war, or “piece-meal?” he wondered. “Suppose they sink a U.S. carrier. What’ll we do?” His prediction was the use of atomic weapons against Russia. But the war also renewed his hopes for a significant shift in American foreign policy. As with most of his other international positions, his response to this new conflict was largely shaped by his preoccupation with China. Less than forty-eight hours after the war began, Luce was proposing an editorial for Life that would advocate a “reversal of Truman’s policy toward China,” reflecting his own view that “the defense of Formosa” (now the headquarters of the exiled Chiang and his followers) was “far more significant than the U.S. military participation in Korea.” On the whole, in the first months of the Korean conflict, Luce was uncharacteristically supportive of the Truman administration, admiring the president’s quick and forceful decision to resist the North Korean invasion, comforted by the presence of Douglas MacArthur as commander of the United Nations (in reality overwhelmingly American) forces there. “The reaction of the plain man seems to have been, ‘At last! It was the only thing to do,’” an exuberant Life editorial proclaimed. “Both the President and the plain man are to be congratulated: the President for the courage of the decision and the plain man for … good judgment on a very complicated matter.” In the first months of the war this confidence seemed fully rewarded by MacArthur’s dramatic military successes: the rapid reconquest of South Korea and the expansion of the war to the North, which Luce believed would ensure a reunification of the divided land under its anti-Communist (but far from democratic) leader Syngman Rhee. Luce was so confident of victory that, having once postponed his planned sabbatical, he left for a trip to the Middle East. Even the Truman administration, intoxicated by the prospect of victory, anxiously convinced themselves that MacArthur could be trusted to advance into the North without risk of widening the war.25
Luce’s return from his aborted sabbatical in November 1950 coincided with the sudden and mostly unpredicted invasion of North Korea by the Chinese army—an intervention that MacArthur had predicted could be easily thwarted and would result in a “bloodbath” that would destroy the enemy’s forces. Instead the Chinese routed the Americans, drove them out of North Korea, and again moved deep into the South. Luce, like many others, was deeply shaken. His first, and continuing, reaction was once again to blame Truman and “that bastard Acheson,” not MacArthur, who had badly miscalculated the strength of the Chinese. It was the “worst defeat the U.S. had ever suffered … the abyss of disaster,” Time reported. “The United States,” Luce wrote privately, had “made a complete fool of itself” in its failure to provide enough air support to permit MacArthur to stop the Chinese. He even reproached his friend, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, by asking him to respond to “a most serious charge concerning the inadequacy of the air build-up, for which you have a large measure of responsibility.” Luce visited John Foster Dulles, then an assistant to Acheson and a man whose views of foreign policy he greatly respected; and he was shocked to hear the panicked (and misinformed) Dulles say that the American forces had been surrounded and that “it is the only army we have. And the question is: shall we ask for terms?” But the disaster only strengthened Luce’s belief that the war must be won—and even expanded—no matter the cost. The alternative would be “the loss of Asia to Communism…. No Asian could evermore put any stock in the promise that had given him hope against Communism.” This new war, Time wrote grimly, “would have to be begun in the knowledge that Russia might come in too, which would lead to the atomic horrors of World War III.”26
Luce was grimly ebullient about this expanded war and saw in it, at last, the great opportunity to destroy the Chinese army and, eventually, the Mao regime. “The US should prepare the Nationalist Chinese to return to the Mainland,” Life wrote exultantly in September. In a January 1951 editorial the magazine went further, proclaiming that there was “no choice but to acknowledge the existence of war with Red China and to set about its defeat.” Undeterred by the possibility of war with the Soviet Union, Luce asked his editors: “Are we—the U.S.—in favor of the liberation of all peoples from the Communist yoke?” Speaking as if Time Inc. were itself a nation-state with its own foreign policy, Luce answered his own question with emphatic language. The company’s goal was “‘to beat the bejesus out of Stalinism’—or, more pompously, to liquidate the Soviet Communist Power System.” After a rambling editors’ meeting, Billings wrote that “Luce w
ants the Big War…. He’s good and belligerent…. I suspect he’d be glad to war on USSR tomorrow.” At one point Luce speculated about the wisdom of “plastering Russia with 500 (or 1000) A bombs.” And in a rebuke to the Realpolitik of the Truman administration, he argued that “the struggle between Freedom and Communism is, at bottom a moral issue … a religious issue.” What no one has a right to say, he added, “is that we can live peaceably and happily with this prodigious evil.”27
By early 1951 MacArthur had stabilized the line of battle and was beginning to push the Chinese forces north. By March his forces had once again retaken Seoul and were moving toward the southern border of North Korea. Luce quickly regained his earlier enthusiasm for the war. “The destruction anticipated the first week of December just did not occur,” he said with relief. “MacArthur did not blunder in North Korea and his army did not suffer a great defeat.” “Confusion” was no longer the “key word,” he claimed. “We are now serious about rearming. Things are not as bad as the press says and never were!”28
Almost immediately, however, a global debate began on how aggressive the American strategy in Korea should now be. To Truman and Acheson and, at least equally important, to America’s European allies, another expansion of the conflict into North Korea and the likely extension of fighting into China would risk a new world war that could engage not just the Chinese but the Soviets. “If we go it alone in Asia,” Truman said at the time, “we may destroy the unity of the free nations against aggression. Our European allies are nearer to Russia than we are. They are in far greater danger…. I do not propose to strip this country of its allies in the face of Soviet danger.” To MacArthur, however, all the concerns and reservations about an extended conflict with the Chinese seemed like the kind of political meddling that many military leaders throughout history have consistently resented. But unlike other unhappy generals, MacArthur could not help venting his frustrations in public—in press briefings, in conversations with civilians, and in public letters. As his frustrations grew, so did his indiscretions. When asked why South Koreans eager to fight were being turned away, MacArthur attributed it to “basic political decisions beyond my authority” (even though he himself was responsible for the policy). A Hong Kong news agency reported that the general had said that “United Nations forces were circumscribed by a web of artificial conditions … in a war without a definite objective.” And in early April 1951, in response to a letter from House Republican Leader Joe Martin complaining about the “cheapness” of the war effort, MacArthur wrote back: “It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest…. As you point out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.” Luce and MacArthur had no experience with and even less patience for the concept of “limited war,” and neither had any inhibitions about saying so. “Either get out of Korea entirely or fight the Chinese Reds in their homeland where it would hurt them,” Luce argued. A failure to pursue the enemy across the 54th parallel, he believed, would be a form of “appeasement.”29
Truman, on the other hand, considered MacArthur’s statements a form of insubordination. On April 11, 1951, to the dismay and contempt of millions, Truman recalled MacArthur from his command of the UN forces in Korea and effectively ended his long military career. Luce spared no effort to use the event as a club against the Truman administration and the State Department. “MacArthur as Commander had not only a right but a duty to express his convictions about military strategy,” he argued. Time offered a scathing denunciation of the president’s policy that well exceeded even the magazine’s normal level of polemicism:
The drama of MacArthur’s removal and homecoming … has brought [Truman’s] foreign policy into the open. This policy … denies to the U.S. the efficient use of its power, guarantees to the enemy the initiative he now has, promises that the U.S. will always fight on the enemy’s terms. The policy invites the enemy, World communism, to involve the U.S. in scores of futile little wars…. Up to now, World War III has been prevented by the fact that the U.S. is stronger than Communism. The new policy almost certainly brings World War III closer because it throws away a large part of U.S. strength.
Not surprisingly Time laid the blame on Luce’s most-hated bête noire: “It was Secretary Acheson’s view which prevailed with the President: do nothing to widen the war; let the Communists keep the initiative.”30
Two weeks after MacArthur’s dismissal, Luce paid him a visit in the suite the general was temporarily occupying in the Waldorf-Astoria. Meeting the famous and powerful was by now a routine part of Luce’s life, and yet he was still susceptible to what he considered true greatness. And in the spring of 1951 no one seemed greater to Luce than MacArthur. “I stepped into the drawing room, and there was the Great Man alone in the big room, sunlight streaming from windows on three sides,” he wrote in a “private” memo after the visit. “I was amazed at the sight of the man…. He looked healthy … handsome … and more vigorous than any public man I know.” MacArthur naturally defended himself, adamantly denied that he had been insubordinate, and talked of his concerns about the army he had left behind. To Luce’s obvious delight MacArthur blamed his dismissal on the State Department, which he believed was running the war “down almost to daily detail.” The secretary of state, he charged, “has taken over the function of a Prime Minister.” Luce noted that this dubious claim was “an example of how MacArthur never fails to come up with an original and stimulating notion, completely out of the commonplace mold of the tiresome editorial writers.” MacArthur tried to appear aloof, with no cares about himself. The “great outpouring” of support (“more than human”) was “not primarily for anything I have done.” But his anger was clearly visible. The government’s attempt to silence his dissent on the war was, he insisted, a short step from a government effort to silence the press. “You will be next,” he warned Luce. “By insidious ways already beginning, the Press will be put under wraps. You must fight, you must fight now for your freedom.”31
In the aftermath of this visit Luce added MacArthur to the pantheon of those he considered truly great men: among them Theodore Roosevelt (whom he had never met), Wendell Willkie, Chiang Kai-shek, and Winston Churchill. Almost immediately he began lobbying his editors to choose MacArthur as Time’s next Man of the Year, even though by late fall, the pendulum of public opinion was already swinging away from him. “He won the Korean War,” Luce implausibly argued (at a moment when the war still had almost three years to go). MacArthur had made “one of the speeches which will ‘go down’ at least in American history.” And, Luce added, the “Old Soldier has not ‘faded away.’” On the contrary he was a leading candidate for president—and one of very few Americans “who have a big popular following.” His editors eventually overruled him and chose instead Mohammed Mossadegh, the new prime minister of Iran, who was already beginning to nationalize the nation’s oil reserves (an action that would lead to his CIA-assisted overthrow in 1953). MacArthur, Luce’s editors argued, was no longer the big news. What they almost certainly also thought was that any MacArthur article would be shaped by what Billings called “his excitement and enthusiasm for the Great Man,” an example of “Luce’s boyish susceptibility to Greatness.”32
But Luce’s adulation of MacArthur, which continued intermittently through much of the rest of his life, was not simply a product of starstruck infatuation. It was also because he thought MacArthur represented the best and perhaps last chance for the fulfillment of Luce’s great dream—a strong American commitment to a non-Communist Asia and to the liberation of China. He wrote of his hopes in a Life editorial even before his eventful meeting with the general. MacArthur
has a great role—a role of greatness—to play in this country now…. He was ousted for no petty reason but because he chose to challenge the whole drift of events and the dominant attitudes of the Government of the United States and of the United Nations…. [He] is today the onl
y man of the West who has in Asia not only immense prestige but also the devoted loyalty of millions and millions of Asians…. How do they think of him? As imperialist? Conqueror? No—as liberator and friend.
MacArthur would, Luce predicted, lead the United States out of “the passive, helpless and hopeless position” into which Truman and Acheson had maneuvered America. “Can any man rise to the greatness our perils demand?” he asked. “[In] the dreary landscape of our time,” only MacArthur “seems to have been shaped by greatness.”33
• • •
MacArthur did not become a serious presidential candidate in 1952 as Luce had once hoped. Instead, as he himself had publicly predicted in his speech to Congress but had probably not really expected, he began slowly to “fade away.” Luce never lost his deep admiration for “the great man,” but his principal goal—especially now that the Korean War had failed to produce the results in Asia he had hoped for—was to defeat the Democratic administration in the 1952 elections and bring back a Republican government for the first time in twenty years. “I felt that it was of paramount importance to the United States that a Republican should be put in the White House,” he explained years later of his position in 1952. “It had been 20 years since there had been a Republican Administration.” Americans, he argued, “should have the experience of living under a Republican Administration and discovering that they were not thereby reduced to selling apples on street corners.” It did not take him long to switch his loyalty to another popular general: Dwight D. Eisenhower.34
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century Page 51