The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Luce placed considerable hope in the company’s Time-Life International division. Launched shortly after World War II, it had grown steadily through the 1950s with editions of Time and Life tailored to various parts of the world. In some cases it was published in local languages—Spanish, Italian, Japanese—and was producing modest but growing profits. By the late 1960s it was generating about 10 percent of the company’s substantial revenues, but the high costs of production and marketing ensured that it produced far less than 10 percent of its profits. A few overseas editions continued for decades, but Time-Life International was disbanded in 1968.25

  Time Inc. could get only so much leverage from recycling its editorial products in various forms, and this limited diversification did little to compensate for the great loss of earnings created by the decline of Life. But Luce remained cautious about moving into wholly new fields, and few people in the upper echelons of the company were willing to challenge him. The company remained profitable, and the magazines remained popular, but for the first time in its history Time Inc. was on a downward arc. Only after his death did the company begin seriously to diversify.

  Luce did not slow down during his last years as editor in chief. As always, he traveled frequently, around the United States, to Europe, to Asia. He continued actively to oversee his editors, not as obsessively as he had sometimes done in the past, but enough to send a steady flow of often-unwelcome memos to the desks of his employees. His 1960 appointment of Otto Fuerbringer as managing editor of Time was controversial among the staff, who considered him—correctly—to be more rigidly conservative and autocratic than his predecessor, Roy Alexander. (Among many of his editors—and especially among those who had lobbied furiously against his appointment—he was known as the “Iron Chancellor.”) Luce was not much troubled by Fuerbringer’s politics. He liked him most of all for his efficiency and his extraordinary editorial skills. He had much the same appeal to Luce as such earlier controversial editors as Laird Goldsborough and Whittaker Chambers, whose ideological enthusiasms sometimes exceeded his own but who created good copy quickly and effectively.26

  Fuerbringer’s semi-Teutonic rigidity was the source of many of the criticisms Luce received from the Kennedy administration. Lyndon Johnson, once he became president, seldom complained to Luce about his coverage in the magazines (although he sometimes complained bitterly to others, among them John Steele, the Time Washington correspondent). Instead Johnson used his trademark tool: shameless flattery. He sent Luce frequent notes of praise, called him periodically on the telephone, invited him to informal dinners and private meetings, and praised him for his speeches and essays. He quoted Luce’s speeches to others (always making sure that someone informed Luce that he had done so). He lavished him with thanks—“deep appreciation,” “delighted with your praise,” “forever in your debt”—for even the most trivial communication. He solicited Luce’s suggestions for the president’s speeches. He issued a proclamation in 1965 declaring “World Law Day,” and made sure to write Luce about his role in creating it. When Luce was unable to attend the ceremony, the president said very publicly, “Who will send Mr. Luce’s pen to him?”27

  Luce himself had admired Johnson since the 1950s, expressed delight when he became vice president, and gave unexpected praise to the president’s Great Society legislation. “Ours is a secular society,” Luce said in a speech in Washington in 1965. “We set our sights on the Great Society, where there will be even more good…. How to bring joy into the world? How to make the Great Society a thing of glory—to build as if to the glory of God—ad majorum dei gloriam? It seems impossible, but there are hints of this vision.”28

  The 1964 campaign was a difficult one for Luce, because it led him to question his loyalty to the Republican Party. In 1960 he had admired John Kennedy but had endorsed (even if somewhat tepidly) Richard Nixon, largely because he saw relatively little difference between the two contenders and because Nixon was a Republican. But in 1964 Luce was troubled by the anger and bitterness that Barry Goldwater’s supporters showed at the party’s convention in San Francisco. He tried to explain it by arguing that “the prime significance of the Goldwater candidacy is dissatisfaction with the Republican Party, and the main reason for that dissatisfaction was that the Republican Party had been a loser, not a winner.” But he could not accept the party’s current “theory that the Republicans would have a good chance to win if they nominated a ‘real,’ that is a conservative Republican.” In this “moment of time,” he said, the Republicans had “very little chance to win…. Johnson has, I think, touched the more responsive nerve.” He confided to Donovan that “I haven’t, for some time, felt that the Republicans had anything noteworthy to say.” Periodically Luce read a Goldwater speech or watched a campaign event and tried to persuade himself that the candidate was getting “better.” He praised Goldwater for a “good serious speech on foreign policy” and a call for party unity that Luce described as “completely satisfactory…. [He] has largely purged himself of his previous failure to conciliate the so-called ‘moderate Republicans.’”

  But Luce was never comfortable with Goldwater. “The trouble, of course, is not what Goldwater said or failed to say,” Luce wrote of a speech the senator made in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “The trouble is what he had previously said, and the impression which he has given as to what manner of man he is by what he has said.” Shortly before the election he explained to Leo Burnett that “[a]fter months, or perhaps more accurately a year, of patient listening to Senator Goldwater’s case, we did not find it sufficiently convincing.” By then Luce was no longer editor in chief. But his resistance to Goldwater was shared by Donovan, and for the first time in many years Life provided no endorsement. Not long after the Republican convention, Luce’s son Hank and his wife joined Harry and Clare for a night at the theater. As their car traveled through Central Park, Clare—an active Goldwater supporter—asked Hank whom he was supporting. Hank replied that he was voting for Johnson and then asked, “Dad, who are you for?” Hank recalled later, “I never got an answer,” just “a conspicuous silence.” He always felt certain that his father either did not vote at all or voted for Johnson.29

  Luce’s political ambivalence in these years reflected his uncertainty and confusion about what he considered the new character of American society. He was both interested in and puzzled by the emergence of the New Left—and he turned, improbably, to Father Murray as his guide. The New Left was based on “selective pacifism,” Murray argued, and “might not be against all wars. In fact they might support wars of liberation in other parts of the world.” Luce had no fixed opinions of his own about the New Left and peppered those around him—Clare, his colleague Robert Elson, Murray, and others—with questions. Luce had many blind spots, certainly, but he was seldom afraid of change; and in the early years of the New Left, he remained more or less open-minded toward it—with one conspicuous exception: Vietnam.30

  The struggle for Vietnam was the last great crusade of Luce’s life. It did not consume him in the way that World War II or the Chinese Revolution had, to be sure. But he believed in a non-Communist South Vietnam, in peacetime and in war, with unflagging commitment; and he tried to make his magazines support his views despite roiling controversy—in the country and in Time Inc. itself—about the wisdom of the war.

  Luce’s interest in Vietnam stretched back to the early 1950s and his dismay at the collapse of the French effort to defeat the Communist forces of the Vietminh. Not only had he hoped that the French would stave off Communism in Vietnam; he had also once again dreamed of a larger war that might provide an opportunity to overthrow the Chinese Communists as well. The failure of these hopes only intensified his interest in South Vietnam once it became an independent nation as a result of the 1954 Geneva conference which partitioned the country into a Communist North Vietnam and a non-Communist South. In 1957 Luce joined the American Friends of Vietnam, which supported the South Vietnam government. Luce contributed a modest amoun
t of Time Inc. stock to the organization. He promoted the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam, and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and argued that they “have contributed notably to the fight of their people against both Colonialism and communism.” That same year Luce presided over a dinner for Diem on behalf of the International Rescue Committee. In his letter of invitation he wrote that Diem “is one of the great statesmen of Asia and of the world. He has held back the flood of Communism which threatened to engulf his country…. In honoring him, we pay tribute to the eternal values which all free men everywhere are prepared to defend with their lives.” Such sentiments were widely shared in the mid-1950s, after Diem was invited to address an enthusiastic joint session of Congress and began to be called “the Churchill of Southeast Asia.”31

  Luce felt especially comfortable supporting the Vietnam War because he was, for the first time, fully aligned with the views of a wartime administration. His experience in World War II had been blighted by the mutual hostility between himself and Roosevelt. The Truman administration had ignored his impassioned pleas to save China and had supported the Korean War far more cautiously than Luce had hoped. But he harbored no such grievances toward the government during the Vietnam War. Eisenhower had strongly supported the American Friends of Vietnam in the 1950s and had provided lavish financial support to the Diem regime. Kennedy, who may or may not have hoped to extricate the United States from Vietnam, nevertheless supported the struggle publicly, expanded the American military presence there, and solicited Luce’s advice. And Johnson, who first introduced combat troops into South Vietnam and eventually created an army of well over five hundred thousand, saw in Luce an ally who could help justify his policies to the world. To ensure Luce’s cooperation, Johnson urged Henry Cabot Lodge, then serving as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, to invite Luce to Saigon. “I hope very much that you can come,” Lodge wrote flatteringly. “I know you will find much here that will interest you, and I know that it would help me to get the benefit of your thinking.” Luce did not accept Lodge’s invitation; but his support for Johnson, Lodge, and the war remained undimmed. He ensured that his magazines continued to support—and even sometimes went beyond—Johnson’s Vietnam policies. His aggressive vision of the war, rooted again in his hopes for overthrowing the Communist regime in China, was expressed in Time: “No one talks seriously about a full-scale land war on China’s mainland. But there can be no doubt whatever that China is the real enemy in Asia, and the greatest threat anywhere to world peace…. And there is room for argument that a more positive U.S. military policy toward Viet Nam would be to risk a confrontation with China in the right place at the right time.”32

  Johnson continued to seek Luce’s help until near the end of his presidency: “I’d like old HL to come out of retirement down there in Arizona,” Johnson told the Life correspondent Hugh Sidey in early 1967. “I’d like him to get in there and fight for me.” Johnson, Sidey recalled, “doubled up his fist and punched the air a couple of times. ‘I’d like him to help carry the battle.’” Sidey’s letter conveying Johnson’s message was sitting on Luce’s desk in Phoenix in February 1967 on the day before he died. Less than a year later Hedley Donovan began leading the magazines toward a more skeptical view of the war.33

  But while Luce’s positions may have pleased the government, they created another ugly battle within Time Inc. itself, one that raged for years and caused more rancor than at almost any previous moment in its history. The controversy centered at first on a brilliant young reporter whom Luce liked and admired: Charles Mohr, a Time correspondent who had served in Washington, India, and beginning in 1962, Vietnam. After less than a year in Indochina, Mohr was beginning to have doubts about the optimistic reports that the military was providing and about the ability of the Vietnamese army to resist the growing strength of the Communist National Liberation Front, which became known to Americans as the Viet Cong. But back in New York, Fuerbringer treated Mohr’s memos from Vietnam the same way Chambers had treated Teddy White’s from China. Mohr’s dark and sometimes brooding dispatches became in Time optimistic reports on the great progress the Americans and South Vietnamese were making. In the summer of 1963 Mohr was asked to write an article on Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, the wife of Diem’s powerful brother. He used the occasion to reveal the corruption, incompetence, and insulation of the Ngo family and their inability to make progress against the Communists. But when the story appeared in Time, it bore little relation to what Mohr had written. “The history of Vietnam is full of heroines,” Time said. “Today the most formidable and in some ways the bravest woman in South Viet Nam … is Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu.” The story did include some of Mohr’s criticisms of the regime, but after Fuerbringer’s intrusion, even the criticisms were muted and sometimes openly rejected.

  Not content with reshaping Mohr’s story, Fuerbringer commissioned a piece for Time’s Press section a few weeks later that attacked the journalistic culture in Saigon, which, of course, included Time’s own reporters. “Have they given their readers an unduly pessimistic view of the progress of the war and the quality of the Diem government?” the article asked. The reporters, it charged, “are in love with their work, so in love, in fact, that they talk about little else. They have a strong sense of mission.” They were “such a tightly knit group that their dispatches tended to reinforce their own collective judgment, which was severely critical of practically everything.” A battle broke out in New York with the publication of the article. Richard Clurman, chief of correspondents, demanded a retraction; otherwise, he predicted, Mohr and others would quit. Fuerbringer refused. Clurman, at Luce’s request, flew to Saigon to evaluate the reporters on his own. He returned even more insistent on challenging Fuerbringer’s characterization of the journalists. To his surprise Luce agreed and ordered a story “saying we were wrong.” But at the last minute, without telling anyone, the imperious Fuerbringer changed the wording before publication and removed the statement of error. Luce was furious, but he took no action against his managing editor. Mohr promptly resigned in the fall of 1963 and moved to the New York Times.34

  On April 16, 1964, Luce announced his retirement as editor in chief—at a moment when, as the New York Times reported, Time Inc. was “the largest magazine publishing business in the world.” He offered no reason for his decision, other than “it just seemed like a good moment.” He told reporters that he would continue to work more or less full-time, but on a wider range of projects, few of which he could yet identify other than a possible memoir. For the moment, however, he seemed to revel in the attention he received and the importance that the press attributed to his career and his departure. “The entire Time enterprise,” the Times wrote, “might be regarded as reflecting the missionary zeal of its founder for informing and uplifting the human race.”35

  Hedley Donovan, Luce’s successor, received relatively scant attention. “Would Luce really retire?” some of his colleagues asked. Luce had named himself editorial chairman, and there was much speculation about what the title meant. Had he simply promoted himself so he could continue to manage the company more remotely? The lavish dinner Time Inc. held in May to mark the transition provided no answers. It was designed to honor both Luce and Donovan. But most of the speeches passed over Donovan without much notice and focused on Luce’s achievements and legacy. Even Donovan himself felt the need to make the event about Luce. “Harry Luce has worked a kind of managerial miracle in this company,” he said in his own remarks. “These magazines are going to continue, in many important ways, to be Harry’s magazines.” But in the months that followed, and to the surprise of many of the editors, Luce did actually retire from the company. He corresponded frequently with Donovan and other editors, and he continued to write and report for the magazines occasionally. He did not, however, challenge Donovan’s authority and rarely criticized his successor’s decisions—although everyone continued to feel Luce’s presence and almost certainly felt somewhat constrained from moving too far beyond t
he magazine’s long-established norms.36

  Luce’s brief retirement was a relatively happy time for him. He was not much less active than he had been during his years as editor in chief. He traveled constantly, both in the United States and abroad, still facilitated at every point by Time Inc. employees. He even tried to arrange a trip to mainland China to meet with Mao and Zhou. Richard Clurman, his partner in this effort, wrote enthusiastically: “Your going to China and seeing Mao strikes me as perhaps the biggest potential coup in all of journalism today.” But in the end the trip proved impossible to arrange. He made dozens of speeches on issues he cared about and accepted honorary degrees. He spent more of his time in Phoenix with Clare than he had in the past, and he even began to purchase and renovate a new home in Hawaii, where Clare had longed to live for years. He returned often to New York, where he began, for the first time in many years, to enjoy a social life with friends. His doctors warned him that he was jeopardizing his health—“smoking cigarettes, bounding around the world, etc.”—and predicted that “these things would shorten his life.” Luce responded cavalierly: “I am taking off six years for the abuse that I give myself, but I am adding three or four years for what modern science now knows.”37

  Luce’s principal activity in the years after retirement was working on his memoir, which friends and publishers had been urging him to write for years. He spent many mornings in Phoenix working on it at a desk in his bedroom. Although he had been a writer all his life, he had never before tried to write a book and seemed to have trouble deciding how to organize so much material and express so many ideas. And so he wrote in discrete chunks, sometimes borrowing heavily from speeches he had made and articles he had written, presumably hoping that he would be able to integrate them at some later point. What he produced was a series of short and sometimes sketchy essays that reflected many of his lifelong interests and beliefs. (Not much in the manuscript was about himself, so calling it a memoir was a misnomer from the start.) He wrote about people he admired (Willkie, Eisenhower, Dulles, MacArthur, Churchill, but surprisingly little on Chiang Kai-shek), and he also discussed people he detested (Roosevelt, Truman, Acheson, McCarthy). He wrote about “prosperity marking a radical change in the human condition,” the “rule of law,” Communism and its inevitable exhaustion, and the “Providential nature of history.” Most of all he tried to explain what America meant and what its role in the world should be.38