The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  Luce read it, walked into a staff meeting, and asked who had written what he called “the best cinema review ever in Time.” From then on he paid close attention to what this shambling, disheveled, and strangely secretive man wrote and said.9

  The result was a period in Time Inc.’s history that became known within the company as the “Chambers War.” It began slowly with complaints from colleagues about his reviews—reviews that were intelligent, well written, and savagely anti-Communist. Chambers was particularly vicious in writing about the work of left-leaning intellectuals. A year after Luce’s first encounter with Chambers, he put him in charge of the entire “back of the book”—the culture section of Time that covered books, film, theater, and the arts. The obsessive, hardworking Chambers soon found himself, in effect, writing the entire section alone, sometimes spending the night on the couch in his office. As his influence grew, so did the anger among many of his colleagues about what they considered his ideological rigidity and polemicism. In a January 1941 Time essay, “The Revolt of the Intellectuals,” he took on Communists and left-leaning intellectuals, without drawing any significant distinction between them. Former Communist Party member and literary critic Granville Hicks and the sentimental liberal Archibald MacLeish received the same withering portrayals as arrogant elitists contemptuous of the ordinary people they claimed to champion. “Dolefully they clumped together in circles like the New Republic and the Nation,” Chambers wrote. “Substituting a good deal of intellectual inbreeding for organic contact with U.S. life, they developed a curious provincialism…. From this it was but a step to supporting the Communist Party.” He had a special animus toward the literary critic Malcolm Cowley, a former but not particularly repentant Communist, and seldom missed an opportunity to denounce him. In early 1942 he launched an especially damaging attack on Cowley—who had recently joined the wartime government propaganda agency, the Office of Facts and Figures—with a scathing review of Cowley’s new book of poetry, The Dry Season. (Oddly, the review appeared not in the Book section but in National Affairs.) Chambers combined dismissive condescension (“a sound, minor poetic talent”) with ridicule of Cowley’s romantic allusions to workers and activists. And he noted, maliciously, that “Congressman Martin Dies recently charged Cowley with having had ‘seventy-two connections … with the Communist Party and its front organizations.’” Shortly afterward Cowley was forced to resign from the government.10

  Chambers’s real ambition, however, was to write for the Foreign News section of Time—to have an opportunity to explain the world to what he considered to be an uninformed and naive readership. He had auditioned for a position in Foreign News shortly after he arrived at Time, but his heavy-handed anti-Communism soured Manfred Gottfried, who urged him to be more moderate in his judgments. Chambers, Gottfried recalled, looked at him with wry contempt, as if to suggest that Gottfried and his colleagues were “innocents.” Through much of the war Time’s coverage of the Soviet Union was—to Chambers’s considerable dismay—consistently restrained and at times admiring. But Luce’s view of the Soviet Union, never warm, cooled considerably as the war neared its end and Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe began to seem more ominous. Two other editors—John Chamberlain at Life and the Austrian refugee Willi Schlamm at Fortune—also complained frequently to him about Time’s sunny coverage of Russia. But it was Chambers who was the most consistent and persuasive critic. And when John Osborne, the Foreign News editor for the previous several years, decided to spend several months in Europe covering the war, Luce—to the surprise of almost all his colleagues—named Chambers the interim editor. Chambers wasted no time in establishing a new tone in foreign reporting: harshly anti-Communist and filled with forebodings about the future of Eastern Europe, which he believed (correctly) would become part of the Soviet empire. But what made his articles both powerful and, to his critics, infuriating, was the disdainful wit with which he presented his views. “Russia needed freedom from the fear of invasion,” he wrote caustically in August, suggesting the thinking of Stalin himself,

  a cordon sanitaire, in reverse, on its western frontiers. Henceforth, from the Arctic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea, there must be a chain of governments friendly to Russia. Why not? That was the short-range goal. The long view? In ten, in 20 years—the powerful, prosperous U.S.S.R. might convert the whole world by its example. That was cheaper than revolution or conquest. Time and power would tell.11

  The furor within the Time staff at Chambers’s appointment as foreign editor only grew as the content of Foreign News became more and more intensely anti-Communist. “My views were well known and detested with a ferocity that I did not believe possible until I was at grips with it,” he wrote in his memoir. One of his critics on the editorial staff wrote Luce to complain that “I read the incoming cables and I am amazed to see how they are either misinterpreted, left unprinted or weaseled around to one man’s way of thinking.” Chambers’s bias, he added, “confuses, irritates, frustrates our correspondents.” John Hersey later described a Chambers article as “written with bias and … filled with unjustified implications.” But Chambers stood his ground. It was “self-evident,” he argued, that the Soviet Union “was a calculating enemy making use of World War II to prepare for World War III.” His battle within Time, he insisted, was “a struggle to decide whether a million Americans more or less were going to be given the facts about Soviet aggression, or whether those facts were going to be suppressed, distorted, sugared or perverted into the exact opposite of their true meaning.” The controversy grew much fiercer when Luce asked Osborne to remain in Europe and named Chambers his permanent successor.

  By the end of 1944 the hostility toward Chambers had become so intense and so widespread that Luce ordered Billings to survey the views of the magazine’s foreign correspondents—all of whom responded with lacerating criticism of Chambers’s “editorial bias.” But Luce was by now a true believer, and he ignored the opinions that he himself had solicited. “The posture of events in January 1945,” he wrote in a memo to his staff, “seems to have confirmed Editor Chambers about as fully as a news-editor is ever confirmed.” A few days later, breezily dismissing the continuing furor, he wrote Chambers that “Foreign News is, once again, by far the best reading in the issue. And it’s all good.”12

  As if to flaunt his newly confirmed power, Chambers set out to write one of the most unusual—and controversial—articles ever to appear in Time. It was, unsurprisingly, a discourse on Communism, designed to challenge and even ridicule what he considered the naive optimism among many Americans about Stalin’s intentions. But the article was not a work of reportage or even a conventional essay. He described it as a “political fairy tale,” and he overcame substantial resistance from his colleagues before T. S. Matthews finally agreed to run it (with Luce’s reluctant consent, and on the condition that Chambers eliminate a few particularly inflammatory passages). Published shortly after the conclusion of the meetings of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at Yalta in early 1945, it described an eerie visit to the conference by the ghosts of Czar Nicholas II and his family, who landed (“with the softness of bats”) on the roof of the former imperial palace in which the meetings were taking place. They had come, Chambers suggested, because far from being appalled by Stalin (whose predecessors had ordered their deaths), they were fascinated by his ambition and his accomplishments. “What statesmanship! What vision! What power!” the czar exclaimed. “We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great…. Stalin has made Russia great again!” That was why “the greatest statesmen in the world” had come to Yalta to meet with him. “Greater than Rurik [a ninth-century imperialistic Russian chieftain], greater than Peter! … Stalin embodies the international social revolution. That is the mighty, new device of power politics which he has developed for blowing up other countries from within.” Chambers, the disillusioned Communist, portrayed Stalin not as an ideologue or a revolutionary but as the same kind of cynical power seeker who had crea
ted most of the tyrannies in human history. Nicholas, he imagined, admired Stalin because Stalin had succeeded at accumulating the great power that Nicholas had only aspired to achieve.13

  “To most of my colleagues,” Chambers later wrote, “‘The Ghosts on the Roof’ was a culminating shocker. Feeling ran so high against it, the general malevolence swelled into my office so fiercely, that again I closed my door,” as protection from an office hubbub that sounded “like the night of a lynching bee.” Although he liked to describe himself as a kind of stoic in the face of criticism, the hostility Chambers encountered took its toll, particularly on his already precarious health. In the fall of 1945 he began to suffer severe chest pains. Once, he later recorded, “I blacked out on the train.” Chambers himself blamed his frailty on the pressures of the job. The animus of his colleagues had, he believed, forced him to write virtually the entire Foreign News section himself. “I had no choice,” he insisted: “Once more, a working day without sleep became my standard practice.” (He did not mention that amid the pressures of work, he also became hugely overweight and addicted to coffee.)

  Chambers knew he had to leave the office to recover, and he offered to resign from Time. Matthews suggested that he stay on the payroll but return to writing book reviews—from home, at least during his convalescence. John Osborne returned to edit Foreign News, but only on the condition that Chambers not succeed him again. Luce, who did not think Chambers would ever regain his health, agreed. When Chambers did rebound a few weeks later, he discovered that the door to the Foreign News editorship was now closed. “I should like to come back at once,” he wrote plaintively to Luce. “I do not want to come back to Time to edit Books…. I want to edit FN.” But in the end Chambers had no choice. For the rest of his years at Time, he wrote for the Culture section and took on special projects, including a number of important cover stories Luce sent his way. He worked mostly from home. He remained to Luce one of the best editors and writers he had ever employed.14

  Luce’s mounting concern about the Soviet Union (significantly intensified by Chambers) paled in comparison with his concern about China. His 1941 visit had reawakened a passion for his birthplace that had been largely dormant for many years and had introduced him to a leader—Chiang Kai-shek—whom he passionately admired. Still, he retained at least some skepticism about the viability of the Kuomintang and its military effort for several years after Pearl Harbor.

  That skepticism was occasionally visible in the magazines themselves, which for a while after Pearl Harbor continued to report reasonably accurately on the travails of the Chinese military and the failings of the Chiang regime. That was largely because of the success of Teddy White in maintaining a warm relationship with Luce while slowly and cautiously building a case against Chiang Kai-shek. White’s stature within the New York offices was such that his dispatches—although despised and ignored by Chambers—shaped the views of many other editors well into 1944, especially in the new International section, which allowed dispatches unacceptable to Chambers to appear in the magazine. Time ran one of those dispatches more or less verbatim in March 1943 and even gave White an almost unprecedented byline. It provided a harrowing description of a famine in Honan Province and an oblique but unmistakable condemnation of the failings and “tremendous miscalculations” of the government. He closed with a harsh description of a banquet given for him by local political officials, juxtaposed against a cannibalism trial in progress against a woman who had allegedly “eaten her little girl” after she had died of hunger. On his return to Chungking, White sent to New York an account of his subsequent visit to Chiang Kai-shek, who refused to believe his description of Honan until presented with photographs of the famine. “The Generalissimo has one simple remedy for that sort of graft,” White noted, “… stand them against the wall.” The country, he concluded, “is dying before my eyes.” He was even more pessimistic when he returned briefly to New York in the spring of 1944. “Evidently China is going to pieces politically—and trying to suppress the news,” Billings wrote in his diary after a lunch with White. “The Soong family is crooked.” Luce himself talked with his staff about China’s “terrible internal condition and the possibility of its collapse.”15

  Not long after White’s piece appeared, Luce reluctantly agreed to publish a major article in Life by the novelist Pearl Buck. Like Luce a child of Chinese missionaries, Buck had a lifelong attachment to the country and its future. She was an ardent anti-Communist and a longtime admirer of Chiang. But she too was beginning to despair of the ability of the Kuomintang either to win the war or to create a stable China. “I do not want to be found guilty of misleading the American people,” Luce wrote his colleagues when he agreed to let the piece run. Buck warned that the Chiang regime was riddled with corruption, was suppressing free speech, and was marginalizing officials who recognized the problems. “We are in the process of throwing away a nation of people who could and would save democracy with us but who if we do not help them will be compelled to lose it because they are being lost themselves.” A year later Luce agreed to let Life run another major Teddy White story that provided one of the harshest indictments of the Chiang regime yet published anywhere. Chiang, White argued, “was doomed unless he could be shocked into reform by America.” His government, White claimed, combined “the worst features of Tammany Hall and the Spanish Inquisition.” White was elated when the article actually appeared mostly intact. Luce wrote to him shortly afterward that “You have written undoubtedly the most important article about China in many years—perhaps ever.” White wrote back: “I was told you would never let anyone publish anything like the things I wanted to say,” he wrote Luce. “I was scared as Hell, Harry, at what I thought would be an inevitable clash between my convictions and your policy.” Only weeks later, when White was back in China, he would discover that these fears were more than justified.16

  As early as the summer of 1943, Luce had been gently chiding White for his increasing pessimism. “Last winter there was some feeling here that, on balance, we were giving a too favorable view of China.” But after the publication of some of White’s more controversial pieces and of Pearl Buck’s story in Life, he said, “we have pretty thoroughly discharged our obligations to print the bad with the good about China…. The plain fact, the great fact, the glorious fact is that China stands…. I think you can justifiably be more concerned to look for the facts which explain China’s strength than to look for the elements of weakness.” The Life story on Chiang clearly did not meet that standard. And while Luce had agreed to publish the piece, and had even praised it, he also wrote at length about White’s failure to recognize the obstacles to Chiang’s success and the remarkable fact of his survival. “I guess the hard tack I want to get down to is that we Americans are not in a very good position to tell China how she should integrate herself in a manner agreeable to us until we have integrated a little of our own ‘democratic’ might and majesty in a manner somewhat more beneficial to China.” White’s response—an impassioned nine-page letter about conditions in Chungking—expressed none of the optimism that Luce was advocating. To White the “great political fact” of China was not what Luce saw as its glorious survival but its growing internal chaos. “The Chinese peasantry turned on their own army and fought against it on the side of the invader!” he wrote. The people had developed “great contempt” for the army and for the government it served. “Even within the Kuomintang there is a bitterness that is completely new.” He had, he added, “been chided many times by Lt. General Stilwell for the lush and unrealistic tone of all American public writing on China and its war effort.”17

  Joseph Stilwell, the American military commander in China, was a harsh critic of Chiang Kai-shek and his government. Known to many as “Vinegar Joe” for his tart, blunt manner, he had developed a great love for China over several decades and had fought gallantly in the first years of the American war in the Pacific to open up a supply route from India to China—known as the Burma Road
—after the Japanese had cut China off from the sea. By 1944, however, he had become appalled by what he considered the incompetence and corruption of the Kuomintang. He was particularly critical of the government’s apparent unwillingness actually to fight the Japanese. Chiang—whom the dyspeptic Stilwell called the “Peanut” in conversation and in some of his official dispatches—was, the general believed, more interested in holding on to power and isolating his Chinese Communist rivals than in winning the war. Stilwell’s contempt for Chiang was no secret to the American military or to White, who came to rely on the general for information about the war that the Chungking government was often reluctant to provide. As the feud between Stilwell and Chiang grew increasingly bitter, White found himself siding more often than not with Stilwell. He was shattered in the fall of 1944 when Franklin Roosevelt recalled the general from China after Chiang had balked at the American demand that Stilwell take command of Chinese forces. (From the day of Pearl Harbor, Stilwell told White at the time of his dismissal, “this ignorant son of a bitch has never wanted to fight Japan.”) At Luce’s request White prepared material for a cover story on Stilwell’s recall for Time. In it he made clear that he shared Stilwell’s contempt for Chiang (whom he was now describing as a “man of almost appalling ignorance”). “Stilwell was relieved,” he wrote in his memo to Luce, “because of Chiang’s embittered opposition to him; Chiang’s opposition sprang from the fact that he could no longer tolerate within his own country a group of men whose standards of honesty, efficiency and responsibility were so strikingly at variance with his own apparatus…. Chiang has outlived his historical usefulness.” Nothing White might have written could have been more certain to enrage Luce, and the cover story on Stilwell that actually appeared in Time on November 13, 1944, made clear how great the rift between them had become.18