The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  That became particularly clear a few months later when he was asked by a colleague how he would like the postwar world to look. Luce took the challenge and responded characteristically with an elaborately crafted document that was in some places prescient and at others dreamily utopian. He titled it “The Reorganization of the World.” It would be composed of “six major Federations.” Among them would be a “United States of Europe,” a system that would preserve “national entities” but oversee them with “many pan-European institutions and policies … which will set a dynamic bias towards European Union.” Luce was not, of course, alone in voicing this hope, but his outline came remarkably close to what eventually became the actual European Union. He was less foresighted in his view of the Soviet Union as a second great federation, which he hoped would “develop a prosperous and noble society.” China, of course, would be the key to Asia: The West, he argued, should “encourage by every means the renaissance of a great Chinese civilization.” India, should it achieve its “painful transition into modernity” and should it free itself from being “dominated by Europe,” would be another stabilizing force in the world. And of course the United States (which would be “a stronger industrial and hence military power than any other two nations combined”) and Great Britain (whose “ex-colonial domination” would be “a kind of binder for the world”) would continue to play their now-established roles as the true leaders of the globe. (Luce gave only passing attention to the less powerful areas of the world of the time: among them the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America).41

  As was his custom, Luce reached out to important thinkers around the country to help him with his great task. He asked the vice president of the University of Chicago, William Benton, to organize a group of faculty who might propose a “Statement of Principles” on economic development; but the scholars who joined the project became bogged down on “the monopoly question,” something in which Luce had little interest. He corresponded frequently with Walter Lippmann, whose views of the postwar world were much more pragmatic than his own. In 1943 Lippmann was promoting the idea of a British-American alliance to oversee the postwar world. Luce tried to draw him into the headier and more idealistic conversations he and his colleagues were organizing, and Lippmann happily agreed to join. But despite their friendship and mutual admiration, they did not reach a meeting of the minds. (“I hope I didn’t seem to be an objector or an opponent to the general plan,” Lippmann wrote Luce shortly after a brainstorming dinner.)42

  Instead of building a coherent vision of the future, Luce moved toward a set of ideas that created an obvious, uncontroversial view of the postwar world that almost no one could oppose. It began with two simple questions. The first: “Does the American nation exist for any particular purpose?” The answer, he argued, “rises in your hearts” and makes clear that “the American nation does exist for a specific purpose—in the words of the Battle Hymn: ‘To make men free.’” The second, more prosaic but equally important to Luce: “What, then, is the post-war TIME?” His answer was more complex but essentially the same. Time Inc.’s mission was “to explain about American journalism and in doing that we have to explain about America.” Explaining America, Luce came to believe, was remarkably simple.

  If we had to choose one word out of the whole vocabulary of human experience to associate with America—surely it would not be hard to choose the word. For surely the word is Freedom…. Without Freedom, America is untranslatable…. And therefore it seems to me that we can sum up the whole of editorial attitudes and principles in the one word Freedom.

  He had reached the end of his long and complicated effort to define America by avoiding the difficult questions:

  Despite all confusions by which we have been confused and may have confused others, I think we have achieved some intellectual right to say that we of Time Inc. have fought, are fighting and will fight … ‘For the Freedom of All Peoples.’ … We believe that the relation of the people of the U.S. with the other peoples of the world must be based on the principles of Freedom. (This can be endlessly celebrated.)43

  XI

  Losing China

  A Soldier Died Today,” Time announced solemnly in its first issue after Franklin Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945. “Everywhere, to almost everyone, the news came with the force of a personal shock. The realization was expressed in the message of the eminent; it was expressed in the stammering and wordlessness of the humble.” Roosevelt was “history’s man … no public figure had ever seemed so close to so many citizens.” In Time, in Life, in Fortune, the coverage of the president’s death was reverent, emotional, and—as one editor wrote—“awe-struck.” “In his time, no abler politician lived,” Time noted. Roosevelt had displayed the “greatness” that his era demanded, and he had brought his nation “triumphantly through a great war and started it on the road to peace.”1

  Although Luce remained uncharacteristically aloof from the coverage of the president’s death, he passively supported his editors’ decision to provide admiring and respectful tributes. He himself wrote a gracious letter to Eleanor Roosevelt praising her husband’s leadership. But privately he remained obdurate in his hatred. He described the fallen president bitterly as the man who “kept me, wholly without moral justification, physically isolated from the global war.” It was his “duty,” Luce once remarked, “to go on hating him.” As for Harry Truman, Luce was initially hopeful, if only because the new president was not Roosevelt. “I know of no better way to communicate to you my profound good wishes for your Presidency,” he wrote, “than to tell you of the confidence which, among themselves, a great number of your fellow citizens already feel in your character and ability.” Even more gratifying than Truman’s demeanor was the new president’s decision to allow Luce to travel into the war zones, at last revoking Roosevelt’s spiteful suspension of his passport. Barely a month after Roosevelt’s death, Luce was en route to the Pacific.2

  As excited as he was finally to be in a war zone, his trip was on the whole unremarkable. He spent most of his time on the aircraft carrier Yorktown, from which planes were bombing Japanese targets almost with impunity now that the Japanese air defenses had been almost completely destroyed. He saw little action, other than the multiple and occasionally fatal accidents committed by American sailors themselves. He spent much of his time sitting on the flight deck with a taciturn gunner’s mate, watching the planes come and go. “A Quiet Cruise of a Task Force Group,” he titled his notes on the trip for his editors, only half ironically; but he was energized nevertheless by his first experience with an American war front. As he gazed out upon vast stretches of ocean he envisioned a new “American frontier” between Okinawa and Manila that “will never be moved back from there. All this is extraordinarily in line with the genius of the American people.”3

  As always, Luce tried to arrange to see the most important figures he could find. (A much-sought-after meeting with Douglas MacArthur did not materialize, although Luce did manage a brief visit with his twenty-year-old son Hank, serving on a destroyer near the Yorktown.) As for men of power, he had to settle for the fleet commander, Adm. Arthur Radford. At one point Radford whispered privately: “Luce, don’t you think the war is over?” Luce replied that Radford would know better than he did. But on his return to the United States he went immediately to Washington to report to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal that the end of the war was in sight. Forrestal sent him to the State Department, where he told Undersecretary Joseph Grew—with considerable certainty but with no solid evidence—“that Japanese surrender could be obtained almost immediately—on one condition, which was that Japan should be allowed to retain the emperor, an idea he had heard often during his Pacific trip.”4

  Luce had high hopes for a meeting he managed to arrange with Truman, but the president either misunderstood the purpose of his visit or chose not to discuss the war with him. They had a cordial, perfunctory conversation that ended before Luce had a chance to make any recommenda
tions. He heard later that Truman did not want to discuss an end of the Pacific war until after his meeting with Churchill and Stalin in Potsdam in July—a meeting that turned out to be especially notable because it coincided with a momentous event in New Mexico: the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb. Luce apparently had no knowledge of the successful outcome of the Manhattan Project and very likely had known nothing of the project at all. Through the remainder of the summer he continued to promote a negotiated peace with Tokyo: retaining the emperor in exchange for ending the war.5

  His argument became largely moot on August 6, 1945, when the United States detonated an atomic bomb over Hiroshima. But Luce did not give up the fight. He and Joseph Kennedy called on Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and implored him to urge the president to delay further bombings—arguing again that Japan could be made to surrender without more destruction. Nothing came of this effort. The second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9, and the Japanese government surrendered less than a week later, but not before getting an agreement from the United States that Japan could retain its emperor. Most Americans celebrated the end of the war with little concern about the unleashing of this terrible new weapon. But Luce was deeply troubled both by the moral and the geopolitical implications of the atomic bomb. “The greatest and most terrible of wars ended this week, in the echoes of an enormous event,” James Agee wrote in the August 20 Time, at Luce’s behest, “—an event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance…. In an instant, without warning, the present had become the unthinkable future.”6

  Luce’s opposition to the use of atomic weapons was based on a complex, and never clearly articulated, set of concerns. He had religious qualms: Would this new capacity for destruction make faith obsolete? “In the atomic world,” he wrote, “who shall rule and how?” What would happen to “the proposition of the Christian faith that there is ultimate sovereignty in the universe and that this sovereignty was uniquely revealed to man in Christ”? He was concerned as well about how the existence of the bomb might threaten America’s ability to shape the postwar world once other nations—most notably the Soviet Union—acquired the weapon. “The idea of ‘sharing’ the atomic bomb with the Russians is crazy,” he insisted in response to hopeful suggestions from scientists that peace could be ensured by providing nuclear technology to other great nations. The atomic scientists, he wrote contemptuously, “feel a sudden profound evangelical and wholly unnatural concern of conscience about their business.” He was concerned as well about how the use of the bomb would allow the Japanese to redefine themselves as victims rather than aggressors. “I don’t think the atomic bomb was handled right,” he wrote to Billings in late August. “If the Japs have any good ‘alibi,’ it’s the bomb.”7

  Solicitousness for the fate of the Japanese people had certainly not been evident in his magazines’ coverage of the Pacific war. Time had expressed no concern about the Japanese-American relocation in 1942 and had reported sunnily on the “decent treatment” that these interned American citizens received. Time, Life, and even Fortune had joined eagerly in the extraordinarily racist depictions of the Japanese that pervaded most of the American media throughout the war—depictions that many contemporaries and some scholars have argued were significant factors in justifying the use of the bomb. Portraying the Japanese as savage, even barely human, made it easier to authorize unusually harsh assaults. One of Time’s first covers after the attack on Pearl Harbor had presented an almost simian portrait of Admiral Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Pacific fleet, in which both the background and the admiral’s face were colored entirely in a vivid and lurid yellow. Another cover in early 1942, at the time the Dutch East Indies fell to the Japanese, had portrayed a Dutch naval officer, with a small picture behind him of a monkey wearing a Japanese helmet and carrying a gun swinging by his tail from a tree. “What would the [American] people say in response to Pearl Harbor?” Time asked shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack. “What they said was … ‘Why the yellow bastards!’” Life light-heartedly captioned a photograph of American soldiers in a Pacific jungle: “Like many of their comrades they were hunting for Japs, just as they used to go after small game in the woods back home.” There is no evidence that Luce personally encouraged these racist stereotypes, but—like almost all American editors during the war—he did little to stop them (although he did publish an anguished letter to Time from Pearl Buck reminding him that using “yellow” pejoratively would offend many non-Japanese Asians). Nor had Luce raised objections to the horrendous firebombings of Tokyo and other cities, which had produced more carnage than either of the atomic bombs.8

  Whatever his views at the time, Luce’s ultimate concern about the atomic bombings had less to do with Japan than with China. The demonization of the Japanese in the Time Inc. magazines was, in part, an effort to distinguish them from their portrayal of America’s valiant Chinese allies. Life once ran a notorious photo essay, “How to Tell Japs from Chinese,” concluding that the Japanese—“squat … massively boned head [had] aboriginal antecedents,” as compared to the more refined and cultured features of the Chinese. But most of all, the atomic bomb contributed to what Luce considered the “massive failure” of the United States to stabilize China. “If the bomb had not been dropped,” he wrote years later in an unfinished memoir, “and if the well-laid plans for the MacArthur invasion had been carried out—then, almost certainly, … there would have been a major Chinese offensive, with American-trained Chinese divisions…. It would have been successful…. Chiang Kai-shek would have been in a position to move armies up to Peking and Manchuria.” As a result “Chiang would have had a chance.” But the abrupt end of the war against Japan led instead to the introduction of Soviet troops into Manchuria, the rapid disengagement of American troops in China, and the ability of Mao’s Communist forces to conserve their strength for the battle against the Nationalists. His views in 1945 never changed. Even in the year before his death, Luce continued to insist that sustained American support would have provided China with the “great chance” to create a democratic nation.9

  In October 1945 Luce was able to visit China for the first time in more than four years. Now that the war with Japan was over, he was eager to see how the Chiang regime was faring against the remaining challenges from its internal Communist enemies. In part Luce saw the trip as an antidote to his long, bitter conflict with Teddy White, whom Luce had come to believe was “an ardent sympathizer with the Chinese Communists.” He would be able to counter White’s gloomy predictions and offer a more reassuring image of postwar China. He made sure to bring with him sympathetic editorial colleagues from Time Inc., among them Roy Alexander and Charles V. Murphy, firm anti-Communists and, like Luce, strongly committed to Chiang. He would hear no discordant voices from his traveling companions, and, almost needless to say, none as well from his Kuomintang hosts. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he was again encouraged by almost everything he saw.10

  As usual Luce kept up a grueling pace during his visit, moving from city to city and province to province gathering impressions that he eagerly and voluminously recorded and sent back to New York. Everywhere he went he found reasons for optimism. “Chiang Kai-shek, by a dramatically successful show of superior force, completed the political conquest of the vast hinterland of west China,” he wrote triumphantly from Yunnan early in his trip. When told by an American general that Chiang had unwisely ousted a provincial governor, Luce insisted that, on the contrary, the “Gissimo did an important job very neatly.” Arriving in Chungking, he was showered with invitations from Kuomintang leaders, culminating in a dinner with Chiang and “a wonderful conversation … of a philosophical nature.” Late in the evening, after Chiang retired, Mme. Chiang continued the conversation, assuring Luce that “the Government now has a terrible responsibility not to disappoint the hopes of the people.” In Shanghai, later in the month, he wrote enthusiastically of the Kuomintang’s successes in restoring go
vernment authority. “This week,” he said, “the historically unparalleled drama of the reoccupation of East, South, and North China moved toward its climax.” He told Western journalists that he was “happily impressed,” and he praised Chiang’s “invincible effort.” The great question he had brought with him, Luce said, “was whether it would be reasonable to be optimistic about the future of China. So far it seems to me that the answer is definitely in the affirmative.”11

  He was equally positive about the role U.S. forces were playing in China in helping the country recover from Japanese occupation. “American troops here have behaved excellently,” he wrote, and “should continue to be a credit to their country…. The Chinese … welcome the Americans as a sign of a new day and examples of a better way to live.” Other journalists wrote emphatically about the impatience of American soldiers to return home and the G.I.s’ lack of respect for or confidence in the Chinese forces. One of the American soldiers who traveled with Luce, he wrote, recited “facts unflattering to China.” Another “loudmouthed wise-cracker,” while passing a battalion of Chinese soldiers, shouted “the war’s over; so now you’re going to fight?” But Luce mostly ignored these comments. He continued to praise the high morale of the American troops and their commanders. “The desire of local Chinese officials to show their appreciation of Americans and to … make a good impression on them cannot be exaggerated,” he wrote from Tientsin.12

  It seemed at times that Luce was almost willfully blind to the power of the Communist insurgency around him. Virtually none of his cables back to New York took notice of the growing strength of Mao’s forces in Manchuria and northern China; nor was there any significant mention of the corruption and bureaucratic incompetence of the Kuomintang that White had tried so adamantly to convey. And yet the Communists were far from invisible, even in Chungking. Luce attended a banquet there at which Mao himself was the guest of honor. The two men had a brief private conversation afterward. Luce wrote that Mao “was surprised to see me there and gazed at me with an intense but not unfriendly curiosity. His remarks: polite grunts.” A few days later, after walking through “many a back-ally,” he met briefly with Zhou Enlai. “We had a nice talk—and completely frank.” But he drew no other conclusions from the meeting, and he expressed little interest in the hopeful but ultimately futile negotiations that were attempting to create a coalition government in which the Communists could participate. Nor did Luce express any doubts about the ability of Chiang and his government to prevail alone. “The biggest surprise, and the happiest,” he wrote to Mme. Chiang as he prepared to return to America, “was to find that the spirit of the people in North and East China is so strong and healthy. The people do not seem to be cowed or corrupted by eight years of life under enemy and puppet patrol. Their sense of patriotism is high and is closely related to their admiration for the Generalissimo.”13