The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  The relationship between Luce and Schlamm baffled many of their colleagues. For a relatively new and quite junior member of the Fortune editorial board, he seemed to have unusual access to Luce and was often the influence behind some of Luce’s raging explosions about questionable taste in the magazines. In the summer of 1947 the two men vacationed together in the White Mountains, behavior so uncharacteristic that it threw Luce’s longtime and deeply loyal secretary into a “tizzy,” worrying aloud that “There’s something terribly wrong with Mr. Luce.” Schlamm began to be invited to dinners and events that others considered inappropriate for a junior editor. Luce’s influential deputy Allen Grover referred to Schlamm’s “evil and disruptive influence over Harry—this little nobody who had inserted himself into the very heart of a domestic crisis in the life of America’s most effective publishing enemy of communism.” Billings referred to “Schlamm’s Svengali influence over Luce.” Early in the planning of the new magazine Luce asked Tom Matthews to lead the development of the project, with Schlamm as his deputy. But within weeks Schlamm had persuaded Luce that he should be co-editor. Matthews disliked Schlamm, was furious to be asked to share authority with him, and ultimately withdrew from the project altogether. But Schlamm continued to promote the project, and Luce continued to support it.

  Schlamm’s original prospectus for the magazine was both cocky and indistinct. He wrote at length about the competition and cited the “cumulative dissatisfaction with most of the existing magazines” as a reason to create a new one. But his vision of an alternative was self-righteously vague and fussily conservative The magazine would reflect “a civilized respect for fundamentals, and mellowing experience.” It would have a “sense of urgency and an understanding of the ‘new.’” It would be “constructive and readable.” And like other Luce magazines, all of which claimed to have “convictions” at their heart, Schlamm offered ideas that he suspected Luce would find attractive: “Man has a choice between Right and Wrong…. The standards we have inherited from the Scriptures and the Declaration of Independence are pretty good guesses of what decent people will accept as self-evident truths.” This would not be “a magazine where ‘everything goes.’ If we have an opinion on any subject we mean it, and we shall stick to it.” It would not be a magazine for the many, not “caviar for the masses,” but a publication that would appeal to the “never-dying community of individuals who manage to combine esthetic sensitivity with intellectual curiosity and moral concern.” It would “not promote avant garde,” but it would embrace “a desire for religious reorientation … what some people already call ‘an American Church-in-Progress.’” Many of Luce’s colleagues found both the tone and the content of the prospectus almost insufferable in its arrogance. Others compared it to some of the more pretentious claims Luce and Hadden had made when promoting Time in the early 1920s. There was little support for the project from anyone but Luce himself.

  Work on the new magazine, which at times was called Measure and at other moments called Quest, continued for three years. Schlamm solicited articles, produced crude dummies, and recruited possible contributors from Europe and America. But the opposition within the company was too great, and Luce’s commitment, in the end, too faint. Early in 1948 he pulled the plug. With a stilted formality that reflected his discomfort, he made clear that not only would Time Inc. not publish the magazine, but that Schlamm was not free to take it elsewhere. He left a faint hope that the company might return to the project in a year or so and try again. (It never did.) And he encouraged Schlamm to propose another role for himself at Time Inc., which Schlamm interpreted correctly as an offer of no job at all. After a few token assignments, he left the company for good in 1949. He was, Billings noted in his diary, one of Luce’s “private problem children—‘pieces of his conscience.’ … [Schlamm] should have gone years ago.”39

  The failure of the opinion magazine did not, however, dampen Luce’s enthusiasm for using his publishing influence to shape the thinking of the nation. Luce rejected the new magazine not only because his colleagues opposed it, but also because he was uncertain that it would reach a large enough audience to have the influence he felt he needed. He was left with relying on his existing magazines, with their large circulation and great popularity. But he was also left with their entrenched editors who did not always welcome his ideas.

  Luce continued to believe in the enormous importance to the world, and to the United States, of a free and democratic China. The failure of that goal—the ultimate defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, and the establishment of Communist China—was the greatest disappointment of Luce’s life. But for nearly two years after the end of World War II, he remained optimistic about the future—confident that the Chinese people, now liberated from the Japanese invasion, would not support a revolution but would instead yearn for peace, comfort, and prosperity under the government they knew. “People are sick to death of war, profiteering, exile, bloodshed and malnutrition,” Time declared in a 1945 story titled “Bright with Hope.” It began with an uncharacteristically rapturous cable from Teddy White: “China’s hopes of peace are brighter than they have been for 20 years.” Time predicted, implausibly, that the Soviet Union’s entry into the Pacific war in the summer of 1945, and its alliance of convenience with China against Japan in the last days of the war, would ensure Russian support for the established government of Chiang against the Communists; and that Stalin was “morally bound to withdraw his Red Army from conquered Jap forces.” The Soviet army, the magazine reported, “gave the back of its hand to Manchurian communists, forbade them to attempt any organization…. This is an extraordinary and encouraging sign.”40

  In Washington confidence in the future of the Chiang Kai-shek regime was a great deal weaker than it was in the Time Inc. Building in New York. The new Truman administration was unwilling to allow American forces to become engaged in a civil war in China. But it nevertheless hoped to stabilize China by providing American aid and by promoting negotiations between the Nationalists and Communists that it hoped would lead to the creation of a coalition government. To advance this vision Truman appointed the former Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, as his “personal representative” in December 1945. (Marshall replaced the truculently anti-Communist brigadier general Patrick Hurley, whom Roosevelt had sent to China in 1944 in the aftermath of Stilwell’s bitter departure. Hurley had blamed the problems of the Chiang regime on “traitors” in the State Department.)41

  The “Marshall Mission,” as the general’s efforts in China came to be called, took place against a backdrop of considerable division in Washington between the military and the State Department. Navy Secretary James Forrestal, Army Assistant Secretary John McCloy, the recently dismissed Patrick Hurley, and others believed with Luce that true peace and reform could not come through negotiation but only through the defeat of the Communists; and that the Chiang regime needed substantial American military and economic support. Secretary of State James Byrnes, John Carter Vincent, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, and others were skeptical of Chiang’s ability to withstand the Communist challenge, with or without American support, and wanted most of all to prevent the United States from becoming ensnared in a new war in Asia only months after the old one had come to a close. Marshall at first avoided siding with either camp, but little by little he became convinced that the State Department view was correct.42

  Luce wrote Marshall warmly in support of his mission and offered his help. Marshall politely ignored the offer, but Luce set out to influence the general nevertheless. He was particularly eager to mobilize the community of American missionaries and other clergy who had served in China, men Luce believed would have both the knowledge and the moral stature to influence policy. He urged Marshall to invite Leighton Stuart—the former president of Yenching University in Beijing, a staunch supporter of Chiang, and a former colleague and friend of Luce’s father—to consult with the general in China. Marshall declined the requ
est, but Stuart made his way to China anyway, called on Marshall himself, and soon became a close confidant of the general. At Marshall’s request, and to Luce’s great delight, Stuart became the first postwar American ambassador to China in 1946 (and its last until the 1980s). Luce showered him with letters and wires urging more vigorous help to China and more pressure on Marshall to stand up to the Communists. “Washington has given too little attention to the problem,” he warned. Aware that the consensus in Washington was that Americans had no heart for a commitment to China, he wrote that “General Marshall and yourself may underestimate the willingness of the American public opinion to support a program of vigorous assistance to China through a constitutional national government.” And he worked hard to counter what he considered a growing chorus of destructive voices: “Teddy White’s Thunder Out of China, Henry Wallace, The New Republic, The Nation … [and] a recent speech by John Carter Vincent [that] seemed to me … to be a shocking disservice to the best interests of the United States and China.”43

  Luce also reached out to Henry Van Dusen, the new president of Union Theological Seminary (which Luce’s father had attended) and a recent visitor to China. In an article Luce solicited for Life, Van Dusen flattered Marshall as a man of “integrity … and wisdom,” but challenged his approach to the China problem. The “intractable bar to peace,” he insisted, “lies in the fundamentally irreconcilable character of the conflict between China’s two factions…. May it not be the part of far-visioned statesmanship to face that inescapable issue now, before Communist strength can be mobilized at its fullest potential and while the Nationalist forces are still organized and equipped?” In short, better a conflict with the Communists now than a false truce that would certainly fail later. “China in Communist hands,” he warned, “would be the most probable … prelude to World War III…. Consequently the U.S. must lend every practicable support to the constituted government of China.”44

  Luce soon began a broader campaign of support for Chiang, a campaign aimed at both the officials he believed would be the most important decision makers—Marshall above all—and at the American public. It began with his own trip to China in the fall of 1946, a year after his previous visit. Luce was, as always, eager for a reason to go to China; and in the spring of 1946 he had instructed one of his reporters there to organize a summer vacation for him on Iltus Huk in Tsingtao, the resort community in which he had spent summers as a child and which he had visited again in the early 1930s. “I have no desire to be paltry,” Luce wrote. “Three or four bedrooms, living room, dining room and something to serve as library or study. Plumbing must, of course, be in order. I presume there will be no difficulty in getting servants.” In the end Luce never took the vacation. But he continued to look for another opportunity to visit China, and he seized on a presumed “invitation” from Chiang.45

  In fact there was no formal invitation. Luce had mentioned casually and unspecifically to Chinese officials in America that he hoped to visit China soon. But because he said it in the presence of Wellington Koo, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, and T. V. Soong, the Kuomintang finance minister, word of this vague exchange found its way to Chiang Kai-shek. He then mentioned that Luce would be welcome should he decide to come. Chiang’s own unspecific welcome quickly became, in Luce’s mind, and soon in the minds of U.S. government officials, a formal invitation. By the time Luce left for China, Stuart Symington, an assistant secretary of war, provided him with a luxurious U.S. Air Force plane for the trip at government expense. Luce arrived in Shanghai on October 26, greeted by the mayor and the city’s ranking American military officials. As usual he was lavishly entertained by the Kuomintang elite. “Luce dominated the conversation after dinner as he has at all these Chinese functions I have attended with him,” Marshall’s aide John Beal (a former Time editor) wrote in his diary after one such event. Not surprisingly Luce heard what he wanted to hear. He asked why the press had not paid more attention to the government’s military successes. He asked for confirmation of his own belief that the course of war had “changed things” and that it had essentially ensured the victory of the Nationalists. He heard few arguments against his views.46

  He had dinner with his old friend Leighton Stuart, by now the American ambassador, where conversation focused, to Luce’s dismay, on the success of Teddy White’s Thunder Out of China. He spent an afternoon on a houseboat near Nanking with Chiang Kai-shek, Mme. Chiang, and General and Mrs. Marshall, celebrating the Generalissimo’s birthday—“a beautiful and memorable day,” he later recalled. When they returned to shore the entire population of the village (which had ignored the group on its arrival) had been mobilized as a belated welcoming party. A private meeting with Marshall did little to change Luce’s view that the general was badly in error on America’s policy toward China. Marshall continued to believe that the solution to the Chinese crisis was to “get the Communists and the government together.” He resisted Luce’s proposal that the United States dramatically increase aid to the Chiang regime; Marshall argued that doing so would only confirm Chiang’s refusal to negotiate in good faith with the Communists. Even Stuart, who had less confidence than Marshall in the possibility of a coalition government, believed that aid to Chiang should be conditioned on reforms within the Nationalist government, a requirement Luce opposed.47

  Despite Marshall’s public optimism, Luce’s visit coincided with the failing negotiations between the Nationalists and the Communists, the cornerstone of the Marshall mission. Luce managed to arrange a meeting with Zhou Enlai, the Communist representative at the talks. Fred Gruin, one of Time’s correspondents, drove Luce to the gray-brick compound where the Communist delegation was staying. “In a small sitting room, a charcoal brazier lit against the season’s chill and the inevitable steaming cups of tea at hand,” Gruin recalled, Luce and Zhou sat down for a conversation, conducted entirely in English. “All the Chinese Communists now wanted,” Gruin wrote, “was a genuine cease-fire in the civil war.” Only later, after Luce had rushed to inform Stuart of the offer, did he discover that Zhou’s proposal included a pull-back of Nationalist forces from the areas in which they were fighting successfully. “I must record,” Luce wrote years later, “the utter confidence as well as the good humor with which Chou En-lai spoke to me. While he didn’t say so in so many words, I had the chilling feeling that he expected soon to be in control of all China.” (Years later Luce wrote: “At the end of my stay, I figured he was right.” Nothing suggests that he actually believed that at the time.)48

  Luce ended his trip convinced that “the Marshall Mission had failed.” But since he had long ago come to disagree with its central aim—a negotiated settlement with the Communists—he was not entirely discouraged. Marshall’s failure, he believed, would give new momentum to providing military aid to the Kuomintang. Luce left China, he said, “hopeful and with good prospect.”49

  Back in New York, Luce encouraged his reliably loyal editor, Charles Murphy, to complete a massive four-part profile for Life of Chiang Kai-shek, which Murphy had begun several months earlier, undeterred by the fact that Chiang was already perhaps the most frequently profiled person ever to appear in his magazines. But Luce encountered staunch resistance from Billings and other senior editors to the gushing, uncritical article. They persuaded him first to reduce it to a two-part piece and then, after a year of indecision, to kill it altogether. Luce acquiesced, in part for fear of seeming too partisan in his treatment of Chiang, a decision he later regretted. But as if to make up for this failure, he aggressively recruited the former diplomat William Bullitt in 1947 to travel as a “special correspondent” to China to report on the state of the civil war. There was little enthusiasm for this project among Luce’s senior editors, who considered Bullitt an ambitious blowhard. “We all deplore Bullitt’s mission to China and expect nothing from it,” Billings wrote in his diary. “If only Luce could resist such arrant rascals!” But Luce’s eagerness for articles from this controversial figure, a ne
wly ardent anti-Communist, was unstoppable—as was clearly evident in the almost unprecedented fee of thirteen thousand dollars Time Inc. paid for the effort, despite Bullitt’s lack of experience in or expertise on Asia. When Bullitt submitted his manuscript, Billings called it “superficial and mediocre,” but did not dare to kill it. C. D. Jackson bridled at running a summary of the piece in Time. The Life editors balked at its length (and eventually persuaded Luce, over Bullitt’s “violent objection,” to cut it down from two parts to one). Luce conceded that “some people think [Bullitt’s] a shit,” but he remained committed to the piece, which ran both in Life and (as excerpts) in Time in October 1947. Unsurprisingly Bullitt echoed Luce’s own conviction that the loss of China to Communism was an unacceptable outcome to the conflict, no matter what the cost to the United States. Like Luce, he believed that virtually all of Chiang’s problems—the corruption, the bureaucratic incompetence, the brutality—were products of the pressures of war, that it was unrealistic to expect improvement until the Communists were defeated. He recommended sending Douglas MacArthur to advise Chiang on the conduct of the war (an oftfloated proposal that MacArthur had consistently refused to consider). “They would work together as brothers for their common cause,” Bullitt rapturously predicted. “The whole Far Eastern horizon would brighten with hope.” But if China were to fall “into the hands of Stalin,” his alarmist conclusion warned, “all Asia, including Japan, sooner or later will fall into his hands…. The independence of the U.S. will not live a generation longer than the independence of China.” Luce was delighted with the piece and helped arrange radio addresses and an exhausting speaking tour for Bullitt shortly after the article appeared.50