Ever since Wendell Willkie’s death, Luce had been searching for a candidate whom he could unreservedly admire. He had supported Dewey in 1944 and 1948, but he had never really liked the man or had any significant relationship with him. He was friendly with Robert Taft, senator from Ohio and son of a former president. But Taft was too conservative and too isolationist for Luce to feel comfortable with him. Eisenhower was different. He was famous, popular, and, even without being particularly articulate, charismatic. His policy views were largely unknown, which allowed Luce (and many others) to imagine whatever positions he liked. “Luce is dazzled by Eisenhower’s glamour…. He is deeply in love with his candidacy,” Billings wrote after a lunch with his boss. Luce was an early and generous contributor to Eisenhower’s campaign. But much more important, he mobilized his editorial staff to support it, showing a partisanship that was at times greater even than the favoritism the Time Inc. publications had shown toward Willkie in 1940. In the first issue of 1952 Life ran an effusive story making “The Case for Ike,” who had not yet agreed to run. Eisenhower later, flatteringly, told Luce that the article had been “one of the factors” that had persuaded him to announce his candidacy (an announcement that also included his first declaration of membership in the Republican Party). Life itself took credit for being the “starters’ gun” for the campaign. Once Eisenhower’s candidacy was official, Luce accelerated his strong public support for him. He actively recruited two of his most important writers and editors to take leaves to work for the campaign. Emmet John Hughes and C. D. Jackson became Eisenhower speechwriters. (Luce was less encouraging to Eric Hodgins, who wanted to work for the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, but grudgingly agreed to let him go as well.)35
During the Republican convention, Time pointedly argued that Eisenhower had a better chance of winning the general election than did Taft. The magazine identified critical states whose votes were still in flux, where Eisenhower would be particularly helpful to local candidates. The Time reportage accused the Taft campaign of “stealing delegates” and actively supported an effort to award disputed seats to Eisenhower. Particularly helpful to the Republicans was the publication of Time a day early to allow the Eisenhower campaign to distribute it widely to the delegates. “You were a veritable tower of strength,” Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Eisenhower’s campaign manager, wrote to Luce after the convention, and “played a tremendous part in laying the basis of public opinion” for Eisenhower’s victory. “One of the lasting satisfactions of this adventure,” Lodge added, “has been the fact that you and I have worked so closely for this great cause.” During the campaign Luce himself, for the first time since the Willkie campaign, began writing speeches and memos and funneling them to Eisenhower through Jackson and Hughes. Eisenhower seldom used them but always remembered to thank him, a flattery that spurred Luce onward to even greater efforts. He even occasionally sat on the platform during Eisenhower rallies and joined the candidate on his campaign train, things he had never done even when Willkie was running. It was not just his loyalty to the party that drove his efforts. It was his enthusiasm for Eisenhower and the prospect of a close relationship to a president of the United States for the first time.36
Luce’s blatant partisanship triggered a significant backlash within his own company, greater than the one he had encountered during the Willkie campaign. Even some colleagues who shared his politics felt uncomfortable with how one-sided they believed the coverage of the election was, although only a few dared to say so publicly. “Time’s political bias for Eisenhower is bringing in a deluge of protest letters,” Billings noted, and editors were “moaning and groaning” over the company’s stance. “Is Time a Republican magazine?” T. S. Matthews, the pro-Stevenson editor of Time, asked. “Open partisanship would certainly be better than surreptitious. Though best of all, I think, would be to be openly non-partisan…. How can Time possibly hope to attain and maintain a real integrity if it’s partisanly concerned with getting somebody elected?” At one point a group of Time Inc. researchers (all women) tried to raise money to run an advertisement denouncing the magazine’s “Ike slant.” After a few days of pressure (and perhaps threats from above), “cooler heads … prevailed among the Stevenson girls.” But the bitterness among the many Stevenson supporters in Time Inc. continued to grow until Luce finally accepted Matthews’s advice and invited the entire editorial staff to a large dinner at which Luce hoped to “introduce himself” to his employees. His speech—long, rambling, at times unintelligible—was nevertheless a revealing event for many members of the staff who had rarely if ever seen him. But it did nothing to placate the anger of those who resented Time’s political position. He made clear that he supported Eisenhower and said bluntly that as the leader of the company he had the right to present the news however he thought best. “I am your boss,” he unrepentantly announced. “I guess that means I can fire any of you.”37
Luce continued to insist that Time was not a “Republican” magazine and that the institution did not favor any particular candidate. But he barred Matthews from handling a cover story on Eisenhower shortly before the election and edited it himself. Eisenhower, Luce wrote, “has picked up more real political experience than many politicians … get in a lifetime…. Ike is in top form, with a new self-assurance and gusto.” The rebuke, and the partisan character of the story, helped Matthews to decide to resign.38
Despite his enthusiastic public support of Eisenhower, Luce remained uneasy about the candidate’s ability to pursue the policies Luce hoped he would advance. “I think Ike is a good man—an extraordinarily good man,” he wrote before the Republican convention. “My difficulty as to Ike lies in the area of ‘great issues.’” Those issues were, of course, “how to cope with Soviet Communism,” how to discredit the Truman-Acheson foreign policy, and how to ensure that the new president would pay sufficient attention to Asia. “The question,” he wrote his editors, “is whether there is any validity to my reservations about Ike, and whether, if so, then there is any editorial duty to utter them.” Without expressing his doubts openly Luce tried to put indirect pressure on Eisenhower through his relationship with John Foster Dulles, who was widely believed to be Eisenhower’s likely choice as secretary of state. Dulles eagerly responded with an article entitled, “A Policy of Boldness,” which expressed the hard-line foreign-policy views that had become a hallmark of the campaign (and that would be largely ignored after the election). It was in this article that Dulles first outlined what became a famous and controversial set of policies that seemed to repudiate much of the restraint that the containment policy had ensured. He called for the “liberation of the captive nations,” for striking back against enemies “where it hurts, by means of our own choosing,” and for using atomic bombs as “effective political weapons.” (Dulles also wrote the foreign-policy plank for the 1952 Republican convention, echoing many of the ideas he had expressed in Life.) Luce happily called it “the embryo of a united Republican foreign policy.” But he was far from confident that Eisenhower himself would abide by these principles, and he was worried that the candidate would be discouraged from boldness by “timid advisors.” “In my judgment,” Luce wrote not long before the election, “Ike wins or loses the election in the next few days, depending upon what he says on this Foreign Policy issue.” Would Eisenhower continue to embrace the “do-nothing” containment policy? he wondered. “The U.S. has to take the most out-and-out stand against Communism,” whether or not it antagonized America’s allies and whether or not it ran greater risks than the Truman administration believed were wise.39
Eisenhower did little to allay Luce’s worries in the last weeks of his campaign. The candidate did not focus much on foreign policy. Instead he continued to rely on his sunny personality and his vague suggestions of undefined change. His most important campaign promise was his pledge to “go to Korea,” as if a brief visit to the front would itself transform the character of the war. But the effectiveness of this tactic underscored th
e enormous advantage Eisenhower’s military experience made in a campaign in which Cold War issues were in the forefront of public opinion. Voters seemed to trust him to handle foreign policy whether or not he gave them any clues as to what that foreign policy would be. Even Luce, who had badgered Eisenhower for weeks to take stronger positions, forgot about his concerns in the elation of the growing strength of the Republican campaign. And when Eisenhower finally won by a substantial margin, bringing a Republican Congress with him, Luce felt in some ways as though the triumph was his as well. “Victory, its wonderful,” he wired to colleagues and friends.40
In many ways Eisenhower’s presidency met, and at times even exceeded, Luce’s expectations. Luce had never had much of a relationship with previous presidents. Eisenhower showered him with attention. Luce in turn lavished praise on the man he still called “Ike,” both in his private communications with the president and in his magazines. Within weeks of the election he had lunch with Eisenhower to talk about Asia, exchanged friendly letters with him, boasted to colleagues about Ike’s tips on golf, “marveled at [Ike’s] knowledgeability.” His one disappointment came when Eisenhower turned down an invitation to dinner at Luce’s home, but Luce remained undeterred. And Eisenhower in turn made great efforts to keep Luce in his camp. Republican leaders courted him elaborately during his trip to Washington for the inauguration, and he received the first of many invitations to the Eisenhower White House only a few weeks later. “We must give a full presentation of Ike in color photos,” the bedazzled Luce wrote the editors of Life late in 1953, “at least four pages of Ike, Ike, Ike, to make the point [of Eisenhower’s extraordinary “physical vitality”] unmistakable and unforgettable.” Eisenhower’s first, unremarkable State of the Union address a few weeks after the inauguration was, Luce proclaimed, “brilliant.” A rumor circulated that Eisenhower was considering appointing Luce secretary of state, a flattering gesture even though both men knew that Dulles was the president’s choice. “Some discussion of the plain fact that we are now regarded as Eisenhower’s mouthpiece,” Billings worried a few weeks into the new presidency. “Perhaps we have cheered a little too loud this first month.”41
Luce’s elation at Eisenhower’s election—“a pink cloud of delight,” one colleague wrote; “a date to see Eisenhower affects him like strong liquor,” another commented—helped mute his growing concerns about the new administration’s foreign policy. He grumbled occasionally about Eisenhower’s passivity. “What’s wrong with Ike?” he asked in an editorial meeting in June 1953. “Things are certainly going badly and he doesn’t seem able to pull them together into a ‘favorable situation.’” But he mostly kept his concerns to himself, even as the war in Korea moved in a direction that deeply disappointed him. Luce had clearly hoped that the election of Eisenhower would reverse the Truman-Acheson decision to limit war aims in Korea and preserve the prewar status quo. But Eisenhower and Dulles did not change Truman’s course, and the Korean War ended in July 1953 with the partition still intact and, more important to Luce, the “‘foot draggers’ in the Pentagon” still in place. Luce was “all for making some ringing ‘Wilsonian’ declarations,” Billings wrote after an editors’ meeting. “The net of the lunch was to knock down most of Luce’s hopeful and unrealistic notions about the Eisenhower Administration.” But Luce did not abandon those notions. He told himself that Eisenhower had entered office too late to change the course of the Korean War, and that over time the administration’s foreign policy would become more assertive and principled. He was encouraged in this hope by John Foster Dulles.42
Luce had a closer, and longer, relationship with Dulles than he had with Eisenhower. They were not intimate friends, but their relationship was pleasant and mutually useful. After a lunch with Dulles early in 1953, before Eisenhower’s inauguration, he wrote that he “could hardly contain myself for excitement because Dulles was unfolding a policy of action which comported entirely with my own views,” a policy that would take a more aggressive stand against Korea than the Truman administration had done and that would recognize the importance of “launching Chiang Kai-shek against the mainland.” Dulles “would not settle Korea on the present terms” and would favor a line “north of Pyongyang,” which would give South Korea 90 percent of the country. But these were not the views of Eisenhower, as both men soon realized.
In 1954 Luce launched a “reappraisal” of how the magazines should portray the world. A Life article, “Policy for Survival,” would, he hoped, become a “Spur-to-Action” to the president. For weeks memos flowed from his office to the editors of all three magazines, followed by lunches and meetings and arguments without end. Few of Luce’s colleagues would challenge him directly, but many of them were at least partially resistant to the dark and even brutal quality of his view of the world. “We estimate that the climactic crisis of the 20th Century is at hand,” Luce wrote ominously. It would require fighting “throughout and beyond” any conflict, as opposed to settling for half a loaf as in Korea. It meant taking “the offensive in Asia, seeking and using every opportunity to limit, reduce, undermine and destroy Armed Communism in Asia.” American leadership, he claimed, “is in a decline, neutralism and appeasement are growing among our allies, communism is gaining among the masses, and the Kremlin is coming daily closer to … the domination of the world.” The only policy that “will not carry the big nuclear risk is a policy of constant appeasement, or slow surrender…. In short: Pacifism.” The three pillars of a successful foreign policy, he argued, would be “the attainment of atomic supremacy,” the “liberation of China” through a “rollback of the Iron Curtain with tactical atomic weapons,” and a reaffirmation of “the historic American stand in world politics of being for governments of free people, for free people, by free people everywhere.”43
Like many such impassioned interventions, Luce’s muscular new policy found little support even within Time Inc., let alone in the administration he was trying to influence. He did not promote it for long. Instead he tried to persuade himself that Eisenhower and Dulles were following something close to his own course, even if quietly. Dulles, he wrote, “is the champion of the proposition that politics (including international politics) has something to do with morals and that morals have something to do with God…. We must surely support [him] as vigorously as we can in this effort to establish a moral basis for our world politics.” Luce must certainly have recognized that Eisenhower had no such inclinations. The president was concerned more about the economic cost of an aggressive military posture than about its morality, and he—with Dulles’s perhaps-grudging support—created a foreign policy that differed relatively little from that of Truman and Acheson. Eisenhower did not attempt to “liberate” the captive nations; he mostly resisted defending countries and regions that were not of high strategic interest to the United States; and he refused to take active steps to “liberate” China. Dulles tried to compensate for Eisenhower’s restraint with a largely rhetorical policy of his own, which he announced in Life in January 1956: “brinkmanship”—the willingness to use nuclear weapons against Communist aggression rather than rely on the expensive and difficult ground wars that Eisenhower opposed. The article created a firestorm of criticism from those who saw Dulles’s piece as a recipe for nuclear war. But Time eagerly supported the policy and offered a litany of foreign-policy successes that it claimed had been the result of Dulles’s supposed strength: “The fears and feelings of U.S. allies … must be balanced [against] the necessity of keeping before the world’s mind the central fact of the peace: Communist aggression has been deterred only by the willingness and the ability of the free world to go to war rather than cringe before the threats.” In reality there was little evidence to suggest that the president had any real willingness to go to war, and even less evidence that the promise of “brinkmanship” (a promise never actually delivered) had any significant impact on policy or its results.44
Luce’s effort to promote an alternative to containment found a
new target not long after the cease-fire in Korea: a war in Vietnam that had begun almost as soon as World War II ended. The conflict pitted the former French colonial rulers against a strong independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh, a Communist educated in Paris and Moscow and a fervent Vietnamese nationalist. During and after World War II, Ho led a growing nationalist movement known as the Vietminh. The Vietminh had opposed the Japanese during World War II. (Most of the French evacuated when the war began, and the few who stayed mostly collaborated with the Japanese.) Only a little more than a year after the Japanese withdrawal, the French bureaucracy and military moved back into Vietnam and tried to regain control of the country, which the Vietminh had already declared an independent nation under their rule. By 1950 the French and the Vietminh were engaged in an open war, which dragged on for almost four years.
Watching this spectacle from afar, Luce was once again excited at the prospect of a confrontation with Communists in Asia. He hoped that with American help the war might drive out the Communists and reunite Vietnam. But he hoped even more that the conflict might also spread to Vietnam’s northern neighbor, China, opening up another opportunity for Chiang Kai-shek’s forces to resume their war against the Communists. As early as 1947 Time was describing Vietnam as “the sickest part of ailing Asia today,” an observation accompanied by a strong warning from William Bullitt in Life of the danger of “Soviet control.” Luce soon latched onto Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the commander of French forces, whom he now saw as Vietnam’s MacArthur, and whom he invited to New York in hopes of strengthening American support for Indochina. “It makes me proud to think that I have been of some service to you and to our common cause,” he wrote de Lattre after one such visit. Luce himself visited Vietnam late in 1952 and, while critical of the French for their “lack of moral seriousness,” remained convinced that “the war can be won.” And if the Chinese were to intervene, he added provocatively, “it will be quite as convenient for us to destroy Chinese Communist armies in Indo-China as anywhere else.”45
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