Vietnam was, to Luce, another test of the willingness and ability of the United States to protect Asia from Communism. “There must be no more talk of a ‘hopeless war,’” he ordered his editors. When his star photographer-reporter David Douglas Duncan published an article in Life in August 1953 in which he correctly declared that the French had already effectively lost the war, Luce, as usual unaware of what appeared in his magazines until after it was published, put him on the “inactive list” and accused him of exercising a “seductive power over managing editors” and of having an “emotional attitude towards the French.” He then began a campaign of damage control in response to strong criticism from the French and from many American supporters of Vietnam.46
But Duncan soon proved to be the prescient one. Six months after his reviled article in Life appeared, the French army in Vietnam was hopelessly surrounded in an indefensible corner of North Vietnam, Dien Bien Phu. A frenzied debate began in Washington over what the United States should do. Hard-liners within the administration—among them Vice President Richard Nixon—advocated U.S. military intervention against the Vietminh and even considered the use of atomic weapons. Luce, of course, was not privy to these secret deliberations, although he would likely have sided with the “no substitute for victory” mentality that shaped such views. But Eisenhower was not persuaded. The French surrendered and abandoned Indochina, which left the United States now the principal Western benefactor of Vietnam. Eisenhower settled for a negotiated partition of the country that, as in Korea, established a Communist north and a non-Communist south. Part of the peace agreement, hammered out at an international conference in Geneva, included a provision for elections to reunify the country within a few years.
Luce was dismayed by the “loss” of North Vietnam. He began to cultivate politicians and scholars who were part of the American Friends of Vietnam, which others soon began to call the “Vietnam lobby.” And unsurprisingly Luce began to encourage his magazines to portray North Vietnam as a grim and oppressive police state awash in propaganda. It was, in the words of a 1954 Time article, a “land of compulsory joy.” Time gave particular attention to one such piece of propaganda: a Vietminh announcement that “the Viet Nam revolution is an integral part of the world revolution led by the Soviet Union.” And it noted that the “articulate” among the nearly half a million refugees who moved from the north to the south after the partition claimed that “the Viet Minh has destroyed the customs and friendlinesses of the past, and has spat upon family ties and religion.” What should be done? “In the Asia of victorious Ho Chi Minh and his big brother Mao, there are millions marooned upon desolate sandbars: the act of rescue, if these Asians this late are considered worth saving, will take power, humanity and a steely nerve.”47
And yet despite all the presumed parallels between the “loss” of North Vietnam and the “loss” of China, Luce was on the whole surprisingly restrained in his response to what he considered the disaster of the Vietminh’s victory. He retained a lifelong contempt for the men he believed had abandoned China—especially Dean Acheson and Harry Truman (whom Luce once called a “vulgar little babbitt”). But he continued to admire and support the men who effectively abandoned North Vietnam—Eisenhower and Dulles. That was partly because Vietnam was not China, not the land of his birth and of his continuing preoccupation. But it was also because his stake in the success of a Republican government, and in his personal relationship with Eisenhower, outweighed his disappointment with the outcome of the Vietnam conflict. Decisions he would have pilloried mercilessly under Truman he quietly accepted under Eisenhower. More than that, he gradually pulled back from his aggressive prescription for American foreign policy and turned instead toward a campaign that, on the surface at least, appeared to be an example of the kind of soft idealism that he might once have scorned.48
Throughout the 1950s, and indeed throughout the remainder of his life, Luce developed a strong and growing commitment to what he liked to call “the rule of law.” His interest in the law was unusual among the great causes he had championed in the past in that it produced little controversy. Virtually no one could object to a defense of the law. But Luce’s reasons for this commitment were not as simple as they sometimes sounded. They were, in fact, a reflection of some of his deepest and most contested convictions.49
Among the first visible clues to Luce’s controversial view of the law was a speech he gave at a convocation at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1951 to mark the opening of a new legal center. At first Luce had been reluctant to participate. He had never studied law himself (with the exception of the summer when he was an undergraduate at Yale in which he took some law-school courses), and he had no particular expertise in any legal field. To prepare for the speech he browsed through some legal journals in search of inspiration, and he came across an article by a legal scholar, Harold MacKinnon. It attacked the jurisprudence of one of the giants of American law, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had sat on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. It might be too much to say that Luce’s subsequent interest in the law was the result of the serendipitous discovery of MacKinnon’s argument. But many of his activities on behalf of the law in the coming years reflected this first, powerful encounter with the legacy of Holmes.50
The problem with Holmes, Luce believed, was exactly what Holmes’s admirers most valued: his unromantic pragmatism, his brusque rejection of fixed belief. To Luce, Holmes’s legal philosophy was “agnostic, materialistic.” What had Holmes believed? “He believed, most importantly, that there is no ultimate truth anywhere to be believed in.” Luce, on the other hand, believed that the law—and most other areas of human existence—had no meaning without being rooted in some kind of universal truth. For Luce that truth was “natural law,” and the belief that “we live in a moral universe,” and that the law must “conform to a moral order which is universal in time and space.” Without the “immutability and unity of truth,” not only the law but all of society would be rudderless, would “stand for nothing.” To Luce, although not to all critics of pragmatism, the only real alternative to materialism was faith. “Freedom is real because man is created by God in the ‘image’ of God. Man carries within him something that the merely animal does not have, the divine spark.” And so when Luce talked of the “rule of law,” he was not simply talking about statutes and precedents. He was evoking the long history of belief in God’s active presence in the world, and the existence of a universal set of truths derived from that presence.51
Luce’s new interest in the law was also intimately connected to his intense (and often thwarted) effort to combat Communism. Having failed to persuade three presidents to launch an aggressive military and political assault against Communism, he began to tie the great contest between America and the Soviet Union to the law. The Soviet Union, he argued, “stood for nothing” and honored no principles. Soviet laws were meaningless because, like Holmes’s philosophy, they had no basis in morality or faith. But a true regime of laws, Luce believed, could transform the Communist world, or at least reveal its emptiness to other nations. “A great global inquiry into law would expose the evils of the Soviet system,” he argued. American law, if it could “mean something which is written somewhere in the hearts of all men,” could represent “the principles by which we exist as a nation” and could become a powerful tool in the battle against Communism. It could “harness together our vast military might and our political and ideal purposes.”52
What had begun as some random browsing in legal texts turned quickly into a preoccupation and a crusade. Luce began to seek invitations to give speeches on the law almost anywhere he could find an audience—at meetings of the American Bar Association, the Connecticut Bar Association, the Indiana Bar Association, the Missouri Bar Association, the Shelby, Tennessee, Bar Association, St. Louis University. But even as the sites of his speeches appeared to become more and more provincial, the content of his thinking was becoming more and more global. International la
w, he came to believe, could be the great force that would spread democracy and capitalism into a benighted world. It would be the tool by which the goals of the “American Century” might still be realized, the vehicle that would allow the United States to achieve its great mission in the world.53
Luce was always eager to tap the knowledge of scholars and intellectuals, and his interest in the law helped him develop a long and rewarding relationship with the aging William Ernest Hocking, a philosopher who had taught for many years at Harvard before retiring in 1943. Hocking was attractive to Luce because of their shared belief in the role of faith in the laws of the world, and also because of Hocking’s conviction that philosophy was not just an academic pursuit but also a tool for shaping public affairs. As a young man Hocking had been a disciple of William James, the great Harvard philosopher who helped build the concept of “pragmatism” into a robust theory that shaped the worldview of much of a generation. But Hocking gradually returned to a form of idealism. Although he never wholly repudiated pragmatism, he qualified his commitment to it, beginning with his influential 1912 book The Meaning of God in Human Experience. It argued for the importance of faith in human affairs—not a faith dictated by Scripture or theological institutions, and not a faith derived from revelation, but rather a faith rooted in human experience—and especially in those affirming aspects of human experience that he believed reflected God’s invisible presence. Luce’s faith was somewhat more formal, and certainly less examined, than Hocking’s. But Hocking was, Luce believed, a valuable and confirming ally in the battle against materialism and in the struggle to draw faith into the public world. In the early 1950s Luce began requesting Hocking’s “guidance” as he developed his new interest in the law. He was still somewhat insecure about his plunge into the field, and he uncharacteristically expressed doubt and vulnerability. “Perhaps even I have overrated The Law,” he worried. He feared that he had been “guilty” of “not caring enough about ‘the people.’” And he asked Hocking for suggestions of “a little reading on the law as the necessary basis of the good society … a ‘refresher’ on a course I never took!” Hocking responded with a rambling list of suggested readings, words of encouragement, and scattered observations on the relationship between law and theology. But Luce was not really asking for advice on how to educate himself. He was seeking for ammunition in his already settled view of the role the law must play. Hocking, in the end, served more as a cheerleader of Luce’s efforts than as a true mentor. Rather than test Luce’s beliefs, he offered such encouraging but unilluminating notes as “in your notable speech on law, you justly criticised our foreign policy for giving too little attention to Law.” But Hocking’s approval was important to Luce, and their relationship helped give him confidence in the course he was pursuing.54
But Luce’s sights were set higher than Hocking, and higher than the various bar associations to which he presented his new commitment to the law. His real goal was to draw national and world leaders into his orbit and to persuade them to embrace his own emerging beliefs. He began a far-flung correspondence with university presidents, members of Congress, and foreign leaders. But most of all he set out to influence the Eisenhower administration. Having failed to persuade the president and the secretary of state to take a more aggressive military position in Asia, he sought to draw them into a commitment to law as the basis of foreign policy. It turned out to be a difficult task, particularly when he was dealing with Dulles. To Dulles the “rule of law” was a pleasant aspiration with no practical role in the struggle against Communism. He never explicitly rejected Luce’s ideas. “You can’t have security without law,” Dulles said supportively (and vaguely) in a 1957 meeting. But he went on to remind Luce of how difficult extending law into international relations would be. “The World Court is unemployed,” he noted. “There are lots of arbitration agreements lying around but they are never used…. Between us and the Communists is an unbridgeable gulf in the matter of Law.” On another occasion he warned that “there is still a strong reluctance on the part of nations … to submit their disputes to abitrament [sic] of justice.” And later still Dulles wrote discouragingly, “I am touching on the subject of international law in my address at the UN. But there are so many other matters of greater interest and greater urgency that I fear it will not make much impression.”55
To promote his ideas more effectively, he helped organize a committee of “petitioners” that included Charles Rhyne, president of the American Bar Association, Ross Malone, its president-elect, and Erwin Griswold, the former dean of Harvard Law School and former solicitor general of the United States. Together they urged Dulles to deliver the “main address at the Annual Meeting of the American Bar Association” in August 1958, to appoint a “Presidential Commission” to “advance the cause of world peace through law,” and most of all to embrace a “hopeful interest in the subject.” The group met with Dulles in July and encountered a notable lack of enthusiasm. “Mr. Dulles’s reaction, to begin with, was negative,” Luce recorded. “He had been trying to do all this before his visitors were born.” People would “think it was a shortcut to peace whereas actually implementing these world-law proposals could take 100 years.”56
Luce continued to hope for Dulles’s support, and Dulles periodically encouraged him. Every now and then Dulles included in a speech or a public document a reference to the importance of the law; and although it was almost never accompanied by any concrete policy or action, it helped prevent any serious strains in the relationship. Eisenhower, who had only slightly more commitment to the value of international law than Dulles did, also made rhetorical gestures to Luce and his colleagues—gestures that Luce eagerly embraced no matter how modest they were. During the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 Eisenhower denounced the “lawlessness” of the Soviet Union’s invasion of a theoretically sovereign nation. Luce was exultant. “You took this occasion to hold up the banner of Law as it has not been held up in a generation,” he wrote the president. But Eisenhower’s public embraces of the “rule of law” were rare; and although he was less inclined than Dulles to express his reservations, he too had doubts about the viability of Luce’s cause. Everyone agreed, Eisenhower wrote, that “a great world-wide push to enthrone law over force” would help settle “the world’s differences.” But beyond this broad principle, the president continued (echoing Dulles), “I am most uncertain of the meaning you intend to convey….[I]t is manifest that the world is not yet ready to adopt and observe the principles of international law.” The promotion of law, Eisenhower added, should not be the task of government but should be “largely a private one carried on through the Bar Associations.” And so he spurned a proposal from Luce and Rhyne to create a “presidential commission on the rule of law.” Instead Eisenhower gave encouragement to an initiative that moved the issue of law out of the White House and into academia—an initiative sparked by the departure from the administration of one of Eisenhower’s most influential aides, Arthur Larson.57
Larson was chief speechwriter to the president, a position he used to help articulate a moderate vision of public policy that came to be known as “modern Republicanism.” But by 1958 the president’s interest in moderation was fading, and Larson began looking for a position outside government. Rhyne, a trustee of Duke University, proposed (with Luce’s eager support) the creation there of a center for international law, which Rhyne invited Larson to lead. Larson resigned from the White House (carrying with him the nominal position of “consultant” to the president on “the advancement of the rule of law”). Luce was pleased that the movement for what he now called “world peace through law” was represented by a significant institution, and he supported Larson’s efforts to bring more publicity to the cause, which Larson did very effectively. During his directorship of the Duke center, Larson attracted an impressive array of public officials and international leaders to speak or participate in conferences (Luce among them); he published articles and books on international law; and he hel
ped raise the profile of international law and its possible value to global politics. But the creation of Larson’s center was also an excuse for the administration to marginalize this inconvenient movement, in which Eisenhower and Dulles had little real faith.58
Among the most important concrete proposals to emerge from Luce’s efforts was the repeal of the so-called Connally Amendment, a provision in the 1945 treaty by which the United States had joined the International Court of Justice. The Democratic senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had opposed any transfer of sovereignty to an international organization, and as a result of his amendment, the treaty gave the court no jurisdiction over “domestic” issues within the United States. The American government would alone decide what was “domestic” and what was not. To Luce and other champions of international law, the amendment was a major obstacle to what Larson called the “world rule of law,” and the Duke center worked strenuously on behalf of its repeal—but to no avail. In the end Luce’s quixotic crusade produced no new laws and no new policy, although it did contribute to making international law more a part of the nation’s public discourse. He continued to hope for a revolution through law for years. “The year 1965,” he wrote fifteen years after he began his efforts, “could be the year the Rule of Law idea really surfaces into public consciousness.”59
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