W. A. Swanberg

He was a sparse-haired, pale, timber-wolf kind of man, quick in his movements, and very decisive in his speech, as frequently happens with men who are afraid they might fall into a stammer. He had shaggy reddish eyebrows and cold, pale-gray eyes [pale blue, really] that hardly ever participated in his rare smiles.

I felt at once that there was a great deal of dangerous integrity in the man. I mean, the sort of integrity I generally associate with the head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. An almost unbribable pig-headedness. It was also instantly obvious that he didn't have a shred of humor to cover any part of his almost frenzied intensity.

Hired, King gave a dozen cheap cameras to chimpanzees in a zoo, with which a few of them accidentally took pictures of spectators looking at them through the bars. These were published under the title, "This is what you look like to the monkey in the zoo." Among his many other ideas was a life-size picture of a twenty-one-inch dwarf who just fitted into Life's double-page twenty-two-inch dimension. But he disliked the kind of sanctimonious commercialism he found in the "Ivy League clothes dummies" running the Lucepress. "Nearly everybody was scared stiff of his job," he wrote. He disapproved of Time's eternal propaganda and its tricks such as its habit of following the name of Leon Trotsky with the parenthetical "(ne Bronstein)":

... It seemed to me that the editors of Time liked to . . . expose him as just a cheap little Jew who, in the manner of his breed, had, for devious, shady reasons, decided to change his monicker.

He commented on the central evangelical theme:

Everybody in his right mind knows that Communism is a hell of a way of life. ... So?

So I'd like to make it plain at once that that still doesn't make unhampered, catch-as-catch-can capitalism into a snow-white maiden. . . . Life, Time and Fortune ... do unremittingly sponsor the notion that to lack faith in capitaHsm is tantamount to spitting at the holy source of divine wisdom itself, because man can never hope to aspire to any nobler spiritual plateau than the expectation of six per cent interest on invested capital.

An unfailing party-enlivener, King was a guest of the Luces at Greenwich and at Mepkin, but he tired of his job and quit after only three years. There was general relief, for he was not the type the company liked to encourage. He did not have the faith.

1. THE MEEK PEOPLE

In 1938 Europe came to such a boil that Luce had to examine it even though his own affairs were cooking in New York. In May, Time absorbed the 250,000 remaining subscriptions of the Literary Digest, which in fifteen years it had beaten into submission. That same month, Time Inc. moved from its six-year home in the Chr)'sler Building to the top seven floors of the brand-new thirty-six-story Time-Life Building on 49th Street, a part of the massive Rockefeller Center complex. Billings, on vacation in South Carolina, had been implored to hurry back to Life so that Luce could leave. "Luce took me up to see his office on the roof," he told his diary, "—a magnificent double-story affair fit for old Duce or Luce." It would become known as the Penthouse. Luce took BiUings to lunch at the expensive Louis XIV restaurant across the street and sailed with his wife that afternoon on the splendid Queen Mary —which could be seen at its pier from the Time-Life offices. Only six weeks earlier the Nazis had marched into Austria, consummating the Anschluss which caused the Rome-Berfin Axis to reach unbroken from Baltic to Mediterranean. Luce had recently given a speech predicting world war in which America would be involved, but he did not really beheve this. It had been given to an all-Yale group at Montclair, New Jersey, men whose complacency he felt constrained to disturb, saying:

. . . [W]e Americans are entirely too cheerful. ... In my time, Yale was turned into a military training camp. I think the chances are at least fifty-fifty that Yale will again be turned into a military training camp within ten years. . . . [R]ight now the gentlemen of England are trying to make up their minds whether they will let Germany grab Austria and Czechoslovakia. . . . War in Europe, war in Asia—and we stay out?

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W. A. Swanberg

And he returned to his theme—indeed his obsession—of Ortega y Gasset, warning that the mass mind was a threat not only in Europe but in America where, he felt, pobtical ideals had withered under the New Deal:

One of the most brilliant works of our time is certainly Ortega y Gasset's thesis on the triumph of the mass-mind. The mass-mind shows itselF in dictatorships. The mass-mind shows itself also in unrestrained and rudderless democracies.

Elaborate plans had been made by the Time organization for him to meet important and knowledgeable people abroad—always his goal no matter where he was. If he resembled a drama lover from Grand Rapids visiting New York to see ten plays in ten nights, it was the only way it could be done. His curiosity and his passion for first-hand observation were unmatched by any of his peers. The European trips of Adolph Ochs, Roy Howard, Hearst and Colonel Robert McCormick were vacation jaunts by comparison.

In London the Luces visited Ambassador Joseph Patrick Kennedy, whose hospitality could hardly have been impaired by the flattering cover story Time gave him when he was Securities and Exchange Commissioner ("an ideal pohceman for the securities business"). Kennedy, perhaps not without White House ambitions and thoughts of Lucepress friendship, arranged an invitation for the Luces to a ball given by the Duchess of Sutherland, where they met the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, in whom Luce had a joumahstic as well as a social interest. He conferred with Brendan Bracken, Harold Nicolson, Lord Beaverbrook and others. Cassandra, the London Daily News columnist, in noting Luce's visit, recognized both his pohtical power and literary sins:

They talk of him as a future Presidential candidate. Our elder statesmen and Potent Peers of the Realm curried his company. He was feted, dined, wined, complimented and plastered with praise. . . . Mr. Luce presents the news [in Time] in a way which he describes as being "curt, clear, complete." . . . And that style is as vile a piece of mangling as has ever stripped the heart out of prose.

The London Bystander also mentioned him as a Presidential possibility, adding, "Henry Luce is also a chain-smoker, heart-breakingly punctual, exceedingly idle about his clothes, and unable to forget, when dealing with waiters, that way back in China his father . . . had half-a-dozen 'boys' at his beck and call."

Going on by air to Berhn, the Luces were the guests of a wealthy German businessman at a gathering attended also by an American businessman from Stamford, Connecticut. After dinner. Luce brought up the subject of National Socialism. As he described it in the 6000-word report he made of his trip:

Herr [his host] is not even yet a member of the party, but he is a tremendous enthusiast for Germany if not for National Socialism and it was with an al-

Luce and His Empire

most pathetic eagerness that he besought [the American from Stamford] to take the floor and explain to us outsiders the merits of Hitler's Germany. This Mr. [ ] was glad to do. . . . He said that if he could take a year off to do nothing except study the ways and destiny of man in the twentieth century, the place he would come to, of all the countries in the world, is Germany. Whether or not you like it, Germany is the place where you are most Ukely to learn most about what you are going to get in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, he says. . . . The great and first impression I got ... is that National Socialism is a socialism which works mightily for the masses however distasteful it may be to them personally in many ways.

This patronizing of "the masses" was perhaps unconscious: ". . . in Germany there is no 'soak-the-rich' ideology," he wrote. ". . . The extraordinary thing about Hitler, at least for the moment, is that he has suspended the class war . . ."

The Luces had tea with the Hitler-truckling British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson. They were driven south in a Cadillac by a relative of their Berlin host and lunched at Bayreuth:

. . . [I]t was there I first saw the paper edited by Streicher and entirely devoted to attacking Jews . . . there has been no exaggeration as to the important role which anti-Semitism has played in the Third Reich or as to the intensity of this brand of hatred. Our friend [the driver] . . . was anything but a "natural" Nazi, but even he accepted anti-Semitism as, at least, a necessary evil in the rebuilding of Germany under the Third Reich.

He listed points, some on the credit side, some on the debit, of this German brand of dictatorship. Fifteen busy theaters in Munich caused him to report, "Any idea that the Nazis have put the kibosh on culture is ridiculous." He thought the Nazis and the New Deal alike in their use of vast sums of money for self-advertising building programs. Luce in several speeches had made sarcastic mention of demagogic New Deal gestures toward "the people" in America. To him, the term seemed to mean a combination of the politically exploited and the lumpen that he, along with Ortega y Gasset, feared. He made repeated ironical use of it in mentioning the popularity of the motorbike in Germany:

. . . [T]he German people are on wheels by the millions—the People. Yes, the People. Oh, make no mistake, the People, the meek People who have inherited the earth. We read of Germany as if it were the private domain of Hitler with just enough people to serve him for an audience occasionally, and with an Army to parade around and amuse him. But the visual impression of Germany is of a People's land. I never saw Hitler. I saw many soldiers casually here and there but I saw no Army. I saw only The People and The People and The People. I do not know what they are but they did not seem to be slaves. Their chains are not visible.

They took the route Hitler had used in the Anschluss, attended the opera

W. A. Swanberg

in Vienna and dined with the American consul general, a man named Wiley: "Wiley is married to a charming Polish Jew and is 100% anti-Nazi but he too, I think, agrees that National Socialism is thoroughly misunderstood in the U.S."

At this very time the Nazis were increasing their pressure on the Czech Su-detenland. In Prague, Luce talked with President Eduard Benes (whom he had last seen in 1921 while on tour from Oxford) and was affected when Benes swore the Czechs would defend their land, saying, "Ask anybody— anybody you meet in the streets-—and he will tell you he will fight." Luce observed, "We saw tens of thousands of good stolid Bohemians going about their business . . . men— and women—who would fight and die for country and for liberty. It was a thrill—I confess it—to touch, however briefly—such a people." He added, "... I know no such men of courage in America. We in America have totally forgotten what it is like to . . . [be] with men who will fight . . ." But this was Luce the mihtant, the admirer of courage as a virtue in itself, not Luce the internationalist making any decision of his own as to the merits of the Sudeten question. He made none. "The first German plane which arrives over Prague is, I am sure, a dead plane," he wrote. But after he had gone on to Karlsbad, talked with the Sudeten German leader there and heard his story about the "subjection" by the Czechs of the Germans within their boundaries, he seemed to swing toward the Germans:

It may well be true that there was no "Sudeten question" until Hitler came along. But on the other hand the real moral of all this is that Europe is not divided into countries but into vaUeys, and every valley has its history and its local demons and its fairies. . . . Without this deep emotional attachment to place, you cannot have civilization, and yet, of course, this very attachment to place breeds conflicts between places. We must not be contemptuous of Europe because it has this Spirit-of-Place, this attachment to soil—what Hitler calls Brot and Boten [sic]. We need much more of it in America . . . We must recognize that this is necessary to civilization . . .

In Paris the Luces were the dinner guests of the American ambassador, that odd number, WilUam C. Bullitt, now congenial to them since his former infatuation with the Soviet had swung to the opposite extreme. Charming and an intriguer, BuUitt, if later rumor could be believed, was then pulling strings for a European accord against Stahn that would take strange shape at Munich. His guests, in addition to Cabinet ministers, included Andre Maurois, Louis Bromfield and M. Bailby, owner of Le Jour, the Paris paper that was said to have received huge secret payments from Mussolini for supporting a French pro-Fascist policy. The air was charged with machinations, into which it is not impossible that Luce may have been initiated by Bullitt, a man who knew the power of the press. Luce wrote, "To the vast glee of Bullitt and Novehst Bromfield and others assembled, I asked M. Bailby to explain to me the morals of the French press and whether its reputation for corruption was jus-

Luce and His Empire

tified." He commented favorably on Pierre Laval and felt that Fortune had been too kind to Leon Blum and the Popular Front—feelings certainly shared by BuUitt:

. . . Communism is a much bigger thing in Europe than it is in America. There were iiiillions of actual official Communist votes in Germany before Hitler. In France there is a very large block of actual Communist votes seating 72 Communist Congressmen and there are whole suburbs around Paris which are Communistic—not merely in the alarmist American sense of the word, but as an actual party organization.

Although he announced no specific conclusions, the tone of Luce's comments suggested agreement with Bullitt that Europe might be approaching a Fascist-Communist showdown in which American interests lay with the Fascists, and a strange air of coolness over the prospect. The Hitler career of international blackmail was on the record, and although Nazi indecencies against humanity were not yet perpetrated daily on fashionable streets in broad daylight, they were known to the world. Luce seemed to walk through this evil without a twitch. He listened placidly to the wealthy Berlin businessman-apologist and the wealthy American businessman-apologist for Hitler, and became in his report a near-apologist himself, suggesting that Nazism was "misunderstood" in America and that better comprehension would place the Nazis in a better light.

2. THE FOUR CHEEKS AT MUNICH

The Luces arrived in New York on the Queen Mary June 20, having had Ambassador Kennedy as a companion. Luce took Clare home and hurried to the office as inevitably as a racing addict would have gone to the track. "He sat on my picture table swinging his legs," Billings wrote, "and talking about the bigwigs he'd met. Joe Kennedy, Edward of Windsor—he'll probably entertain the Windsors when they come to the U.S."

Clare's new play Kiss the Boys Goodbye, a social satire which she was said to have written in a month, opened in New York September 28. Time's drama critic was now the solid Louis Kronenberger, who remarked that he could Kiss the Boss Goodbye if he did not like the Boss's wife's new play. But his review was bravely lukewarm, daring to say that by comparison with the leading character, some others were "dramatically flat." It got by the Boss without change and he never seemed to hold it against Kronenberger. But he did make handsome amends to his spouse when her play received rousing praise in the following week's Life, which called it "high comedy" and saluted her for smashing the jinx that usually follows a hit by producing another hit. Life's four pages and twenty-four pictures with glowing captions made priceless publicity, the envy of other playwrights less favorably connected.

W. A. Swanherg

When Kronenberger later was a guest at Luce parties, he observed, Clare "tended to shake my hand while scanning some far horizon, and to murmur goodbye as though seeing the last of a rather incompetent footman. Once, however, she did remark with a strong hissing sound, 'I'm ssssso glad that we sssso often sssee eye-to-eye about the theatre.' "

On September 30, Luce's prediction that the Czechs would fight was undercut by the turning of "all four cheeks" by Chamberlain and the signing of the four-power Munich pact from which Czechoslovakia, as well as Russia and the League, was excluded. Chamberlain and Daladier, in placating Hitler by awarding him most of the Sudetenland and later informing the Czechs that they must submit, were delaying World War II only by a scant year and for a heavy price—Czech border fortifications that would have stopped the Nazis in a two-front war, plus thirty-five Czech divisions.

Time praised the pact, saying it was easy for those not threatened to criticize: "Really scathing attacks on Neville Chamberlain were made almost entirely from extremely safe distances of several thousand miles . . ."It followed a sly Time propaganda custom by attributing criticism of Munich to people it downgraded, notably "certain Manhattan news broadcasters" of whom it named only "Johannes Steel, a German agent on mysterious missions in Brazil until the Nazis came into power." The following week Chamberlain was Time's honored cover subject. It noted that "energetic, square-jawed" Premier Daladier got a 535-75 Chamber vote of confidence on the Munich question, "nearly all the dissenters being Communists." In the Commons, Winston Churchill drew scowls when he warned, "We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat . . ."

Time's foreign news had now grown obnoxious to many middle-roaders. Kronenberger remarked on Goldsborough's "pro-fascist, reputedly anti-Semitic " hne and how his "week-after-week treatment of the European situation was getting to be as inevitable a topic as Goldsborough's presence in the office was becoming an embarrassment." At the time of Munich, Luce seemed in substantial agreement with his FN chief. He still did not believe war was coming, his journalistic-missionary efforts were devoted to isolating the Russians, and the Axis still seemed a God-given weapon aimed straight at Bolshevism. But within his organization the group protesting this view grew more restive, among them Ralph Ingersoll. As general manager of Time, In-gersoll was also embarrassed by a sag in circulation he blamed in part on Goldsborough. A few weeks after Munich he wrote Luce:

If ever the returns were in on the failure of a major department, the returns are in on Time's Foreign News. . . . Goldsborough has almost consistently been sly, unfair and uninformed. But in the face of the greater charge of being unfeeUng, this is almost beside the point. People do not buy hundreds of thousands of copies of the writings of a tired, tired Jesuit. . . . My prescription is that he be given a year's leave of absence. . . . Goldy's gossipy mind was amusing in the

Luce and His Empire

20's, it is not amusing now . . . And utterly inconsistent with that basic premise of Prospectus No. 1, "We believe in the existence of Good and Evil."

This criticism of Goldsborough was also to some extent criticism of Luce himself, who was beginning to fmne at Ingersoll's tough officiousness. But he knew that even conservatives such as Mrs. Helen Reid of the Herald Tribime were taken aback by Time's irresponsibility in foreign news. Ingersoll's mention of "Good and Evil," of course referred to Time's original prospectus, so carefully drawn by Luce and Hadden. Goldsborough was raising a problem of morale on the staff, and circulation figures were holy symbols. Luce's final agreement with IngersoU about the FN editor was on the ground of style rather than of judicious treatment of the news.

In November Luce took over the editing of Time for a week, in so doing reading Goldy's copy hot from the pencil. On December 8 he sent a memo "To all Time Writers and Editors" giving Goldsborough generous praise after its opening paragraph: "With the best wishes of all of us, and no doubt a little of our best envy. Laird Goldsborough begins this week his long-overdue sabbatical year." Robert Neville and other younger men thereafter wrote FN. At the same time Luce made another gesture toward his rule of "handing the company over" to younger men by retiring Myron Weiss, who had reached the advanced age of forty-four. Weiss recalls that Luce was very kind, "hated to do it" and paid a handsome severance sum.

The Luces went to Mepkin for the hohdays with the two Luce boys, Ann Brokaw and a number of guests including the Allen Grovers and the Daniel Longwells, Mrs. Longwell being the former Mary Eraser, one of the few women to attain editorial status at Time. The main house was still unfinished but five guest houses designed by Stone had risen, each air-conditioned, indirectly hghted and having glass walls facing the river. Neighbors were critical of such functional glitter in a country of pillared verandas and moss-dripping liveoaks. "Why should I build an old mansion on the Cooper River?" Clare asked with some justice. "I have no roots there. This is none of my tradition, and it would be false to ape the old ways."

The common enjoyment she and her husband took in addressing an audience occasionally brought darkness to the Lucean brow, since she could interpolate entertaining remarks on her subject while he was articulating his own. Sometimes, at the long dinner table, the Luces seemed to compete for their guests' attention, Luce seizing listeners at his end while Clare gathered those at the other. The serious Luce at times seemed unaware that she could say extravagant things simply for effect which less literal listeners were expected to discount, and in any case he hewed to the husband-is-master doctrine. On one occasion when they disagreed about something, it was said, Luce leaned forward and asked icily, "You are sure that you are right, aren't you? Absolutely sure?" "Yes," Clare replied, "I am absolutely sure." "Well then, if you are that sure . . . then are you wiUing to bet one million dollars?" Although the

W. A. Swanberg

angry Mrs. Luce did not accept the challenge, it seemed entirely serious and some of the astonished guests realized it was not beyond the couple's resources. The Mepkin duck shooting, too, could create strain, for she was the better marksman and he loathed being beaten at anything by anybody.

Luce posed for Jo Davidson, who was making a bust of him. Meanwhile, in the Time-Life Building, Ingersoll was making a momentous decision. Time's Man of the Year—a selection Luce took with great seriousness—had already been chosen. Newsworthiness rather than righteousness being the criterion, he was of course Hitler. Time had an excellent color picture of him in uniform which, however, did not show his fanaticism and made him appear rather like a banker in khaki.

"I did not see how Time could put this dignified picture of him on the cover without conveying some kind of tacit endorsement," Ingersoll later explained, without adding that Time's dignified textual treatment of him had often given a similar impression.

After much agency search he found a lithograph by an Austrian who had fled the Nazi terror, Rudolph C. von Ripper. It showed a small, diabolical Hitler playing a huge organ which actuated a monstrous wheel from which hung the bodies of his victims. It became the Time cover for January 2, 1939, with the caption: "Man of 1938: From the unholy organist, a hymn of hate." With it was a text piece abandoning the attitudes of the three-weeks'-de-parted Goldsborough, a few passages reading:

. . . Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. . . . Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today. . . . Small, neighboring States . . . feared to ofi^end him. . . . The Fascintem, with Hitler in the driver's seat, with Mussolini, Franco and the Japanese military cabal riding behind, emerged in 1938 as an international revolutionary movement. . . . The Fascist battle against freedom is often carried forward under the false slogan of "Down with Communism!" . . . Civil rights and liberties have disappeared. Opposition to the Nazi regime has become tantamount to suicide or worse. . . . Germany's 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties . . . Now they are being held for "ransom," a gangster trick through the ages. . . . Out of Germany has come a steady, ever-sweUing stream of refugees, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics as well as Protestants, who could stand Nazism no longer. . . .

Had not Time for so long applauded the Fascist dictators, these things would not so badly have needed saying. Luce himself had approved the text after criticizing it for being too anti-Fascist and adding a paragraph listing Hitler's achievements within the Reich, but it seems possible that such sentiments as "The Fascist battle against freedom is often carried forward under the false slogan of 'Down with Communism!' " may have been shpped in during his absence. A breakthrough of near-honesty had been made. It must have puzzled the more pliant readers who had for so long been led by this same

Luce and His Empire

magazine to think well of the dictators. As for Time's own liberals, it was said that a large group of them paraded across 48th Street to the Three G's, a favorite saloon, and hung one on.

3. THE GENTLEMAN FROM INDIANA

Ingersoll was a radical who at times spoke obliquely. In a later explanation of the crisis he described himself as a journalist with a social conscience whereas (and here his tongue seems to have been far in cheek), "Harry . . . believed that a journalist should be amoral—with no responsibility except to be accurate [sic] and able to hold the attention of his audience." Ingersoll, already planning to start a newspaper of his own, no longer looked on Luce as his lifelong employer. When Luce returned, to gaze at the Man of the Year issue with distended eyes, Ingersoll described the subsequent interview:

It was in Harry's room on top of the Time-Life Building, and we were quite alone . . . Harry became visibly emotional, flushing and getting that cold set look he gets when he is very angry. We sat looking at each other for about a minute and then he said simply, "Spilt milk; let's not discuss it."

Luce's official objection was that the cover should not be a deliberate instrument of propaganda. Apparently he forgot his deliberately propagandist cover of June 9, 1930—the portrait of Stalin surrounded by Red conspirators. At the same time he took another blow from the left in the appearance of High Time, published by the "Communist Party Members at Time Inc.," which was secretly distributed around the office and instantly became the talk of New York. Among its many complaints it listed fourteen recent firings and blamed Luce:

Psychologically, Time Inc. is a one man organization . . . [A]ll his [Luce's] sub-executives are terrified of him, and this terror seeps down through the whole organization. Mr. Luce is fond of ripping apart an entire magazine on the deadline and making it over again. On occasion he does the same to his stafl^.

"Join the Communist Party! " High Time urged as a way to fight for job security. Its longest feature was headed, "Goldie—The End of Time's Minister of Propaganda," an attack on the distortions of the sabbaticalized FN head. As the New Republic saw it, the article "offers a convincing explanation of Time's curious editorial interpretations of what has been happening in Soviet Russia, in Spain, in Germany, in Italy and in France." High Time also dispensed gossip about upper-echelon personnel. Luce, who would as soon open a brothel as harbor a nest of Reds, was in a passion. Billings wrote in his diary:

At 5:15 an emergency meeting in Luce's office . . . Gottfried, Davenport, Jackson, Prentice, Paine, Hodgins and Bruce Bromley [a lawyer with Maurice T. Moore's firm] . . . Luce proposed that we try to find out who in our company

W. A. Swanberg

was responsible for High Time and fire them out of hand. This precipitated a hot debate. Gottfried, Davenport and Paine warned vigorously against a purge, a manhunt which would get the company bad publicity. . . . The meeting was strongly against Luce's proposal of a frontal attack. . . .

Now Walter Winchell gossiped that Luce had hired detectives to hunt down the Communists of High Time. The New Republic chuckled, "Our detectives tell us that Mr. Luce is going to be very embarrassed when he discovers that those contributors out on the firing line include some people 'way up' on his own staff." Luce, after some thought, sent out an admonitory office memo:

Most of you have seen the sheet "High Time" put out by the "Communist Party Members at Time Inc." I think that just as a gossip sheet it's a pretty amusing job of writing. I also think that the authors of it were disloyal to the organization and to all their feUow workers. ... A publication by "The Communist Party at Time Inc." is just as offensive as one would be by a "Nazi Bund in Time Inc." ... It has been a cardinal principle with us that editors, writers and researchers have a right to spout to one another their views . . . We have had people of all shades of political thought on our staff and I maintain the right of every one of them to speak to every other member of the staff with as much intellectual freedom—and carefreeness—as he would in his own family. . . . Free speech in confidence is essential to group journalism. It would be intolerable if our editors had to feel that they could not open their mouths without having some half-uttered thought plucked out and used to stab them pubhcly in the back. . . .

I think you will agree with me that one of the things not to do is to start a Red hunt. . . .

We cannot get along on any basis except that of free expression toward one another in private and assurance that such confidence wlU not be violated. If anyone feels that he cannot make that confidence mutual on his part, he ought to resign. Certainly ff the management discovers any employee making public gossip of matters that are properly confidential between members of the staff, he will be fired.

—Henry R. Luce.

Time's clandestine Communists came back at him in their second issue, saying, "He called it 'gossip.' WTien you want to suppress free speech, it sounds better to call it 'gossip.' " There was an attack on the use of Life in 1938 as a "Repubhcan Party organ," and on John Martin for steady denigration of the New Deal in Time's NA department: "He does his work by innuendo, by tricky leads, by making New Dealers sinister or foolish and anti-New Dealers dignified and cool-headed." As for Luce, High Time said he had had pohtical ambitions since 1932, had no chance imtil Life became so powerful, and now seemed to have settled for the role of king-maker rather than king. Perhaps most embarrassing was the charge that Time had suppressed news that would antagonize large advertisers—that it had treated the Akron strikes in a manner hostile to labor and favorable to the tire manufacturers.

Luce and His Empire

Troubled over his own "revolt of the masses," Luce wrote an interminable memo which he never sent out, much of it in rebuttal of the theories of Inger-soU. Just who was Time aimed at? Ingersoll had argued that each department should be handled with enough depth to please experts. Not at all, said Luce. Time was meant to be read cover-to-cover by all readers, not patchily by specialists:

And that means that if you are going to ask one man to read Time from cover-to-cover, you have got to work like hell to edit Time for one man. . . . Now, theoretically, the lower the mental content, the wider your audience will be. But that is only theoretically or generally speaking—it is not true in specific cases. The mental content of Life always was about 1000% higher than any other picture magazine and is 2000% higher today—and look at the comparative results. But if you are going to hold 700,000 circulation [on Time], must you edit for the last and dumbest of the 700,000? No—or if that is so, the Board of Directors of Time Inc. will flatly authorize you not to edit for same. Time is going to be a damned intelligent paper—let the circulation chips fall where they may. . . .

Time is edited for the Gentleman of Indiana and for Madame the Lady of Indiana. . . . Time is going to write for the Gentleman of Indiana, writing to him as man to man, in straightforward decent language, no punches pulled, but no dirty below-the-belt cracks either at God, the Constitution or his fellow gentlemen of Indiana. . . .

That meant perpetuation of the meat grinder, the writing of every story to maintain editorial "unity" and satisfy cover-to-cover readers with all text at a similar level of understanding. The editor-in-chief also loosed a bolt at Ingersoll:

Someone else around here, call him Mr. "X," is worrying about Time's intellectual or interpretative level. Well, now, what I would like to do is to change places with Mr. "X." Dear Mr. "X," if you will guarantee that Time's newsstand circulation will move steadily forward, I will gladly be responsible for Time's intellectual level. ... I fancy I could be a pretty hot intellectual myself if I ever had the chance to be. I, too, could probe the European situation to its very gizzard. ... So, Mr. "X," . . . I'll take on the job of being [Time's] intellectual mentor and elevator. . . .

I do not conceive of myself as having to be the continual Moral Schoolmaster of this place. But I think I cannot escape being the custodian or depository of "Time's conscience." Possibly therefore an informal, unwritten custom should be established—namely that any senior editor or senior executive of any Time Inc. publication who is troubled about any tendency involving editorial conscience should understand that he can and should come to me about it at any time. Practically, and recognizing that we are all frail mortals, it is a question of mutual confidence and respect. If fundamentally any senior does not have sufficient confidence and respect for my ethical attitudes, he should, I think, put me on notice to that effect . . .

W. A. Sivanberg

In April 1939, Ingersoll, who had questioned Luce's ethical attitudes, left Time to start work on the liberal-leftist newspaper PM, where he would prove himself as obdurate in his prejudices as Luce was in his.

4. THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER

Other changes at Time enunciated the banishment of Ingersoll and the renewed hegemony of the Boss. Under Gottfried as managing editor were two associates, Frank Norris and T. S. Matthews. Luce made it plain that he was not only his own publisher but also the top editor, responsible for "general character, tone, direction, ambition and ideals."

None of his three headmen had newspaper experience. Matthews was as close to being politically obtuse as such an otherwise cultivated man could be. A literary perfectionist, he had done much to rid the "culture" departments of the Timestyle excesses which the New Yorker had lampooned. According to Winthrop Sargeant, who had worked under him, Matthews had been "empire building"—that is, aiming for more power and gathering a group of loyal followers with whom he could move in when opportunity came, as it had now. Like most of his colleagues he was nominally a liberal. Astonishingly, despite his ten years at Time, his sympathy for the Spanish Loyahsts, his acquaintance with Goldsborough and presumably with his work, he was unaware of the extent to which Time was a propaganda magazine. He had an intermittent sense of journalistic responsibility. In his new eminence he decided that he must get better acquainted with Luce. As he put it:

I could no longer say that I didn't take Time seriously. I now thought it a barbarous magazine that might, at least in part, be civilized. It had possibilities that hadn't been apparent to me before. I liked my job and wanted to go on with it. But not under any and all circumstances, not under any kind of management."

He invited Luce to dine with him and four colleagues, Norris, Charles Christian Wertenbaker, John Osborne and Robert Fitzgerald. Luce accepted but insisted that the five instead be his guests at his new apartment in the Waldorf Towers on Park Avenue, just two blocks east of Rockefeller Center.

The Luce apartment had the coldness of the habitation of a rich couple pursuing power. Luce, who never knew what he was eating, was hardly more conscious of his surroundings. A couple of the callers had never seen him, much less spoken to him. The dinner gave them an opportunity to see what he was like, and also provided Matthews with two unscheduled meetings with Mrs. Luce. Hunting for a bathroom as the evening wore on, he walked down a corridor, opened a door and discovered Clare before her mirror, preparing

" Quoted from Name and Address, by T. S. Matthews (Simon & Schuster, N.Y. 1960).

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for bed. Closing the door and retreating, he turned a corner, spied another door, opened it and now was eying Clare from the other side.

"Young man!" she said severely.

But the unexpected view of Clare was less important than a clear view of Luce's aims. "Luce," Matthews recalled, "could hold the floor and hold it." He was ingratiating and convincing in his exposition of his news policies. It grew so late that the conference was continued a week later at the Luce apartment, then again at the Players Club, where Matthews engaged a private room. As he described it:

When Luce arrived for this meeting he handed us each a copy of a memo he had written. As we read it, we saw that he had anticipated all these final questions and had written his answers. Furthermore he had lifted the argument to a general discussion of journalism, its purposes and possibihties, and ended with a statement of his own journalistic faith. He had cut the ground out from under us. We looked at each other and shook our heads. There was nothing left to say.

Few other press lords would have submitted to questioning by five subordinates, a couple of them far enough down the ladder so that he had never met them. Luce more than once had sent word to Miss Thrasher that he was too busy to see his father, waiting outside. Yet he had given these five a total of ten or twelve hours divided among three evenings. He had gone over the ground so thoroughly in his own mind and was so sure of his ground that he dispersed the doubts of five keen men who had good reason for doubts so soon after Munich and the Goldy crisis. The "soul meetings" with Luce would become a company legend and would form the theme of a novel years later by Wertenbaker.

Matthews's account of the talks names the cast, sets the scene, then leaves out much of the action and dialog. He did, however, name one of the questions he asked Luce. It was in fact the crucial one—the right question in the wrong tense: "Under what circumstances would you consider using Time as a political instrument?" And he gave Luce's answer to that one question:

"If I thought the RepubUc was in danger."

No one seems to have asked, "Is it in danger?" Indeed Luce performed a forensic feat in winning over the five editors who were, to one degree or another, not sure that they wholly approved of his conduct of the magazine. He coiild scarcely have done so had he not been morally certain of his own ground, backed by the angels of the Lord. The greatest question that had arisen among the five was the same one that had troubled MacLeish and a few others—the question of bias in the presentation of the news. He had disposed of that masterfully in his conversation and in his memo to them, disavowing any intention to make Time objective and asserting that objectivity was impossible even if desirable:

Even within our company there is occasionally some confusion on this score. For example, there is a persistent urge to say that Time is "unbiased," and to

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claim for it complete "objectivity." That, of course, is nonsense. The original owners-editors-promoters of Time made no such fantastic claim. . . . You will find an acknowledgment of bias in the first circular. . . .

They were bowled over not only by his skill in debate but by the force of his convictions. They believed in him. They believed in him enough so that they did not put questions that would have occurred to really hard-bitten doubters under aggressive leadership. True, the original circular seventeen years earUer had conceded the impossibihty of "complete neutrality on pubhc questions" and said that Time would exercise the benevolent prejudices common to enhghtened minds such as the belief that the world was round. Only a few thousand people had read it then and had long since forgotten about it. It had been flashed before the readers again on Time's tenth anniversary. Were such warnings supposed to suffice in perpetuity? Would it not be fair to make this point clear in every issue? Should not every reader be informed that he was not reading news but news modified and rewritten to include opinion and suggestion? Did not the subtitle, The Weekly Newsmagazine, assure the reader that he was getting news? Was there not a question of honest labeling of merchandise here? And did not the bias go considerably further than agreement that the world was round? These were logical questions that did not get asked, or, if asked, were turned aside by Luce's impregnable moral assurance.

They were questions that would continue to trouble some of the more thoughtful Timen—questions which in their existence in an unknown number of editorial minds would remain hidden like a skeleton in the closet at Time Inc. for many years, with great excitement arising when someone occasionally was brave enough to open the door.

Aside from Time's skilled adjectival shaping of the news and the people in it, there were at least three levels of communication of its propaganda. There was the relatively rare honest opinion given openly along with an honest news story. There were the opinions cleverly hidden behind the facts of a news story which itself was still essentially true. And there was the twisting of the news itself by exaggeration, selection or suppression. This last could be achieved in many ways—in the case of a pubhc official, for example, by stressing the emptiest or most questionable passages in his speeches and ignoring the constructive and inspiring passages. Time often used this technique on President Roosevelt, not forgetting details fike frequent mention of his use of a cigarette holder, which was regarded as a vote-loser in the virile hinterland. The gimmicks available to shrewd denigrators were hmited only by the fertility of their imaginations. One of them, reflecting Luce's fairly continuous effort to depict Roosevelt as a potential dictator, appeared in Life, where careful search of picture files turned up Hitler, MussoUni, Stafin and the President all in similar poses of shaking hands, pointing, petting animals and pinning medals. The headhne was "Speaking of Dictators," and readers who wrote to complain were assured it was only a joke. Another was Time's cover

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story on the American Communist leader Earl Browder whose color photograph, backed by Communist posters, had a clever guilt-by-association line under it: "comrade earl browder / For Stalin, for Roosevelt . . ."

Time's treatment of Roosevelt grew more acid as his second term wore on without real economic recovery and there was some evidence of public disillusionment. It was unequaled in its ability to make a man look incompetent or suspect in the framework of a few compliments that gave an impression of fairness. A cover story on James Roosevelt said the son had grown rich selling "the Roosevelt brand of insurance " to clients whom Time pointedly refrained from suggesting might expect political favors in return. With great good nature Time portrayed the President as a man who liked a drink even better than the next fellow and that "often at banquets the flower vases before his plate conceal as many as four Old-Fashioneds, which he downs before one can say 'J^ck Garner.' "

Although Luce was still susceptible to occasional liberal ideas, his growing hatred of Roosevelt tended to steer him from anything even faintly New Dealish. Time Inc. was full of well-paid liberals in the position of being forced to write propaganda that pained them. Their wrestlings with conscience would be documented in works of fiction as well as fact. In the novel The Big Wheel by the former Time staffer John Brooks, one such writer bemoans his dilemma:

"I know I shouldn't go on writing things I don't believe. I know I ought to quit. . . . And by God I intend to, in another year at the outside. But how can I? I tell you, I need ten thousand a year to keep the apartment! Besides, where could I go from here? This is the top, Dick! The top! This is what men spend their time working up to. The only place you can go from here is down."

1. JACK BENNY AND WINSTON CHURCHILL

When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Time said it was the "signal for a belated Stop Hitler drive," as if its own recognition of the dictator's true stripe had been early. Luce said no more about Nazism being "misunderstood." He urged that America, instead of standing in isolation, summon the world to peace "with all the power and energy we can command." He met with the nation's two most honored public men, reporting on it predictably enough so that Billings wrote in his diary: "Editors' and Publishers' meeting at which Luce reported thus: He had lunch with President Roosevelt privately, and soon after, breakfast with ex-President Hoover, privately. Roosevelt was dull and uninspired and had nothing to say. Hoover was exciting and thoughtful and said plenty. So what!"

Late in June the Luces sailed for Europe, "only for a rest." But at Aix-les-Bains Luce received an irresistible invitation from America's ambassador to Poland, Anthony Biddle, to visit that country, which was then arming against Nazi threats. In view of England's alliance with Poland, he flew with Clare to London to prepare himself with a breathless round of interviews with British leaders. They also attended the London opening of Clare's The Women, which had had trouble passing the censor, and met George Bernard Shaw, whose Socialism Luce abhorred. Shaw, unacquainted with American journalism—or was it a Shavian barb?—later sent Clare a postcard ending infu-riatingly for Luce, "Kindest regards to you and Mr. Boothe." En route to Poland the Luces stopped briefly at the Ritz in Paris, where he wrote his first wife:

Dear Lila: Three days in London of the most strenuous interviewing caused me to miss yesterday's boat with the letter I had intended to write. Flew over here today and in half an hour we are off to Poland.

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As you know, I had intended to come over this time only for a rest. . . . But in view of the terrific goings on in all parts of Europe, it seemed foolish not to avail myself of various unusual opportunities to look around—and so I'm doing two weeks of joumalisticing. ... I hope to see you before the summer's end.

In Warsaw, where the Luces were among the guests at a ball given by Ambassador Biddle, he was persuaded that Poland would hold off the Nazis because of its "tradition of military patriotism." Hurrying on to Bucharest, where he dined with Foreign Minister Gabriel Gafencu, he became optimistic about the resistance Rumania would offer. "Today there are no braver opponents of Nazi Germany than the governments of the not-so-democratic Republic of Poland and the quite democratic Kingdom of Rumania," he wrote in the 3500-word report he prepared for his editors back home. (Both countries would quickly crumble.) Surely Clare was the instigator of their visit, as they returned through France, with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who recorded it curtly and clearly but incompletely:

. . . We received a visit from Clare Boothe Luce and her husband. They had been to Poland and both were convinced that there would be war. . . . She was embroidering in petit point a map of the United States. She was convinced her husband would become President.

The world reports of Henry Luce, which would ultimately run into the hundreds of thousands of words, were already becoming a tradition in the Time-Life Building. One could never fault his conviction that the way to learn about world crises was to go to the scene and ask those involved. He did, however, expect to arrive at solutions rather quickly. The Luce curiosity still had in it something of the Yale undergraduate pelting his professors with questions. There was in it also something of the pollster, jotting down quick answers and going on to the next individual. In his short report on his activities in London, his comment on his talk with Lord Beaverbrook was, "... my God, what a man, in his huge London Palace-Prison, in his terrifying and fantastically expensive discomfort—Power, Power, Power . . ." Whether the Enghsh took Clare and her petit-point map as an omen of the Presidency, they took Luce seriously as a man of influence and molder of opinion. He was deferred to by "statesmen and potent peers" even more than the year before. England, haunted by the peril of a war for which she was not prepared, needed the American friendship which Luce could influence. His report listed twenty-one persons (not counting Shaw) he had interviewed during his short stay, including Winston Churchill, Lady Astor, Anthony Eden ("infinitely nice"), Viscount WiUingden, Lady Sybil Colefax ("most delightful") and Lord Camrose. He added as if in afterthought:

Oh, of course, the most enjoyable evening of all my pohtical travels! Dinner a quatre with the [Lord Robert] Vansittarts ... in a fashionable restaurant . . . and then we returned to their home for a night-cap, inspected the Vansittart ancestors . . .

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If the Luce reports let the editors back home know he was getting up in the world, they also let them know that he was the most energetic reporter in the establishment and that they had better put similar effort into their work. But his office reputation as a prophet was poor. "Luce came back from Europe at noon," Billings wrote August 14. "He dropped into my office for 20 minutes and talked world affairs . . . He thinks the Poles will fight for their sovereignty. We laughed to ourselves and kissed the Poles goodbye . . ."

His hunch that war would not come in 1939 was also mishandled by events. A week after his return came Stalin's answer to Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact. To go with this appalling news was a Jack Benny cover, a miUion copies already printed in color for the September 4 Time. "Oh, God," Luce protested, "how I hate the idea of Jack Benny this week." The comedian was scrapped and the man hurriedly substituted was Churchill, with whom Luce had so recently talked—a Churchill who was still only a lowly M.P. Next in this parade of world-shaking events came the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1. Europe was at war, and perversely had consummated it too late to get it into the September 4 Time.

Hitler's accommodation with Stahn at long last destroyed Luce's sympathy for him. "Luce went through the special issue war dummy [of Life] with disastrous results," BiUings wrote. "He felt we didn't blame Hitler enough for starting the war, that we were too hard on Britain. ... I called in Kay [Hubert Kay, an editor] and told him . . . Said he: 'When is Harry going to declare war on Germany?' "

2. THE REX LETTER

"I've met the man who ought to be the next President of the United States," Russell Davenport told his wife after his first encounter with Wendell Willkie. Davenport, now managing editor of Fortune, was bowled over by the charming, rumpled Hoosier who headed Commonwealth & Southern Corporation. When WiUkie spent a weekend at the Davenport summer place in Westport, where the Hon cub Davenport had given his wife was tethered to a tree, the Luces were interested guests.

The Roosevelt years which had seen Luce attain wealth and power had seen him largely frustrated in touching the Washington springs of power because he was a Repubhcan, an outsider. He was also sensitive about a hberal establishment, with the President at its head and front, which did not take him seriously as an intellectual. He was well along with his collection of honorary degrees and yearned for membership in the Yale Corporation. His protesting, "I fancy I could be a pretty hot intellectual myself" came from the heart. He was said to have told Clare that he could think of no one mentally his superior—a claim that took her aback and made her mention first Einstein

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and then John Kieran. Luce rejected them both, saying Einstein was a spe-ciahst and Kieran "a freak." It seems hkely that Luce ached to be king-maker for a Repubhcan administration that would bring him into the center of power rather than the periphery. He had cheered Willkie's losing fight against TVA. Time had just used one of its subtler pejoratives on Roosevelt's TVA boss David Lilienthal who, it said, had come "out of the White House with his lips twisted in a grin of satisfaction" over the TVA victory. Since Horatio Alger, twisted lips had meant sure villainy and a "grin of satisfaction" suggested the triumph of turpitude.

While Luce investigated President-making, his wife was setting a course for a seat in Congress. She sailed for Italy in February with her friend Margaret Case, a Vogue editor. Miss Case's ultimate mission was to study Paris fashions, Mrs. Luce's to study the quiet confrontation of French and German armies at the Maginot Line which had continued virtually bullet-free for six months and was called in America the Phony War. She planned a book about it which should help her political ambitions. Before going on to France she attended an audience with Pope Pius XII and chatted with Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and foreign minister, at a Roman dinner party. Quite on her own—she was smashingly independent—she had adopted her husband's moral and political loathing for Communism, though she was not pious.

In Paris she resembled her husband in seeming less critical of Laval's property-conscious rightism than of the Popular Front, the "French New Deal" with its inclusion of Communists. Her mind was keen and tough. What was the French strategy? What did they expect to gain by the Phony War? Did they still hope the Germans might turn on the Russians? Did they believe that Germany would ultimately collapse economically because of the blockade? But what if Germany itself became Communist, a true ally of Russia? She was dubious of the Maginot mind and the French tablecloth generals.

Time had recently opened a small Paris bureau to watch the war. With the aid of its staff and her own acquaintance with Ambassador Bullitt and others, she arranged interviews with public figures and even wangled a visit to the Maginot Line near Metz, where the bored poilus were so impressed by her beauty that they brought her roses. She had been accredited as a Life correspondent. She could be as blunt as her husband in asking questions of strangers. She caught a tartar in Mme. Charles Pomaret, wife of the Minister of Labor, when she said: "Madame Pomaret, we Americans who are friends of France feel that American public opinion, which is largely isolationist, is partly so because we don't quite know what France's war aims are."

Her hostess whirled on her fiercely, put down her champagne and spoke of Uncle Shylock in the last war and of Americans who meddled in French aflFairs. Minister Pomaret, hearing the denunciation, came in. His wife said, "This is Mile. Boothe. She has been asking me the usual stupid question:

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What are France's war aims? America wants to know them!" Pomaret nodded and said, "I am sorry, Miss Boothe, you must go." He opened the door and ushered her out of the ministry.

Undismayed, she cabled Luce urging him to come, adding in the hngo of the dramatist, "The curtain is about to go up on the greatest show the world has ever seen." Luce sailed on the Rex April 13, a few days after the Nazi occupation of Denmark and attack on Norway.

It was as if the Rex was Luce's Mount Sinai, though of course it was only that he now had time to record revelations long growing on him. The cable he had received, the drama of a Europe licked by flames, the action-lover's consciousness that he would soon be there watching the fire, all seem to have inspired the romantic and the prophet in him. He set down his thoughts in an apocalyptic letter to Roy Larsen. He wanted to impart his message, as he put it, "before becoming environmentally involved in Armageddon or whatever it is." The Rex letter, as kingly in tone as the vessel's name, contained a distillation of his beliefs as they bore on America and the world of April 1940. First he philosophized about his power, the power of propaganda:

. . . [Ojur great job [at Time Inc.] from now on is not to create power but to use it. . . . The thought has been inextricably bound up in all our work for a decade. Furthermore the use of power and the creation of it are not separate things—they are inevitably bound up together. But I think you and I share a kind of reluctance to use power—one of the deepest first instincts in the American tradition is perhaps the distrust of power. It would perhaps rather create power, take satisfaction in the creation-—and let its use be free, "democratic," uncontrolled.

To see Time Inc. in perspective is to realize its tremendous potential power. ... I don't particularly like it . . . but there it is.

Perhaps he did not intend this last to be taken literally. He next took up the business of using that power, with a President to be elected, a world war to be settled, and a vital American need, as he saw it, to spread itself ideologically:

. . . [T]here is another [reflection] of more immediate application to the shape of things present & to come. The wild waves and the gentle waves have been telling me that the domestic problem of the United States and the foreign problem of the United States are today one and the same thing. . . . The problem of preserving, expanding, and developing a way of life which is characterized by ideals of freedom, of the integrity and moral responsibility of individuals . . . [A]ll the wisdom to which you & I respond tells us that this great aim cannot be achieved by a U.S. self-contained either economically or ideologically. America has no chance ... of developing the good life as we see it unless there is at least a roughly corresponding development (instead of denial and disintegration) in some of the rest of the world. And this does not mean to me . . . that we must go dashing ofi^ declaring war on Hitler or Hirohito or anybody else tomorrow or the next day. But it does mean that the stakes of American civilization {not prosperity only) are world-wide stakes. . . . The American people do not know this.

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You and I know it. . . . So it is up to you and me to do our part to tell the American people that this is really so. . . .

. . . To no one else could I say with the same assurance of understanding: by God, what a job we've done! Only you & I know all the unspectacular headaches—& mistakes! . . .

Selah! God knows what may happen before we meet. . . .

Luce met Clare in Paris, spent a week there talking with French leaders, then went over to barrage-ballooned London, where they stayed as always at Claridge's, a place that satisfied their mutual demand for the best and most prestigious and was only a block from the embassy ruled by the isolationist Joseph Kennedy. Kennedy said the British were as good as licked. "I told him I could not match him argument-for-argument," Luce later recalled. "I could only tell him I did not believe they would be, and so I prayed." It seemed that these two power-seeking men were willing to give each other a push. Kennedy had recently been flattered in a second Time cover story ("grinning, cussing Joe Kennedy, known and loved by millions of English-speaking men"). The ambassador had coaxed Luce to write the preface to Why England Slept, by his twenty-three-year-old son John—an expansion of the young man's Harvard senior thesis on England's failure to prepare for war, to be published later in the year. Luce was impressed by Kennedy's charming second son. He might have been unwilling to write the preface had he known that the ambassador had first approached Harold Laski, Laski having declined on the ground that he felt it "the book of an immature mind; that if it hadn't been written by the son of a very rich man, he wouldn't have found a publisher."

As for Clare, she was exasperated that in the face of all the British disaster the nation could still stomach the same prime minister, writing, "It was a shocking thing to me that long after Mr. Hitler had blown Mr. Chamberlain's Pax Umbrellica inside out, they still let him hold the twisted framework over their heads for protection." The Luces talked with generals, press lords and peers. They spent a weekend at Lady Astor's magnificent Cliveden, where appeasement was no longer in vogue. They made arrangements for audiences with Queen Wilhelmina and King Leopold and flew to Holland May 7.

In contrast to the blaze of spring tulip fields, there were sudden dark rumors that the Germans were coming. The Luces attended dinners with Dutch leaders arranged by American Minister George Gordon, but because of the uneasiness the queen did not see them. On May 9 they went on to Brussels and stayed in the top-floor suite of the American embassy presided over by the rich lawyer John Cudahy.

Luce soon had that peculiar good fortune so often yearned for by newspapermen—physical presence at the scene of great and dangerous events— though in his case it was perhaps less luck than his insistence on such constant search for events that he could scarcely avoid occasional collisions with them. At 5:25 next morning a maid rushed in shrieking "Les Allemands!" Hearing

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planes, the Luces leaped from their beds. "We were at the window looking down into the street when we heard a tremendous explosion," Luce said later. "The house across the street collapsed. The sirens began to blow."

Their appointment with King Leopold was at ten, but the king had other duties that morning. The two Luces were alike in a disregard for danger which they would demonstrate repeatedly. Some forty people had already been killed in the air raids. Ambassador Cudahy urged them to leave immediately, but they insisted on staying for an embassy dinner that evening. By then the bombs were fewer and quite distant, evidently hitting the airport. Luce had cabled the home office in part:

Your special correspondent, Clare Boothe, is sending Billings a brief eyewitness account of the first day of the German's grand attack on the Western world. I hope Life can use it this week as a signed item in a lead story. ... [It was given subsidiary position.] If you were here today, remembering 1914, you would be sad but also you would be plenty, plenty mad. The word Boche is the only word used on the streets today to describe the enemy, and no other word would sound right. I deeply wish all priggish, pious pacifists could be here today.

In the morning they hired a car and headed for Paris, passing refugees in carts, bicycles and haywagons—then British troops singing as they marched northward to meet the Germans. They passed a symbol now ironic, the monument to the dead at Vimy Ridge. In Paris they found many bejeweled residents of the Ritz terrified. Perhaps their terror was no worse than that which would be shown by any nationals in such a situation, but Luce felt the special contempt he held for a nation whose government, like the Literary Digest, had failed to measure up to its competition. The behever in heroes looked vainly for them in crumbling France—for men who had the courage, conviction and style to rally a demorahzed people. The behever in aristocracy perhaps blamed it on the erosions of the Popular Front, though England's Tories had done httle better. But now at the last moment England had produced a hero, Churchill having just become prime minister. Luce, scanning the horizon for heroes, took some comfort in a statement of sympathy for the invaded countries by the Pope, and shock and anger expressed by President Roosevelt. A cable he sent home made clear his impatience with anyone thinking America had nothing to do with this war:

The remarks of Roosevelt and the Pope sound wonderful here. I am practically prepared to become both a Catholic and a Third Termer unless the opposition offers some small degree of competition. Unless the others move awful fast, it looks like Davenport's man [WiUkie] is the only Republican who can get this [Luce's] homecoming vote.

Sober and long experienced observers say it is utterly irrelevant to discuss right and wrong in connection with the present German regime. The simple fact is that the Germans will stop at nothing to get what they want and there is utterly no evidence that they want anything less than all they can get by the most

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ruthless means. Whether or not they bomb civihans is similarly irrelevant, because they will not waste ammunition if it serves no purpose, and they will not hesitate to destroy every woman and child in Belgium if they can gain thereby . . . [T]he United States is indulging in complete and criminal folly unless it proceeds at once to build every single military airplane it can possibly make in the next six months. Never mind who uses them, never mind who pays, but for God's sake, make them. Similarly, all possible military equipment of every sort should be ordered at once, regardless of cost.

If Life and Time fail to sell this idea now, it probably won't matter much what these estimable publications say in years to come. . . . The Germans have one weapon greater than all their army and that is the blindness and stultification of those in every country who are too fat to fight.

1. THE WILLKIE-LUCE LEAGUE

Luce came home, the columnist Jay Frankhn said, "hke a bat out of Flanders with a demand for national unity." He reached New York alone May 20, his venturesome wife remaining behind to stay with the Kennedys and see more of Europe's convulsions. Luce's heady patriotism and politics revolved around his conception of what he called the American Proposition (Clare shortened it to Amprop), in which he saw the nation as destined to spread freedom and prosperity around the world. He came shouting, like Paul Revere, that America must wake up. The born competitor knew that America must compete— quickly—with Hitler. Two days after his return he made his first nationwide broadcast over NBC: ". . . i/Great Britain and France fail, we know that we and we only among the great powers are left to defend the democratic faith throughout the world. . . . We have to prepare ourselves to meet force with force—to meet force with superior force." He sounded the warning over the Columbia network: "If we deal with the Third Reich on a basis of appeasement of any kind, it will follow as sure as night follows day that we will pay for it ... in the bloody end of all our democracy. We must deal with Hitler as with an enemy. . . ."

As he would in later crises, he seemed impatient for America to go in and solve it, angering isolationists. Senator Burton K. Wheeler referred to his speeches as "really advocating that we get into the war."

He was implementing the Rex letter, telling the American people what he knew and they did not. He gave up on Thomas E. Dewey and Senator Taft as Republican candidates because they dodged the war issue, and came out for Willkie, the anti-isolationist, the viewer of America as part of the world. Life frankly beat the drum for Willkie, Fortune published Willkie's article "We

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The People," as Joseph Barnes noted, "accompanied by what was practically a nomination of him by the Luce editorial board," and Davenport resigned to become Willkie's right-hand man. Still, when Luce went to the Republican convention in Philadelphia in June, Willkie was a very dark horse. His nomination on the sixth ballot was a surprise which the Lucepress cheered, and Luce won the suspicion of the isolationist Republican Old Guard who disliked the Johnny-come-lately Willkie's internationalism and former Democratic allegiance.

Thereafter Luce became a trusted Willkie adviser. No one—not even his father—dared walk into Luce's penthouse office unannounced, but Willkie did so repeatedly without injury. "He looked like a big bear," Miss Thrasher recalled. "He'd come in about 6:30, say good evening to me and walk right in to Mr. Luce's office. Mr. Willkie would put his feet up on one side of the desk and Mr. Luce would put his feet up on the other and tell me, 'You can go home now.' I have no idea how long they talked."

When John Kennedy's book Why England Slept was published August 1, Luce's foreword stressed one of the reasons Kennedy gave for Britain's failure to prepare: "A boxer cannot work himself into proper psychological and physical condition for a fight that he seriously believes will never come off." Now, said Luce, America had the same trouble. We had to believe war was coming, but so far neither of the candidates seemed to believe it, not even Luce's candidate:

[Mr. Roosevelt] can't believe we are ever going to fight. Otherwise how can he so glibly guarantee that we will not need to sacrifice one tiniest bit of our "social gains." . . . Mr. Willkie may reasonably be pardoned [on political grounds] for presenting himself to the Republican Convention as a prime keep-out-of-war man. . . . But all his genius of personality and industrial management will be bitter ashes in our mouths if Mr. Willkie goes forth to prepare for a war which he leads us to believe isn't really ever going to happen.

Young Kennedy came in to chat with Luce, brightening the office with his Irish smile, charming Miss Thrasher by giving her an autographed copy of the book, being granted a few minutes of Luce's time because he was Joe Kennedy's son.

"Mr. Luce was very anxious for Mr. Willkie to be elected," Miss Thrasher recalled in great understatement. Luce longed to become Secretary of State, a position for which he felt himself to have special qualifications which it is un-hkely that he concealed from Willkie. While his journalist-propagandist status was as questionable as ever, his call for national dedication was one the administration itself would adopt, and none too soon. Confidentially Luce warned his senior men that it was their "journalistic duty" to sound the danger signal, to "cultivate the Martial Spirit" and to be "savage and ferocious in our criticism of all delay and bungling." He visited Secretary of State Hull to argue for the transfer of over-age destroyers to the hard-pressed British, and

W. A. Swanberg

later urged this on the President himself. Luce's hearing was deteriorating—a handicap he perhaps mentioned obliquely in his rather grandiose memorandum:

After dinner Prex and I have a private talk in the Oval Room. My big question is, has he or has he not made up his mind about sending destroyers to Great Britain. I understand him to say definitely that "it's out" . . .

Not long thereafter, the destroyer deal was made. Meanwhile, National Affairs Editor Matthews aroused the Lucean ire. Although Matthews opposed a third term and was nominally for Willkie, he did not share Luce's propagandist audacity. The inexperienced and impulsive Republican candidate made errors that Time reported just as if he had been a Democrat. The canny President made few, and Time in some issues reached an approximation of fair political reporting. It was all very well for Time to praise Willkie's personality and courage and to describe him as "the hardest-hitting extemporaneous day-by-day debater of public issues whom the Republicans have had for a candidate since Roosevelt I." But when the same issue said some Republican professionals feared that Willkie was muffing his opportunities and might be "only a fatter, louder Alf Landon," Luce exploded. Felix Belair, Time's new Washington man, had suffered the jeers of other newsmen because of the magazine's pro-Willkieism. He showed his misunderstanding of Luce, who of course had no wish to be objective, when he observed that the story "did more to clinch Time Inc.'s reputation as an objective publishing house than any other recent development. "

Matthews, who was working sixty hours or more a week, recalled: "Luce called me up at home to complain, in a long, rambling, furious diatribe . . . When I got a chance to speak I told him, with equal fury, that if he ever again called me at home on a Wednesday ... I would resign on the spot . . . Wednesday was the one day I had with my family, it was a sacred day, and was never to be trespassed on again. He apologized handsomely . . ."

Luce thereafter reserved his complaining for the other six days, but Matthews stood him off as no other editor ever did. Time later reported Willkie's splitting of an infinitive, told of crowds booing him in Michigan and elsewhere, and said he seemed to promise rather a lot when he said, "I pledge a new world."

Now and then Luce would get a Willkie speech idea in the small hours and would telephone it to Miss Thrasher at her West 73rd Street home through the Time switchboard. She would take the Elevated through the night to the T-L Building, where she would give the information to the Willkie campaign train on Luce's private wire. She might get home at four, but she would be at work at 8:30, not minding it at all because "it was all so exciting." Clare, returned from Europe, took the stump in reply when Dorothy Thompson switched her support in October from Willkie to Roosevelt. The two women at times forgot their candidates in the heat of their own contest. Because Miss

1. Vestigial wings seem visible on the baby Henry Luce, first-born of missionaries in China. Below, at three, the forceful tycoon is in the ascendant.

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2. Mother Luce with young Harry, Enimavail, EHsabeth (seated) and baby Sheldon.

3. Rev. Henry Winters Luce (seen in later life) was red-headed, dedicated, sometimes tactless enough to discompose his seniors.

4. Level, challenging gaze marks young Luce (standing, extreme left) with classmates at Chefoo School, where he upheld America in a preponderantl)- British atmosphere.

5. The collegian shavetail Luce (left) appears below in his guise as managing editor of the Yale Daily Ne\\s. He is to left of Chairman Briton Hadden, seated in center, with staff. Hadden, the biggest man on campus, would retain that status as Luce's partner in magazine enterprise.

6. The beautiful and charming Lihi Luce, who tried to slow down her driving husband, wrote him, "I am going to kidnap you and take you to some leafy solitude ... to laugh." Not laughter but t\pical Luce intensity is conspicuous at right.

7. Divorce was in the ofRng when Daniel Longwell carried a romantic Luce message to Clare Brokaw (shown with daughter Ann) in Salzburg, far from New York gossip.

8. The jovial but Napoleonic Hadden rather upstaged his partner Luce from the beginning. Their growing estrangement was solved tragically by Hadden's death.

9. Archibald MacLeish was first to protest Time's manipulation of news. Laird S. Goldsborough (below, right) was storm center of the staff ideological warfare.

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10. The talented John Shaw BilHngs became Luce's editorial chieftain, responsible for Time, Life and Fortune. 9H^t

IL Ralph IngersoU (below). His opposition to Luce ended his Time Inc. career. T. S. Matthe\\s (below, right) also fought Luce and was later ingeniously jettisoned.

12. At Mepkin, Jo Daxidson fashions bust of Luce. Below, the propulsive tycoon exhibits most dazzling smile ever photographed of his usually serious countenance.

13. In the famous courtroom confrontation Whittaker Chambers stands (left) to identify Alger Hiss (standing, right). Below: Close-up of reformed Communist Chambers.

14. John Herse}' (left), a Luce favorite, fell out with him over news slanting. Allen Grover (right) found a European tour with the Boss an exhausting e.xperience.

13. Luce in China with Theodore White, another fa\ orite soon to be thrown overboard.

16. The liberal Eric Hodgins (left) deplored the ascendancy of Goldy and then Chambers. C. D. Jackson (right) ate crow for Life before Hollywood right-wingers.

17. Roy Alexander (below) survived as the Boss's companion on three long tours.

18. The "miracle editor" and his Congresswoman second wife in pastoral Connecticut.

19. In his heyday—striking if not handsome, attractive to women, flinty of eye.

20. Wendell Willkie would probably have named Luce his Secretary of State. Below: Chiang Kai-shek and Madame were promoted to stardom in the laudatory Lucepress.

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21. Tsingtao journalists fawn over the revered visitor (center) in 1945. Below: With H. H. Kung he dedicates propagandist China House he founded in New York.

22. Luce and his ensign son Hank meet by chance in mid-Pacific.

23. Congresswoman Luce acknowledges ovation for "GI Jim" speech.

Luce and His Empire

Thompson had visited the Maginot Line a few weeks after Clare and had been permitted to fire a gun, Clare called her "the Molly Pitcher of the Maginot Line," attributed her switch to "hysteria" and said, "I was the first American woman to be taken on an official conducted tour of the Maginot Line. Dorothy Thompson was the second—and last." Miss Thompson replied:

Miss Boothe is the Body by Fisher in this campaign. She is the Brenda Frazier of the Great Crusade. She has torn herself loose from the Stork Club to serve her country in this serious hour. ... I have met the ladies of cafe society who save nations in their time of crisis, and I have visited the nations they have saved. . . .

Near the campaign's end, Life, after its heavy Willkie bias, showed how efiFective a truly impartial journalism could have been by publishing "The Case Against Willkie" by Bruce Bliven, and "The Case Against Roosevelt" by Robert Moses. Luce topped it off with a signed editorial emphasizing the importance of the canvass, declaring the non-voter to be "a traitor to the Re-pubhc" and adding, "never knowingly will I shake hands with him or sit down to a meal with him." E. B. White complained in the New Yorker that this put him in a fix: Bliven's argument made a vote for Willkie out of the question, Moses' arraignment of Roosevelt ruled him out as well, and now Luce, who had made it impossible for him to vote, called him a traitor for not voting. It troubled White, too, that at dinner parties he and Luce could not eat together. "One of us could be placed at a small table by himself and served separately," he supposed.

Luce, heedless of E. B. White, knew his work was in vain when the Fortune Poll predicted that Roosevelt would get 55 percent of the vote.

"Miss Thrasher," he said, "I don't want you to be too disappointed. Mr. Willkie is not going to be elected."

After the election, Roosevelt, who had been annoyed throughout the campaign by Time's fictionizations, let off steam by writing a long, long letter of complaint to Luce. In it he listed hterally scores of errors, one by one, paragraph by paragraph. He knew of course that many of them were not mistake-errors but examples of Time's policy of clever and often malicious invention. He wrote that he felt it in the public interest that journalism should "conform to a reasonable extent with facts." He felt that journalism based on "misrepresentation" and "deliberate falsehoods" would in the end have a destructive effect on the democracy, and "I hate to see an educated group of people doing things to their country which their very education, in the better sense of the word, should keep them from doing."

There was much, much more in the letter. In the end he withheld it and instead had his assistant Lowell Mellett send a shorter letter of protest. Luce, beheving it to be only from Mellett, replied with a defense of Time which was passed on to the President. "It is a slippery reply, " Roosevelt wrote in part in a memo to Mellett.

W. A. Swanberg

2. THE AMERICAN CENTURY

Willkie's defeat condemned Luce to four more years of Roosevelt, four more years of exclusion from the political center of power though still commanding acknowledged journalistic power. Perhaps his own hopes for the Presidency had ebbed. The magnetism and bravura so vibrant in men like Churchill, Hitler and Roosevelt, which was transmitted almost like an electric shock to the people, was entirely lacking in his dour, withdrawn nature. Briton Hadden had had it. Ironically, Clare had a large share of it, luxuriating in the spothght, so exhilarated by her researches in Europe and her feehng of crowd response while speaking for Willkie that a political career looked more than ever attractive.

Henry R. Luce did not have enough of it.

Nevertheless he was not one to underestimate his weight. The spirit of the Rex letter emerged in an idea which he first tried out as a public speech in three widely separated cities—Pasadena, Tulsa and Pittsburgh—before he pubhshed it in Life in a signed editorial titled "The American Century." In addition to its appearance in his own magazine, reaching perhaps a dozen million readers, he promoted it at great expense in full-page newspaper advertisements aU over the country and by mailing copies of it to himdreds of leaders of thought. He had put hard study into it. He felt it to be, as it was, an important statement in a field with which he was always as much concerned as if he had been Secretary of State—the field of national purpose and long-range policy, the field of Amprop.

The United States was already in the war for all practical purposes, he wrote, and had better set its goals. The notion that we were entering the conflict to save the English was far short of the mark. That we would hope to do, but our main purpose was to establish American dominance in the world, to realize that "the complete opportunity of leadership is ours." Seven years of Roosevelt had failed to make democracy produce prosperity on a narrow nationalistic basis. We must win the war and make it work on a world basis. Our "free enterprise" system had to spread to prosper: "We know perfectly well that there is not the slightest chance of anything faintly resembling a free economic system prevailing in this country if it prevails nowhere else." °

So a triumphant America had to behave like a leader or fail. She had to push, spread, take charge. She had to keep open the world's seaways and airways "for ourselves and our friends" in order to expand free economic enter-

° In his insistence on the necessity to spread "free enterprise" internationally for our ovvn profit, Luce was saying here, as in the Rex letter, something similar to what Professor Schlesinger so sharply censured Professor Chomsky for alleging incorrectly that President Truman had said.

Luce and His Empire

prise. Military power was essential. Luce was frank in saying that this military-economic expansion would add pecuniary profit to the spread of American "ideals":

The vision of America as the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas, the vision of America as the dynamic leader of world trade, has within it the possibilities of such enormous human progress as to stagger the imagination. Let us not be staggered by it. Let us rise to its tremendous possibilities. Our thinking of world trade today is in ridiculously small terms. For example, we think of Asia as being worth only a few hundred millions a year to us. Actually, in the decades to come, Asia will be worth to us exactly zero—or else it will be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year.

Hence America should be generous with food and with technological help, but only for friendly nations. Prophetically he warned that there would be forces of "Tyranny" opposing the establishment of the "American Century" —a reference to the Communism he did not name, the controlling animosity of his life. Here came a striking passage whose violence he concealed by euphemism. He predicted a deadly and possibly prolonged postwar struggle between America and her tyrannical enemies:

Nor need we assume that war can be abolished. All that it is necessary to feel— and to feel deeply—is that terrific forces of magnetic attraction and repulsion will operate as between every large group of human beings on this planet. Large sections of the human family may be effectively organized into opposition to each other. Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space. But Freedom requires and will require a far greater living space than Tyranny. Peace cannot endure unless it prevails over a very large part of the world.

For all her idealism, he made plain, America must be ruthless in carrying out her destiny:

[We must] accept whole-heartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.

That was hard talk, which he repeated:

It is the manifest duty of this country to undertake to feed all the people of the world who as a result of this worldwide collapse of civilization are hungry and destitute—all of them, that is, whom we can from time to time reach consistently with a very tough attitude toward all hostile governments.

Luce's "American Century," so reminiscent of his oration at Yale twenty-one years earlier, seemed also the 1941 version of Beveridge, singing the praises of an America so good and great that it must have no qualms about playing sahib. America must be first in the world. The capitalism which Roosevelt had shackled into failure in the nation would succeed gloriously if

W. A. Swanberg

spread internationally under American auspices. With the war won, the world and its riches would be up for grabs. America and her friends must grab it. He made it clear that our "constitutional democracy" would need change to meet the demands of a new age:

Clearly a revolutionary epoch signifies great changes, great adjustments. And this is only one reason why it is really so foolish for people to worry about our "constitutional democracy" without worrying or, better, thinking hard about the world revolution. For only as we go out to meet and solve for our time the problems of the world revolution, can we know how to re-establish our constitutional democracy for another 50 or 100 years.

Implicit in this was his long impatience with an American constitutionalism he felt in need of overhaul more than ever because of the challenge of world war and world revolution. The exact shape of Luce's "new order" was necessarily vague in its details but not in its fundamental principles. The American Century was a capitalist century. It was a militarist century. It was a century of General Motors, Standard Oil, Pan-Am—and of Time-Life-Fortune— entrenched in Asia and Africa with the protection of American military power. In writing of an Asia worth ten billions to the United States, he would be accused of being more interested in good profits than in good neighbors. His slant was so strikingly that of the capitalist pushing for world markets that Vice President Henry A. Wallace sought to counter it with a later speech, "The Century of the Common Man," and Max Lerner with an essay, "The People's Century." Religionists found no love-thy-neighbor feeling in Luce's proposal. Harold Bosley in the Christian Century was disturbed by what he felt to be an exaltation of "political tyranny and economic monopoly" by a prominent Presbyterian layman: "Henry Luce's 'American Century' ideal is ruthlessly plain-spoken and entirely devoid of a single Christian insight into the nature of a Christian society." Norman Thomas assailed Luce's "nakedness of imperial ambition. The English-speaking nations are to police in God's name such places as we think necessary for our advantage, doing justice, as that British Nazi poet, Rudyard Kipling, told us was our duty, to the 'lesser breeds without the law.' " Freda Kirchwey let Luce have it in The Nation under the heading "Luce Thinking":

Sounds nice, doesn't it? But at the same time doesn't it also sound faintly reminiscent? Echoes ring in the ears. Ghosts wander the corridor of the brain. "Manifest destiny." "Anglo-Saxon justice." "The white man's burden." . . . [This] brand of imperialism should be investigated by the Federal Trade Commission and a cease-and-desist order issued before the public can be poisoned.

The response to the editorial upset Luce. In it he had followed his old resolution to shun sentimentality and treat humanity as he felt it was. No eminent person commended "The American Century." Dorothy Thompson, who praised it in her newspaper column, seemed to be his most famous supporter.

Luce and His Empire

Most liberals attacked it, and the conservatives who would normally have applauded his aggressive drive for world trade were mostly Republican isolationists wanting no "Roosevelt war."

But if "The American Century" was dated in its evocation of gunboat diplomacy, it would prove in time that the old was ever new and would vindicate its prescience in its outhne of the strategy of the Cold War. Luce's prescription would be followed closely in America's postwar foreign policy. Just as he urged, America would give technical, economic and military aid to nations felt to be friendly, would take a "very tough attitude toward all hostile governments" and would build a huge military establishment to keep the sea and air lanes open. But something was fated to go wrong with the American Century. Luce would hve to see and recognize only the beginnings of it.

3. LIKE A KING

On May 8, 1941, the Luces landed in Chungking after the grueling air journey from San Francisco. Luce was climbing another Matterhorn, carrying into a new phase of operations a global mission that would preoccupy him for years. In his magazines he had been plugging the heroic resistance to the Japanese offered by the Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek. He had also given invaluable personal help to B. A. Garside in the formation of United China Rehef, which would raise millions in America.

Garside, a one-time missionary in China and a friend of Luce's father, had sohcited Luce's help. There had been a tangle of eight different agencies appealing for specialized aid to China—the Fund for Christian Colleges, the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, the Committee for Chinese War Orphans and five others. Garside had worked to combine them into one large organization which would ehminate competition and considerable overhead and would distribute money more equitably in China. Luce had agreed to contribute $60,000 and to coax a group of business leaders to become board members and supporters of the united agency. But Garside found that none of the eight groups wanted to lose its own identity and each attached crip-phng qualifications to its willingness to do so. When he reported on this, Luce blew up.

"You haven't got it pulled together," he snapped. "I can't ask these men to serve on the board under such conditions and I can't give a substantial contribution to an organization that won't work."

Garside agreed because "you didn't argue with Harry Luce," and left in discouragement. An hour or two later. Miss Thrasher called him and said Luce wanted to see him. He hurried back to find Luce much softened.

"This is too important to drop, B. A.," he said. "We've got to make it work."

He sent two Time pubhcity men, Otis Swift and Douglas Auchincloss, to

W. A. Swanberg

Garside along with four secretaries. Their skillful promotion, along with Luce's own pressure, finally got the eight groups to merge into United China Relief. Luce then persuaded Thomas W. Lament, Paul Hoffman, Wendell WiUkie, David Selznick and a half-dozen others of equal stature (including himself) to become board members. Luce also sent out a letter of personal appeal to all Time subscribers which alone brought in some $240,000 to UCR.

Hence by now Luce was probably the white man most important to the survival of hard-pressed Nationalist China. The good offices recognized by T. V. Soong during Luce's 1932 visit had swelled to a steady barrage of TLF pubhcity calculated to win sympathy and aid both from the American government and people. Luce had embarked on a triply grandiose mission: to make China Christian, to make her victorious over the Japanese and the Communists, and to make her part of the .\merican Century. This was not the sort of project normally undertaken by a man in Rockefeller Center in behalf of a half biUion Asians. It was something he could never have hoped to achieve without possession of the world's most powerful private propaganda arm.

The Chinese landscape seen from the plane had stimulated the poet in him, causing him to write:

As the sun comes up and the clouds clear we look down upon a land of intricate and fairy-like beauty. It is the land of the terraces of rice paddies and the land of thousands and thousands of hills, each hill a separate thing, rising with surprising steepness and falling off quickly to make room for the valley and the next hiU, and each hiU terraced nearly to its top with rice paddies of infinitely varied shapes, some square, some round, but mostly Uke the sliver shape of the new moon, shapes within shapes until aU but the wooded hill or mountain top is fuU. It is the landscape which might have been dreamed by a child of pure imagination.

Understandably, the Luces were met by a group of respectful Chinese officials including HoUington Tong, vice-minister of information, China's first American-trained newsman, a graduate of the University of Missouri and Columbia University. They were also met by Time's stringer in Chungking, Theodore H. White, wearing shorts and a sun helmet.

"Harry was majestic," White recalled. "He carried himself like a king, and had more power than most kings."

White (Harvard '38) had majored in Chinese history and graduated with honors on a newsboy's scholarship. He had gone immediately to China to prepare himself for teaching. In Chungking he landed a part-time job with the government Ministry of Information. A few weeks later John Hersey of Time had visited Chimgking looking for a stringer and had hired the engaging Bos-tonian. White was overjoyed to discover that his occasional dispatches were pubhshed with little change. In one of them he was named as the correspondent—the first Time foreign man to get even such a one-shot byUne. White wrote in a manner which Luce above all could appreciate, showing the sym-

Luce and His Empire

pathy of one who loved China and was moved by the pounding the Chinese were taking.

"This famous New York pubUsher Uked my copy," he said later. "What an intoxicating experience for a kid not long out of college!"

He waited on the Luces during their thirteen-day visit. They stayed at the handsome home of Dr. H. H. Kung, head of the civil government, whose wife was the eldest Soong sister. Both Luces were excited rather than alarmed by the almost daily Japanese air raids which left heaps of rubble helter-skelter and killed scores of Chinese. They dutifully took to the underground shelters which had been dug to accommodate the city's whole expanded population. That the Chinese got only a trickle of help from America, were never much above the starvation level and were being bombed by Japanese who still received shiploads of scrap metal from the United States did not sit well with the Luces. Perhaps they were surprised to learn that so far Chiang had received less help from America than from the Japanese-fearing Russians.

Inevitably they visited United States Ambassador Nelson Johnson (a 1939 Time cover subject) at the embassy across the river. Luce had a two-hour talk with the British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, whom he described as "not only the most charming white man in China but also, in the opinion of many, the ablest diplomat." The couple were the honored guests of Foreign Minister Wang Chung-hui, of Mayor K. C. Wu and his wife. Luce, interested as always in Yenching University, whose Peking buildings were now occupied by the Japanese, addressed a gathering of the considerable number of alumni White rounded up. Luce was feted by Dr. Kung at a dinner attended by the minister of war. General Ho, and the head of China's scarcely perceptible navy, Admiral Shen. T. V. Soong was in Washington, trying with little luck to get American planes with which to oppose the Japanese strikes. By special permission of Chiang Kai-shek, the Luces took a wild journey to the quiescent infantry front by plane, train, automobile and Mongolian pony, as Clare snapped pictures with a camera whose operation she had mastered with characteristic close and determined study. But the crowning point was tea with Madame and Generalissimo Chiang, whom Luce described as "the greatest ruler Asia has seen since Emperor Kang Hsi 250 years ago."

The Luces were greeted by the dynamic and theatrical Madame, after which the slim Gimo, clad in khaki, made his entrance. It was a great moment for Luce. ". . . [Y]ou got the feeling that there was no person in the room except the man who had just entered it so quietly," he wrote. Chiang was hospitable, as indeed he should have been. With Madame interpreting. Luce produced a gift for him—a portfolio of photographs, gathered by Life, of him, Madame and the leading men of his Nationalist government. "He grinned from ear to ear," Luce observed, "and was as pleased as a boy with the pictures of himself and Madame." Madame herself impressed him almost equally because of her glowing tribute to Mrs. Luce's beauty. While the two women were fated never to be mutually admiring, perhaps because of competing

W. A. Swanberg

queenliness, Luce was exultant over the visit. If in the Gimo's eyes he was an instrument of aid for China, it was a fair exchange since the Gimo was Luce's instrument in his own triple mission.

A bomb had destroyed Madame's pantry and along with it her store of cigarettes. The Luces had brought along an enormous supply, knowing of the shortage there. They replenished Madame's supply, having already left many cartons at the press hostel where White and other correspondents lived. The Chiangs' gift to Clare was a magnificent pair of Chinese silk pajamas, and to Luce a jade Tang horse. "An hour later we left," Luce wrote, "knowing that we had made the acquaintance of two people, a man and a woman, who, out of all the milhons now living, will be remembered for centuries and centuries."

But from the ambassadors. White and others, he learned that the Chungking government was painfully inefficient, that urgent business waited weeks to get done because everything depended on the personal attention of Chiang or Dr. Kimg. Furthermore, Chiang's Kuomintang ruhng party was accused of corruption and tyranny, and criticism was growing. On leaving. Luce took a hberty that did him credit. He intended to step up his already powerful campaign for American aid to China, and he wanted it to be well used. He left a letter of thanks for Chiang containing a chiding which, however gentle, was something rarely heard by the Gimo. He mentioned the inefficiency and the criticism and went on:

Your speech to the Kuomintang headquarters some weeks ago calling for reform was much admired in America, but does not seem to have been taken very seriously here. If a drastic reform in the attitude of some sections of the Kuomintang is possible, it would seem to be desirable at once. I am told that the best young men and women dislike both the Communist and Kuomintang parties and feel politically homeless.

He ended by expressing his appreciation of the difficulties and with renewed assertions of gratitude. He had already put White on regular salary and told him, "You're going with us." He planned to make use in New York of the writer's speciahzed knowledge. White, after two hungry and harried years in Chungking, was dehghted.

"Henry Luce Roused to Enthusiasm," headfined the Hong Kong Sunday Herald. Stopping at Manila on the homeward fhght, the Luces stayed with American High Commissioner Francis B. Sayre and Luce spoke in behalf of China to a businessmen's group in Baguio. He met General Douglas MacAr-thur, field marshal of the Phihppine army and a behever in his own Amprop, a man who made the same crashing impact on him as had Chiang. After the long island-hopping trip to San Francisco, both Luces addressed the influential Commonwealth Club, lauding China's courageous battle and urging American aid. Reaching New York, Luce told reporters his journey was "the greatest trip I have ever made in my fife," told of China's need for help and

Luce and His Empire

said, "General Chiang Kai-shek is a magnificent leader." He hurried to Washington and conferred with Presidential Assistant Lauchlin Currie, who was charged with expediting aid to China, and with Reconstruction Finance Corporation Chairman Jesse Jones. He also arranged interviews with Secretary Hull, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and War Secretary Henry L. Stimson—all, no doubt, in China's behalf.

On June 22 came news that should have sent him into a jig. The Nazis suddenly attacked the Russians along a 2000-mile front. Luce put Marshal Sem-yon Timoshenko on the cover of Time, which welcomed this diversion of German might away from England and hoped that the Russians could hold out much longer than the few weeks the Nazis thought the job would take. Not too long, however, though Time did not say that. Perhaps Luce, even more than most American anti-Communists, cheered it as God's own retribution against both sides and heaved a sigh of relief that at any rate the Russian evil would at last—if a little late—be crushed by the Nazi evil, as he and so many others had counted on for years. But he kept his mind on America's duty, as Time's punchy account showed:

Like two vast prehistoric monsters lifting themselves out of the swamp, half-blind and savage, the two great totalitarian powers of the world now tore at each other's throats. But the time gained was no gain unless urgent use was made of it. No good use would be made of it if the U.S., pleased to see Nazism fighting Communism, relaxed its defense eflForts.

In Time and Life, leading non-interventionists including Charles and Anne Lindbergh, Senator Bennett Champ Clark and General Robert E. Wood were treated with skilled ferocity. Even Luce's good friend ex-Ambassador Kennedy was described by Life as "defeatist about Britain, in favor of a quick peace." The three isolationist pubhshers. Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and his cousins Joseph M. Patterson of the New York Daily News and Mrs. Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald were designated by Time as "the Three Furies" who "ground out their daily gripes at the risks involved in the Administration's policy of trying to stop Hitler." Luce wanted America to get into the war. One issue of the cinematic March of Time, "Uncle Sam—Nonbelligerent," lampooned the isolationist Senator Wheeler and, said a leftist critic, "assumes that everyone in the United States but a few appeasers favors war." The radio March of Time raised labor's hackles by dramatizing strikes which slowed production of tanks and other arms. There was a steady sniping at the Washington bureaucracy which could not seem to achieve efficiency. Every arm of the organization executed Luce's order to "cultivate the Martial Spirit" and to be "savage and ferocious" with bunglers.

Never was China forgotten. The striking face of Madame Chiang appeared on the cover of Life for June 30. Inside was Luce's own 10,000-word account

W. A. Swanberg

of his visit and his observations of Chinese heroism and need, illustrated with the pictures taken by Clare. Chiang having been on Time's cover to the point of satiety, his General Chen Cheng appeared there along with a story by Theodore White on the unvarying Luce themes: China's heroism, China's importance to the defense of America and her urgent need. White was commissioned by Luce to do a series of four articles on China for Fortune conveying the same message in detail. Luce himself spoke over CBS in behalf of United China Relief, saying with perhaps excessive confidence, "The imperial Japanese army has been stopped cold in its tracks . . . China's army is the outstanding creation of a very great leader of men—Chiang Kai-shek." He spoke similarly to audiences in New York, Buffalo, Flint, Los Angeles and points between. As B. A. Garside said, "When Harry Luce put his mind to something, things got done."

Young White, lonely in New York, was invited out for weekends to the Luce Greenwich estate. "They made me completely at home," he said. "I'd meet famous people there—John Gunther, Walter Duranty, Sir William Wiseman, the jet set of the Forties."

4. FOR THIS HOUR AMERICA WAS MADE

Luce had perfected his policy of cultivating important people, learning from them and skillfully making them contribute to his power and success. His use of the Time cover story (and of Life and Fortune in a different way) was brilliant, double-acting, self-propelling. Even among intellectuals who tended to sneer at the magazine, to appear on Time's cover had become a national and international cachet of distinction. There was no great difficulty in finding people willing to endure this notoriety. The magazine's regular cover artists, Ernest Hamlin Baker, Artzybasheff and Boris Chaliapin, did a profitable business on the side painting Timelike portraits of individuals who sought to give the impression that they had appeared on the cover. People invited to the Luces' were apt to break any engagement and neglect affairs of state or of the soul, to accept. Once arrived, they were on their mettle to be scintillating and informative.

In the case of those few who became subjects of cover stories, a strange thing happened. These people usually found Time's stories about them inaccurate in detail and powerfully slanted to give the subject a newspeg or a souped-up interest calculated to promote the Boss's ideas and to sell magazines. Yet, with few exceptions, they were so delighted at entering this hall of fame that they were still friendly and still useful as sources of information, so that Time profited at both ends, coming and going. Furthermore, the important friends of cover subjects, equally anxious for entrance, would go to considerable lengths to be obliging to Time. Luce would have deserved recognition as a master of pubhc relations on the basis of his development and

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exploitation of the cover story alone. He played cleverly on this human longing. As one guest at the Greenwich house noted, "Ranged on tables are countless photographs of the great and near-great the Luces have known."

On Sunday, December 7, 194 L the gathering at The House included Vincent Sheean, Ambassador to Moscow Laurence Steinhardt, Dr. Lin Yutang, Virginia Cowles, Margaret Case, and Joseph Thorndike of Life. Twenty-two people sat down to luncheon at 2:30. The Luces had a rule that meals must not be interrupted by telephone calls. One came at dessert time, however, important enough so that the butler brought the message on a tray to Clare at table. She glanced at it. She tapped her glass with her spoon for attention.

"All isolationists and appeasers, please listen," she said. "The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor."

There was a hubbub of gasps, exclamations and demands for details. Only one of the guests kept his place amid a general rush for the radio and the telephones. Dr. Lin apologized for finishing his dessert: "You see, this is all so very expected." Mrs. Luce took the trouble to send roses to the isolationist Cissy Patterson with a card: "Hiyi: How do you like everything now?"

Luce was immediately on the wire to New York. Life, which had gone to press the night before, would be dead without news of the attack. His chauffeur got him to Rockefeller Center in less than an hour. The presses in Chicago were stopped while he supervised the remaking of the seven lead pages and of revising the next issue of Time, which would go to press in thirty-six hours. It was one of those times when the alert, driving Boss had the unanimous admiration of his staff. He allotted a couple of precious minutes to telephone his father in Haverford. For all his shock. Rev. Henry Luce found in the news the same cheer that his son did. Japan was now at war with both China and the United States, meaning that China and America were allied as they never had been before. "We will now all see," the old man said, "what we mean to China and China means to us."

That same night. Dr. Luce died in his sleep at the age of seventy-three. To Theodore White, who expressed condolences, Luce replied calmly, "It was wonderful that he lived long enough to see America and China as alUes." The Japanese attack was a providential aid to Luce's own grand plans for Christianizing and Americanizing China at a speed hitherto undreamed of. His editorial in Life expressed shame for America's past irresolution along with a call to arms as stirring as the born fighter could make it:

This is the day of wrath. It is also the day of hope. . . . For this hour America was made. Uniquely among the nations, America was created out of the hopes of mankind and dedicated to the fulfillment of those hopes. It is for this reason that we accept only two alternatives—either to die in the smoking ruins of a totally destroyed America or else to justify forever the faith of our fathers and the hopes of mankind.

Only two weeks before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had taken a pub-

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lie swipe at Time for its report of the bibulosity of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda of Chile, head of South America's only Popular Front government. Whether or not in reflection of Luce's dislike of aU popular fronts. Time said of Aguirre in a three-paragraph account: "He spent more and more time with the red wine he cultivates." The angry Chilean government demanded an official apology. Aguirre's death a few days later added to the American embarrassment. When Roosevelt made a formal apology to Chile, he seized the opportunity to denounce Time and to give his news-conference listeners the unusual privilege of quoting him directly, saying:

. . . [T]he government of the United States has been forced to apologize to the government of Chile for an article written in Time magazine—a disgusting lie which appeared in that magazine. . . . [W]e are informed by our ambassador that this article was a notable contribution to Nazi propaganda against the United States. . . .

Luce, the "savage and ferocious critic," showed again, as he had at the time of the New Yorker parody, that he could dish it out much better than he could take it. The President, speckled with scar tissue after years of Time's cunning punches, had drawn a little blood for once himself. Luce's cry of pain emerged in the form of a pubhc statement in which he made no apology and characterized Roosevelt's remarks as "unwarranted by the facts and unwise as an attack on a free and honest press."

But now, with the nation at war, he put away resentment and wrote the President pledging that "the dearest wish of all of us [at Time Inc.] is to tell the story of absolute victory under your leadership." He added a personal note in his own bold hand:

. . . The drubbing you handed out to Time—before Dec. 7—was as tough a wallop as I ever had to take. If it will help you any to win the war, I can take worse ones. Go to it! And God bless you.

1. AMERICA FIRST

Early in Februan' 1942, Clare, again a Life correspondent, left by air on the long trip to India by way of Brazil and Africa. On February 16, Luce went to New Haven to make the principal speech at the sixty-fourth annual banquet of the Yale Daily News. Although he had been back at Yale scores of times since graduation, this was an especially important occasion—the first time he had spoken to the News men since the dear days when he and Hadden ran the paper. He had been asked to "explain the war."

The time for explanations was past, he told them. Now was the time for action performed in faith. "Reason has been the Maginot Line behind which Western civihzation retired. . . . Night has descended. The hour has struck for action and more action." Reason was obviously on our side, he said, but it was more appropriate to svunmon tlie eternal verities of virtue, honor and duty, and all that Yalemen had to know in this war was that they were fighting "For God, for Country and for Yale."

Although he received polite applause, he did not quite get away with it. At the same time, Life was on sale with another of those stirring and imperialist Luce appeals for American leadership in the war and in the "American peace" that must follow it.

Under the heading "America First," Seth Taft wrote an editorial in the News: "There's no point in being soft-shirt or mealy-mouthed about what Mr. Luce proposed Monday night . . . about what Mr. Luce has proposed in his editorials in Life . . . His doctrine is America First throughout the world, Manifest Destiny, Yankee imperialism." And in Luce's old Yale Lit, John G. Gardner's editorial denounced his "harangue against Reason" and his enhst-ment of religion in a scheme for "world conquest. "

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By the time these shafts were aimed at him he was out of range in London, only to come within range of Cassandra again, who wrote:

His papers are "slick," and he faithfully murders the English language in one of them every Monday morning. He is responsible for creating ... a style of writing that moves with the smooth grace of a man riding a bicycle with hexagonal wheels. Mr. Luce is given to publishing his own signed editorial pronouncements that are reminiscent of an Archbishop giving a service in a super-cinema.

He was treated more respectfully by the Daily Express and the Evening Standard, both owned by his friend Beaverbrook (who had been on Time's cover in 1938 and again in 1940), the Standard describing him as "a very different type from his brilliant, witty wife, Clare Boothe. He is a serious man with an enormous respect for facts; that is where the success of his magazines lies." The Express told of his whirlwind visits to Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool and other centers to see aircraft factories and other war plants.

By this time Clare was in Cairo. London was different since the Kennedys had left, but one can be sure that Luce walked the same block from Clar-idge's and pumped information out of Ambassador John G. Winant. His mission was to discover England's condition, mood and war aims other than mere survival. As a businessman and politician it struck him as mad that any nation could enter such an ordeal without knowing clearly what it hoped to accomplish.

Time now had a London bureau on Dean Street headed temporarily by young Stephen Laird, who had to face the fusillade of questions Luce fired at his staff people whenever he was on tour. The Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, presented him to the press, the Manchester Guardian writing, "Mr. Luce ... is not a patch on Miss Clare Boothe, his playwright wife, as a witty, lively, outspoken victim for an interview."

The terrible Luftwaffe blitz was over, but the blackout was dense, the food awful and the Germans were poised across the Channel. Luce, walking in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, admiring British courage, was vexed about British vagueness about Socialism creeping in, and above all about war aims. "Willing and eager to die," he wrote in his report, "—but for what?" He found the Russians high in the people's esteem: "Soviet Russia has saved them. . . . Soviet Russia is immensely popular. By comparison, their cousin country of America is scarcely noticed ..." The Soviet, far from collapsing in a few weeks, was putting up such a furious resistance that Luce was torn between admiration and loathing, writing, "Russia has shown a greatness and ferocity of will and conviction equal to, if not greater than, the vaunted fanaticism of the Hun."

He returned to New York and soon Hew to California to lunch with Donald Douglas in Santa Monica, visit four bomber plants and compare their efficiency with England's. He gave thought to his wife's contemplated campaign for Congress and to a squabble he and his publications were having

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with the McCormick-Patterson press which, if no longer isolationist, was so bitterly critical of administration war policies as to make Luce think them foot-dragging. He favored Roosevelt's war efforts, only wanting more of them and faster. The Chicago Tribune replied to animadversions in Time and Life by pointing out that Luce, though still (at forty-four) of combat age, "has not gone into the armed services." The Tribune thereafter called him "Henry R. (White Feather) Luce."

Meanwhile, Clare had reached Lashio, Burma, where she interviewed General Stilwell and had a lucky meeting with the Chiangs, who had flown down to confer with the general. Perhaps out of regard for her political ambitions, she had no objection to the first person singular and did not shght her own place in the confidence of the great. "Madame Chiang read me a bitter article that she had written," she wrote for Life. ". . . Chiang once said to me that Madame was worth ten divisions to China. ... I ate dinner with the Gissimo, HoUington Tong and Madame. ... I had a talk with handsome, blue-eyed, crisp-mustached General Alexander. ... I talked with big, handsome, able, dark, young Governor of Rangoon Sir Reginald Dorman Smith." One of her stops was Kunming, where she interviewed General Claire Chennault of the Flying Tigers. Doubtless seeking his pilots' own accounts of their experiences, she talked quite late one night with a group of them. This came to the attention of a Chennault staff officer, Paul Frillman, who recorded, "I was awakened ... by noise and laughter from the pilots' bar. I blearily struggled into my old robe and made my way there. The commotion centered around an attractive blonde in a well-tailored version of Churchill's air-raid suit . . . She was charming everyone, and it was a great party, but I saw some pilots who were slated for a dawn mission, only a few hours away.

" Tt's late and I'm afraid the lady should go,' I said. . . .

" 'But don't you see who she is?' several asked.

" T don't care if she's the Queen of England,' I said. Tt's time to go.' That ended the party.

"At breakfast I saw her sitting next to Chennault, who called me over and introduced me. 'This is Clare Boothe Luce,' he said.

" 'We've met,' she snapped with as heavy a frost as Stilwell's."

She was home late in April, loving the excitement of foreign correspondence and wanting more of it. Her dispatches were printed at great length in Life, with photographs showing her with the noted people she wrote about, but were excluded from Time. John Hersey one day walked into Gottfried's office to find Luce there, urging Gottfried and Matthews to use one of her dispatches with a byhne in FN. Gottfried and Matthews were adamant against it, and Luce, with the occasional editorial humility that could be so winning, finally bowed to their judgment. Roy Alexander opened the door at that moment and the doorknob stRick Luce a hard blow in the kidney, so that he left both in physical and mental discomfort.

Clare's stepfather. Dr. Austin, who had only recently died, had represented

W. A. Swanberg

the preponderantly wealthy Connecticut district in which Greenwich was located, from 1938 to 1940, when he had lost narrowly in the Democratic landslide that overwhelmed Willkie. The Luces were legal residents of Greenwich although they spent little time there. "Harry urged me to run," she recalled. Although at times he could be angry with her, he was perhaps impressed by the political insights she had shown, usually but not always in agreement with his own. On the surface there was generosity in his promotion of the wife whose press clippings were so much superior to his and who had weapons he lacked for attaining pubUc office. He evidently understood that her need for activity and power was as demanding as his own. Possibly the thought of part-time freedom from the wife who could out-talk and out-quip him was not totally undesirable.

He queried his New York editors, to find them almost unanimously opposed to her candidacy. There was outright hostihty toward her on the part of some members of the staflF, perhaps because she had sometimes called them "Harry's little people" and because the matter of publicizing her always presented journahstic problems. These problems were enlarged by Luce's own utter in-sensitivity toward the journalistic ideal of independence. Belair, his Washington man, was also opposed, pointing out that for Time to report her doings as a Congresswoman would strain the credulity of its readers.

"No," Luce rephed in perfect seriousness, "because whatever Time prints will be beheved because it is in Time."

The Republican nomination was hers for the asking. Luce assigned his assistant, Wesley Bailey, to be her undercover campaign manager, it being hoped that it would not become known that a Time Inc. man was involved. Her opponent was Democratic Congressman Leroy Downs, a Norwalk newspaper pubhsher. She campaigned vigorously, making 116 speeches from Greenwich to Danbury to Bridgeport, sohciting workers' votes on her promise of sympathy for labor and showing her union card in the Dramatists' Guild. She tickled the Tories by attacking Roosevelt for fighting a "soft war" and for waste, such as $100,000 in musical instruments given to the WPA in West Virginia. "Nero needed only one fiddle to play while Rome was burning," she said in speeches. She always wore a fresh rose in the lapel of her tailored suit. She referred to Downs as a "rubber stamp" and a "faceless man," to which he replied that while he was not at all faceless, his face was admittedly the less beautiful of the two. She attended a communion breakfast of Polish women in Stamford, found them icy toward her—a non-CathoUc who hved most of the time at the Waldorf, in the South or God only knew where in the world—but thawed them by saying that she was the last American woman out of Warsaw before Poland was inundated by the Nazis. She won handily with a plurafity of 6400 votes. Time, in a story about her campaign, forgot entirely to mention her opponent's name.

She retained Edward L. Bernays to advise her on her public-relations approach to Congress. Talking with her at the Waldorf apartment, Bernays was

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aware of her beauty, intelligence and "provocative presence," writing, "I understood why Harry had fallen in love with her."

"Mr. Bemays," she told him, "I can't get anything about myself in Time." Luce, who was present, permitted them to talk privately. "But he kept pacing the floor outside," Bemays recalled, "back and forth, and now and then he'd come in. It seemed impossible for him to relax."

2. ANOTHER GOLDSBOROUGH

The astonishing Russian defeat of the Nazis' best at Stahngrad and the mighty westward drive that followed, gave Luce nightmares. America, he felt, must not permit Russia to win the war. America must win it first. It was neither patriotic nor poUtic to speak out against Russia. In his second venture into global editorializing in Life—the one which had aroused protest at Yale —he threw up a cloud of ambiguity in his efforts to alert the nation:

[America's war] is war against the cleavage of mankind into Right and Left which, tearing Europe asunder, made Hitler's victories possible. It is war against the hidden civil war which, raging throughout the world, weakened the struc-tuie of nations until much of their national identity had been lost before Hitler overwhelmed them. ... It is war against . . . the setting of group against group. . . .

He was saying circuitously that the real enemy was Russia and Communism. To let Russia win the war against Hitler might mean that Russia would emerge as the world's mightiest power and wreck America's opportunity to dictate the peace:

. . . [I]f [anyone] expects the Russians or the British or any other people to win this war for us, he is inviting defeat for America—the most dreadful defeat that any nation ever suffered. This is America's war and America must win it. . . . [T]he imperative of victory is American leadership. America must be first in the work of farm and factory. America must be first in the fields of battle—and on sea and in the air. America must be first in the councils of war and America must be first in the policy of the world.

America's moral and pohtical superiority invested in her the right to reorganize the world according to her own design:

Because America alone among the nations of the earth was founded on ideas and ideals which transcend class and caste and racial and occupational differences, America alone can provide the pattern for the future.

Freda Kirchwey was even more critical than before, writing, "his whole cult of American superiority is no whit less revolting than the Nordic myth that provides the moral sanction for Hitler's brutal aggressions." Luce, in his ideological struggles, evidently missed his old friend Goldsborough. Goldy,

W. A. Swanberg

after his sabbatical on full salary, had been put in charge of Time's quite minor Science department, had disliked it and eventually left to join the Office of Strategic Services. Luce found another Goldsborough in Whittaker Chambers.

Chambers was short, chunky, powerful and untidy, his necktie always twisted, his dark baggy suit httered with cigarette ashes. He had bright blue eyes and his serious corn-fed face at rare times could light up in a friendly smile. Matthews, who hired him as a book reviewer, was impressed by his intellectual background, his capacity for hard work and his dramatic writing style. Everyone was struck by his conspiratorial air. Luce had had a good impression of Chambers from the time in 1939 when he joined Time and for a brief period did cinema reviews. "Who reviewed Grapes of Wrath?" Luce asked one week when he happened to be editing. Chambers said he had. "It's the best cinema review ever in Time," Luce said, adding that he and Clare had seen the premiere of the movie and their appreciation of it had been greatly enhanced by Chambers's review.

Young Sam Welles, a newcomer who was moved in as Chambers's assistant when the latter was in charge of book reviews, was baffled by the older man who seemed kindly enough but seldom spoke to him except about the books they reviewed and never, never, did what was commonly expected at Time when two men occupied the same office, namely, propose that they lunch together. WeUes at last became irked enough at this to reverse the usual procedure and ask the senior man to lunch. Chambers seemed so upset by the suggestion, and so evasive, that WeUes was spurred by curiosity to press the idea, and Chambers agreed with what seemed great reluctance. With Chambers in the lead, saying httle, they boarded the Sixth Avenue subway and got off at Macy's. Chambers led Welles aU the way across Macy's ground floor to the Seventh Avenue side, where they took an escalator to the second floor. There they walked across to the Sixth Avenue side, Chambers looking at none of the merchandise but trotting smartly ahead. They then took an escalator to the third floor, repeated the process up to the fourth, then took an elevator down to the first floor, where they emerged on the Sixth Avenue side and Chambers said, "Let's eat in the Longchamps in the Empire State." They hurried over there and had lunch, WeUes trying earnestly to make conversation. Chambers replying in monosyllables. It was only over coffee that Chambers suddenly relaxed and began to talk in a most friendly and charming way. A few days later the deeply puzzled Welles got up courage to ask Chambers what his game was. Chambers explained that he had been a Communist courier and had quit the Party in revulsion over the Stalin purges, and as a result was being followed by Party avengers seeking to kill him. A likely way was to take a man to lunch and poison him, sometimes through an ally in the restaurant. Hence Chambers avoided eating with anyone he did not know. He had taken the elaborate route through Macy's to throw off other shadows, and had not been

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sure of Welles himself until coffee arrived, by which time, he said, "I knew you were too ingenuous to be a Commie." He showed Welles the pistol he carried in an inner holster. Thereafter, Chambers and Welles were good friends, and Welles never found him anything but truthful, though others at Time would later claim him to be either overimaginative or a liar.

"He was so bitterly anti-Communist and anti-Stalin," Matthews remarked, "that we were careful not to give him books to review bearing on those topics."

Now, in 1944, he was still furtive, armed and brilliant. "He saw himself as a Dostoevskian character, fated by destiny to play an important role," said John Barkham, who worked with him. "In his pocket he carried a miniature score of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He said that the scherzo of that symphony was one of the mightiest works ever conceived by the mind of man."

He always worked behind a locked office door—sometimes slept in his office and shaved in the washroom. In a restaurant he was careful to sit with his back to the wall so that he could see the door. Timen took sides, some thinking him a genius who had risen above youthful political follies, others believing him in some part a fake and poseur, perhaps a little crazy. At this time, when the brutalities of Soviet Russia had been obscured by her magnificent stand against the Nazis, the anti-Chambers clique included many Uberals who looked forward to postwar peace and coexistence with a reformed and friendly Russia.

This was scarcely Luce's view of the matter. When he again ran across the Chambers he had first known only as a fine reviewer, and discovered that he was a former Communist who had come to loathe Communism, there was established a firm rapport between the two men. An important element in that rapport was the extraordinarily close relationship—almost a special arrangement—each had with God.

3. GLOBALONEY

It seemed that the whole world was looking forward to the Congressional debut of the remarkable lady from Connecticut. One could not be with her long before sensing the proportions of her ambition. As the Washington writer Maxine Davis put it, "Mrs. Luce has a consuming ambition, a will to power, great power. No personal satisfaction is enough. Nothing less than the power to direct the destinies of nations will ever be enough."

Since the Presidency was beyond her sex, the Senate and the Vice Presidency would have to do. The range of her view and the plenitude of her self-confidence was not far from equaling that of her husband, who was pressing buttons to save China, out-gun Russia and ready the world for the American Century. If it was true, as Scott Fitzgerald had observed, that the very rich

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were different, people consumed by ambition had their own earmarks. Luce, for one, had a habit that annoyed Matthews (and others), small in itself but perhaps revelatory:

[He invariably appropriated] any matches or packages of cigarets within his reach, no matter whose they were. ... I am sure this was only absent-mindedness; all the same, it seemed to me another form of rudeness, an unawareness of other people. I suppose he must have had a strict upbringing as a child, but I sometimes wondered if he hadn't also learned in his mission compound a lordly disregard for servants and underUngs.

On her part, Clare, as Miss Davis noted in an article paying tribute to her courage and industry, "is not a cozy woman, a warm woman." She was addicted to bizarre classical allusions, rhymes and puns which at their best were irresistible and at their worst seemed no more than labored self-advertisement. Speaking to the Women's National Press Club, whose members were about to question her, she said that she felt "on the spot tonight—on the spot qui mal y pense."

Surprisingly, this keen, talented woman, so anxious to make a grand entrance into national poUtics, stumbled onto the poUtical stage and then muffed her lines. She offended Republican Leader Joseph W. Martin by using her husband's influence to arrange a speedy meeting with Democratic Speaker Sam Raybum. She affronted her owti constituents in Danbury, the hat-making city, by permitting herself to be photographed hatless on the Capitol steps. An interview she gave the New Yorker in which she lamented her inabihty to get a cook and the difficulties she was having with an inept maid was hardly pohtic amid wartime sacrifices and shortages. Her prompt request for appointment to the high-and-mighty Foreign Affairs Committee made eyebrows rise, membership in this council usually being the reward of seniority after faithful labors. When she was invited to the President's traditional White House supper for new Representatives—a purely social function, no politics allowed—she sent him a 1200-word reply listing issues she wished to discuss with him including "the people's long delayed fury against the swollen and wasteful Washington bureaucracies." Presidential Press Secretary Stephen Early informed her coldly that she was out of bounds. Roosevelt himself handled the situation by saying just two words to her in the crush—"How's Henry?"—then turning to the next freshman.

Her maiden speech was historic. She labored over it at her apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel among pictures of her husband, her daughter, young "Hank" Luce (now at Yale), Peter Paul (now at Brooks School), and two of General MacArthur, along with two parakeets and a cocker spaniel named Speaker. She delivered it on the late afternoon of February 9, 1943, at a time when the House was usually almost empty. Now it was well filled by Congressmen eager to get an eyeful and earful of the gentlewoman from Connecticut. Speaking on the subject of "America's Destiny in the Air," she aimed her

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main attack at Vice President Wallace because of his call for international postwar freedom of the airways, though she also criticized Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. She was not ready to relinquish American sovereignty of her airspace. She could see, as she put it, "the air liner Qtieen Elizabeth put in, the Stalin Iron Cruiser, the Wilhelmina Flying Dutchman, the Flying De Gaulle . . . But shall I scan, like Sister Anne, the skies in vain, searching for the shape of an American clipper against the clouds?" The snapper produced a sensation:

Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney. Mr. Wallace's warp of sense and his woof of nonsense is very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a postwar world.

The Timism "globaloney" made front pages all over the country in newspapers whose inner-page editorials often criticized the cheapness of the wisecrack. Some accused her of isolationism—quite incorrectly, since both she and her husband were firm internationahsts as long as the world was reorganized on properly Lucean and American terms. There was some resentment against a freshman Congresswoman, enjoined by tradition to be seen and not heard, who leaped at the Vice President's throat only a month after her arrival. Time gave her and her speech a hefty three columns, mostly approving, whereas Fortune bravely called it "ill mannered." "Well," Eleanor Roosevelt commented, "do we want world peace or not?"

Despite her poor beginning, she was smarter and more aware of the issues than most Congressmen. She was assigned to the prestigious Military Affairs Committee. She had five secretaries. She did, it was said, have an unfortunate habit of name-dropping, as another Washington observer noticed: "Congressmen . . . were antagonized when the freshman in their midst drove home a point by 'But Winston Churchill told me,' or 'Mr. Hoover says that . . .' Later she stopped this."

What with her prodigious activity, her daughter's access to her was limited. Ann, now an eighteen-year-old sophomore at Stanford University in California, was said to have been upset once on arriving home from school to find only a chauffeur meeting her at the airport. Now and then during vacation the girl would wander over to Rockefeller Center to see her stepfather, but he was generally too busy to give her more than a moment. His assistant Wesley Bailey was occasionally deputized to take Ann to lunch at the Louis XIV or the Rainbow Room, finding an air of wistfulness about her. The situation was sometimes similar when Luce's sons visited them in Greenwich. Once, when Peter Paul returned after a weekend there, his mother asked if he had had a good time. Not particularly, he rephed. The opera singer Lily Pons, a Senator and two governors had been among the guests, so he had seen little of his father.

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4. THE MIGHTY MISSIMO

Nine days after Globaloney, another proud woman, the recently arrived Madame Chiang, spoke in the same chamber. Luce—through Time, Life, Fortune and both the radio and cinema MOT, plus the enormous publicity he had engineered for United China Relief and the hundreds of influential business and professional men all over the country whom he had lured into it— had been the greatest factor in raising the Gissimo and "Missimo" from the status of being unknown to the American public into household names brushed with the gilt of heroism and glamour. Theodore White, back in Chungking, was sending rousing dispatches about the Chinese which got the best display. Annalee Jacoby was Time's second correspondent in that remote city where only the biggest newspapers had even one. Life photographers Margaret Bourke-White, Carl Mydans and others had sent back hundreds of pictures of China at war. Clare's Life dispatches from Burma and China had further helped to educate American readers. Both Luce and Clare had made many speeches in behalf of China and the Chiangs, some of them reaching large radio audiences. The Luce publicity promoted the Chinese as full-fledged members of the Grand Alliance, with Chiang on the same footing as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. He had strengthened the hand of Dr. Soong and the Chinese commission begging more Lend-Lease help in Washington, and had in turn encouraged the faltering Chinese back home to hang on a little longer against the Japanese.

Indeed, the pubhcity job Luce performed gratis for the Chiangs must rank as the greatest of its kind. Again (as with his exploitation of Time covers), it alone would place him as one of the most exalted of public relations practitioners, a man who could easily have made his fortune in that field or in advertising had he preferred. There was a standing joke at Time Inc. that Luce, Roosevelt, Churchill, StaUn (and of course Chiang) should have a summit conference so that Luce could tell the rest of them how to finish off the war and reorder the world. So far, the publicity he gave the Chinese, while heavily slanted, was effective allied war propaganda. The Gimo, who had valued the Missimo at ten divisions, must have known that the Lucepress influence was worth much more. Significantly, when Madame arrived (in an American Stra-toliner which had been sent to China to pick her up) and was met by Harry Hopkins, she carried a copy of Life containing an attack on British policy which she said had led to the loss of Burma. Hopkins wrote, "She wanted me particularly to read that article as being her point of view."

Madame did not reflect any of the Chinese destitution for which she was so eloquent a pleader. The richness and variety of her dress were dazzling. When she went to New York for treatment of a skin trouble, she took over the entire twelfth floor of the Harkness Pavilion for herself and entourage, en-

Luce and His Empire

suring privacy. She brought her own silk sheets, which were changed daily. When she was a White House guest, she annoyed Mrs. Roosevelt by her queenly habit of clapping her hands when she wished a household employee, as she did in China. She startled the President, when he asked what would be done in China if miners struck as they were doing in the United States, by drawing a hand across her throat.