One American missionary wrote of the disillusionment of the clergy in Chiang and of Protestant leaders who complained to Chiang about government "corruption and apparent lack of interest in the welfare of the people," who thereafter "continued to suffer the displeasure of Chiang . . ." Ambassador Stuart himself, after the cause was lost and his own Ufework had been obhterated, reflected:

W. A. Swanberg

And yet this [Kuomintang] party almost from the time it came into power had tolerated among its officials of all grades graft and greed, idleness and inefficiency, nepotism and factional rivalries . . . These evils had become more pronounced after V-J Day in the attempts to crush Communism by a combination of mihtary strength and secret police. The government had steadily been losing popular support and even respect. . . . In painful contrast the Communist party was free from private graft, officers and men lived very much together, simply and industriously, severely disciplined, thoroughly indoctrinated.

In January 1947 General Marshall gave up after a fruitless year and returned to Washington to become Secretary of State. He knew that he had been used, that neither side had ever really given up its determination to exterminate the other. Chiang's troops had reached their highwater mark, spread in pockets in the North against the counsel of American military advisers still aiding them, and highly vulnerable. Chiang, with Luce's muscular help, was appealing for more American aid. On Luce's recent visit to China, the foxy Soong had queried him closely about the possibilities of Republican resurgence in the next elections, evidently on the theory that the Republicans would distribute more money and arms to Chiang than the Democrats. As Melby in the Nanking embassy saw it, "Soong and entourage are dancing around like a bunch of small boys who have to go to the bathroom. They are using every known dodge to get our money—though they must know by now that any loans will not make the slightest difference. "

Luce now saw the most grandiose project of his lifetime in danger of ruin. Wrapped up in the ruin was not only the fate of China and of Christianity and the Asian hegemony of the United States but also his own peace of mind and reputation. Chiang-in-China was to have been the crowning of a decade and a half of planning in the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center and of countless thousands of words of Lucepress propaganda. The nightmare rise of Mao-in-China brought a powerful Luce counter-strategy. For one thing, his China Institute of America, founded as a haven for Chinese students, now was registered (with Luce as trustee) as a foreign agent working for the Nationalists. It was said that members of Luce's Washington bureau were beating a path between their office and the Chinese embassy presided over by Dr. Welhngton Koo. The newsman Robert S. Allen devoted part of a broadcast to the increasingly powerful China Lobby of which Luce and the attorney Thomas Corcoran (whom Time had once skewered as a shifty New Dealer) were the visible headmen:

The House Appropriations Committee is secretly investigating one of the most brazen lobbyist pressure drives that Washington has seen in years. Aim of this pressure drive was a $60,000,000 raid on the U.S. Treasury in the guise of more aid to the Chiang Kai-shek government in China. The U.S. has already loaned and given to the Chinese government over six [sic] billion dollars. . . .

. . . [T]he Chiang Kai-shek raid is unique. It's the first time that a foreign government has openly lobbied to tap the U.S. till. . . . During the past week

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the capital literally swarmed with Chinese lobbxists. The State Department estimates that there are over 200 agents of Chiang Kai-shek now in the U.S. lobbying and propagandizing for more American millions. . . .

One of the most remarkable aspects of this remarkable foreign raid ... is the fact that it's being masterminded by certain well-known Americans. They are a strange group of aUies. On the extreme right is Henry Luce, ultraconservative pubhsher . . . And on the left is Tommy Corcoran . . . once a bitter enemy of Luce. But now Luce and Corcoran are working hand in glove to get more American millions for Chiang Kai-shek.

Luce has been propagandizing and agitating for another two-biUion-dollar U.S. handout for Chiang for a long time. . . . And in Washington practically the whole Luce bureau has been working full blast as part of the Chiang lobby. . .

Months earlier Life had featured the aggressive Presbyterian layman John Foster Dulles's two-part denunciation of Russia for aiming to conquer the world. Dulles was expected to be the next Repubhcan Secretary of State. Now Life attacked the career men in State who were "all so cautious and wooden" in their opposition to entanghng America further in w^hat had become a Chinese civil w ar of huge proportions. "Our Chinese pohcy has been one of mere temporizing and is now demonstrably bankrupt," Life said. The word "war" recurred incessantly in its editorials and features. One of them stripping U.S. foreign policy down to two essentials: ". . . 1) to prevent the next war; 2) to win it."

Luce exchanged letters and occasional visits with Navy Secretary James Forrestal—once his guest at Mepkin—who was obsessed with the Communist threat and made his office a clearinghouse for anti-Communist information and efforts. Forrestal exchanged similar information with many others including Luce's friends Cardinal Spellman and Monsignor Sheen, and also wath J. Edgar Hoover. The Secretar)' had commissioned a Smith College professor to make a special study of Soviet Communism which argued that if "a true Communist could destroy the United States by pushing a button, he would do so," and that, barring unlikely circumstances, ultimate conflict was ine\'itable. Luce was one of those who received a copy. Forrestal also sent out copies of Arthur Koestler's gripping story of Communist brainwash and torture. Darkness at Noon —a book that would later be reissued by Time Inc. Like Luce, Forrestal now believed the Marshall policy in China to be disastrous and that more aid should be given Chiang. The two men agreed on the need for a greatly enlarged mihtary budget. Fortune published an article, "The Arms We Need," based almost entirely on Forrestal's figures and urging that "the only way to avoid having American foreign policy dominated by crisis is to live in crisis—prepared for war."

When Forrestal's nearness to a breakdown became apparent to those close to him. Time smelled a plot, saying "he had been marked as the victim of one of the biggest headhunts in the history of Washington politics."

Luce also continued his partiahty for reclaimed radicals—men once intoxi-

W. A. Swanberg

cated with Communism and now as immoderate in the other direction. This time it was James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyite whose The Struggle for the World was the first of the mailed-fist shockers to bring the American Centmy into martial postwar focus and to call for fast U.S. preparation not only for war with Russia but for assertion of world leadership. Life published a condensation of the book with enormous promotion, and Time gave it a big play, with a picture of Burnham captioned "Too true for comfort." It was "chilling" stuff, Time conceded, and would be attacked as "Fascist war-mon-gering," adding, "Only one defense of Burnham's book can be made: it is— appallingly—true.''

Through his Washington bureau Luce tried strenuously for an audience so that he could press his China pohcy on President Truman in person. He had sought vainly to see him immediately after returning from China. If Truman by this time had managed to forgive the Luce slurs on Bess, he could not have been happy about the TLF animadversions on his stewardship. Elson, Time's tactful Washington bureau head, was sent to consult Presidential Secretary Charles Ross about Luce's wish for a hearing. Ross was amiable without committing the President. Evidently in response to Elson's suggestion, he said he had already urged the President to read Burnham's The Stru^le for the World, which Luce was actively promoting. Ross said he felt the President's views on China were now quite similar to Luce's and that he agreed with Luce in another respect—that a successful U.S. policy must be based on sound morality, and the trouble with the Russians was that they had no morality.

Luce was going at his usual breakneck speed. In January 1947 he had spent several days at the Time-sponsored Cleveland Forum, a huge conclave of foreign and American statesmen and dignitaries designed to promote Time Inc. and American business as well as to persuade Americans to think big in American Century terms. He made a speech in Syracuse, another in Philadelphia, journeyed to Chicago on business and in May flew to Brazil—his first trip to South America—as the guest of Oswaldo Aranha, president of the UN General Assembly. He came back urging exploitation such as a Life picture story about Sao Paolo and predictably finding "one of the greatest and most irresistible personahties I have ever encountered," this time in Aranha. Soon he was making a speech in Scranton, telling his late father's townsmen mistakenly that "[the] war between Soviet Russian Communism and non-Communism is being fought right now in China," adding, "Some day, somehow, we've got to go back there and put the situation in order. I pray God it may not be necessary to do so with force of arms." It was safe to say that by now, in large part due to his own efforts, Category Three contained a majority of the American people.

Hurrying back to New York, he got into his cutaway and stock two days later and went to his son's wedding to brunette Patricia Potter at Lu Shan, now after twelve years a mansion surrounded by horticultural splendor. One

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of the officiating pastors was Rev. George Buttrick of Luce's own Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church—a divine with whom Luce hked to discuss theology but for whom his opinion was impaired because Dr. Buttrick was a pacifist. One of the many guests was Luce's favorite writer-philosopher, eighty-six-year-old Dr. Alfred North \\1iitehead. When one woman guest felt faint because of the heat, and Dr. ^\^litehead was called to revive her, he did so by explaining that he was only a Doctor of Philosophy.

Luce highly approved of the lovely bride, who had lived a part of her life in China and had attended Bryn Mawr. This was one of those rare occasions when he was brought together with his whole "first family." Peter Paul Luce —now a student at M.I.T.—was one of the ushers, Lila was radiant, the Sev-eringhauses and Moores were there in a body and old Mrs. Luce struggled with a hearing aid. The occasion was not monopolized by Senators, governors or prime ministers. After the ceremony and the champagne, the music began and Luce danced with Lila for the first time in twelve years. John Billings, who was one of the guests, obser\'ed that this was the high point of the day second only to the wedding itself. Everybody applauded the strikingly handsome couple who had experienced separate vicissitudes, the mother and father of the bridegroom.

2. "FEARFULLY IRRESPONSIBLE JOURNALISM"

A yoimg lowan named Merle Miller came back from army service in Europe heartily sick of war and beheving that men of good will should work for peace. An excellent wTiter, he landed with Time and did very well. He inhabited one of the smaller cubicles, attended the weekly teas given by Managing Editor Matthews for the editorial staff and kept his eye peeled for material for a novel that was taking shape in his mind. Soon he discovered that Time was slanted, unfair, dishonest. He was not instructed to write dishonestly but he came to understand osmotically what was expected. As he later described it:

No one ever ordered anyone to write anything ... in a certain way, except, possibly, in the heat of an election campaign. But if you were bright—and you didn't remain on the staff long unless you were—you soon understood the rules.

He described an instance of how this worked out in practice:

I was attempting that day to write a story that would imply that the Czechs who had once been such gentie lovers of what the news magazine referred to as quote Western civilization unquote were no longer either quite so gentle or so friendly. I hoped in the story to be half-way honest and at the same time to get the story I wrote past the blue pencil of my immediate editor as well as the managing editor.

And another:

My assignment was to write a story about Yugoslavia, which would point up, subtly but understandably, the remarkable physical resemblance between Mar-

W. A. Swanberg

shal Tito and Hermann Goering, would remind the reader that the similarity was political and social as well, and finally the fact that, now that the war had ended, the readers of the news magazine must be prepared to realize that not all our wartime allies would be our peacetime friends. . . . The Yugoslav story went well, had precisely the right number of inverted sentences, just enough innuendo, exactly the correct amount of what, while it could not be proved, read just as well as fact and in many ways better.

Miller quit Time in disgust. He soon came out with a very good novel, That Winter, from which these excerpts are taken and in which he limned the Time fakery with the devastating verisimilitude of one who had been there. The book sold very well—so well that Luce, who lacked time to read it, asked Daniel Longwell to appraise it for him. Longwell, the former Doubleday bookman, marked the pages Luce might be interested in and noted that while Time appeared as background, it was not the book's central theme. Nothing to worry about.

Miller, who was later an editor of Harper's and then the Saturday Review, was sufficiently disturbed by his encounter with massive misinformation and manipulation of public attitudes that he spoke against it when he got a chance. In one pubhc lecture he attacked the imposture of Reader's Digest, noted that the New Republic was now so biased that it never criticized the Soviet Union, and paid his respects to his former employer. Time:

It's edited briUiantly, is well written, but is dishonestly written. It is extremely unified in that every single story carries the slant of the editor, Henry Luce. On the other hand. Time's competitor, Newsweek, is honest. It gives byUnes whenever the material is editorially written so that you know it is the opinion of the writer.

So Miller joined that small group of TLF people concerned enough with integrity to quit the plush Rockefeller Center offices, the big salaries, the profit-sharing and the prestige. His gesture against journalistic fraudulence was inevitably a pea-shooter against granite. Probably Managing Editor Matthews did not even hear the rattle against his fortification. In his preoccupation with style he sometimes warred with the researchers whose duty was to keep Time "factual." There were sixty of these capable young women, required by unwritten law to have pretty legs and by a rule in the book of their boss, Senior Editor Content Peckham, to wear sheer silk stockings and to keep the seams straight. When a writer was assigned to a story, a researcher still gathered all the facts for him. Since she was in supposed factual command and he merely the rendering artist, she went over his finished copy word for word. She penciled a dot over each correct word. If she found a word she could not dot, it was the writer's supposed duty to correct it.

In its promotion. Time made much of this arduous and expensive search for truth. It helped make the editorial cost of Time $1.48 a printed word, against less than a dime a word for most newspapers. But the system was honored as

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often in the breach as in the observance. To one researcher who offered a dictionary to prove a point, Matthews said, "Webster is the work of human hands." He once told his assembled writers, "Now, look, let's not take these researchers too seriously." There was a continuing battle between writers and researchers that helped to add up to that $1.48 a word. The writer's purpose was to get as tall a story by the bothersome girl as he could, while her hope was to keep him somewhere within the bounds of plausibility if not truth. In the case of particularly masterful writers carried away by their subject, the researcher system served their fictional impulses rather than factuality, much as some government agencies founded to protect the consumer ended up by swindling him. It cannot be said, for example, that any researcher with penciled dots rescued Whittaker Chambers or Laird Goldsborough from error.

Never did the character and wishes of the Boss trickle down more certainly to the staff and become more manifest in the finished product. It was well known, though not openly discussed, that his aim was not mere fact but was entertainment that assured rising circulation, which in turn assured rising power in his propaganda, which to him represented the final truth.

Matthews himself brushed aside a researcher in Time's Medicine department, Beka Doherty, in his determined effort for a good story. It was a cover about the psychiatrist Dr. William C. Menninger which had already been revised eight times when he got his hands on it. Although this was late Monday night and checking copy had been turned in, after which (said the rules) no major changes could be made, Matthews saw room for great improvement. He began playing with it himself. He made more and more changes as he went along, such as defining Freudianism as "European smut-lety" and describing the mentally ill as people lacking the moral character to face their problems. Miss Doherty protested, as the rules ordered her to. But, she said:

Matthews refused to see me, refused to discuss the matter further with the senior editor or the writer, who were both miserably in the middle. The thing was only solved when I threw a fit of temperament which everybody said was perfectly justified, because Matthews' version of the story would have brought ridicule to the magazine, on the writer, and myself personally, would have choked ofiF eflFectively all the medical sources we had been at such pains to build up, would have caused acute pain to all the mental patients who read Time . . . and last (and least) would have seriously misrepresented the facts.

Attention should be paid to the parenthetical "and least." Daily newspapers were prone to make typos and even errors of fact in producing several editions a day against imperious deadlines. Time, with a week between deadlines, made few typos but oozed with the inaccurate or misleading (quite aside from propaganda) because of the constant effort to improve on fact and make a "good story." Time's slurs, taunts and gibes were often inserted just to jazz things up. Time lacked the restraining influence felt by the editor of a

W. A. Swanberg

daily newspaper who knows that a sizable percentage of his readers can check personally on the accuracy of most stories. Time's story about Paducah was believed by readers in all other places, and the reader in Dubuque was not disillusioned until Time carried a story about Dubuque, when he would say, "They got that wrong."

When the editor of the new magazine Fact scouted around for people who disliked Time, he was all but trampled in the rush. Ralph Ingersoll, who knew a good deal about Time, said, "The way to tell a successful he is to include enough truth in it to make it behevable—and Time is the most successful liar of our times." Dwight Macdonald, another ex-insider, said, "The degree of credence one gives to Time is inverse to one's degree of knowledge of the situation being reported on." Tallulah Bankhead said, "Dirt is too clean a word for Time." Eugene Burdick deplored Time's "dishonest tactics," Mary McCarthy its "falsifications," and Igor Stravinsky found this level of reporting even in one of the speciahzed departments: "Every music column I have read in Time has been distorted and inaccurate." The critic Eric Bentley found manipulation to be its worst vice: "More pervasive than Time's outright errors is the misuse of the truth." Bertrand Russell wrote, "I consider Time to be scurrilous and I know, with respect to my own work, utterly shameless in its willingness to distort."

George Horace Lorimer, who found fourteen important factual errors in Time's four-hundred-word piece about his career, was kinder; he simply wrote Time, hsting the errors but not asking for a pubhshed correction, which of course he did not get.

News manipulation was sheer pohcy, Time's way of fife, performed as a matter of office routine. It often resulted in entertaining trivia harmful chiefly in its corruption of gimmick-seeking editors and writers and its general and pervasive debasing of truth. When Time did a roundup story on the alleged emphasis of country weeklies on bucohc interests rather than the 1946 election, it followed the slant at all costs. It often skipped front-page election stories in the weeklies and quoted inside squibs concerning hog sales, fishing excursions and Ladies' Aid meetings "which came," it said, "smudgily from flatbed presses in the nation's small towns." Country editors complained about this misrepresentation. The sage Henry Beetle Hough of the Vineyard Gazette in Massachusetts observed that "the facts were twisted to suit the point of view of the Time editor, and the whole picture . . . was narrow and distorted." Hough's reproving editorial read in part:

Ah, neighbor, which comes cockily from the many stories of an expensive skyscraper in Rockefeller Center, it is not clear printing which makes words shine or endure, and it isn't always clipped or polished rhetoric. No, no! Plain speech, honest, forthright, and possibly well-smudged, makes better reading in heaven and even in some nearer places than a good deal of well turned mechanical patter.

258

I

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Bernard De Voto, who had commented on Life's strategic use of the "rapidly slipping chemise," was so enraged at Time's despoihng of William Vogt's book on conservation and ecology, Road to Survival, that he took four pages in Harper's to excoriate it. This was one of those instances where "the degree of credence was inverse to the degree of knowledge," for De Voto knew something about conservation and had read the book. De Voto did not seem to reahze that a researcher had checked every word. He noted Time's "sweeping misrepresentations of Mr. Vogt's book," which it accomplished "by making him and people of like opinion say what in fact they have never said, by attributing to them ideas which they do not in fact hold, by derisive epithets, by citing as demonstrated facts what are really hmited hypotheses or mere wild guesses ... by ignoring the issues and the evidence, and by assertions for which no support is given and none exists." De Voto observed that Time felt that the author was "against industry"—an attitude that aroused Time's best infighting as the defender of industry. De Voto was shaken not by the kind of inaccuracy one could forgive but by the evidently dehberate misinformation and deception of the reader. "I have no space to discuss the harm [the article] has done," he wrote. "I merely remark that it is fearfully irresponsible journalism."

Most knowledgeable and cynical of all were newspapermen in New York, Washington and elsewhere who actually saw the raw news come in over the wires and then saw how it was gimmicked by Time. Not far behind was a growing number of college journahsm or politics classes whose instructors and students saw what was happening, and where Time was studied regularly as a horrible example of the distortion and coloration of news, among them Dartmouth, Hunter College, the University of Missouri and Iowa State College. The Southern Cahfornia Daily Trojan observed, "Henry Luce's pubUcations have made slanting the news a science—so much so that one can hardly read a single article in Time, for example, without coming upon some outright attempt to influence one's thinking." At Dartmouth's "Great Issues" course, Time's distortions, errors and misrepresentations were bsted, along with corrections, on panels mounted before the class.

Factuahty aside, Matthews had raised Time's hterary quality noticeably. If the "smutlety" sort of gag was still a trifle overdone. Time nevertheless was so easy to read that some read it for entertainment rather than information, just as others bought the New Yorker solely for its cartoons and the Reader's Digest for its jokes. Time's propaganda came through in any case. True, some thought the Lucepress rather worldly for such a religious man as Luce. This topic came up when ex-Congresswoman Luce, forgetting in her earnest crusade her servant problem, her three homes and her jewel collection, wrote the New York Herald Tribune criticizing the "materialism" of Communism.

This startled the critic Lewis Galantiere who, without reference to Mrs. Luce's own possessions, had thought that Time, Life and Fortune, with their full-page display ads of Umousines, liquors and cosmetics, had a worldly color-

W. A. Swanberg

ation. It was one thing, too, to run straight advertising and another to run so-called textual matter designed to tie in with advertisements either specifically or generally. Galantiere had recentiy been riveted to his chair by a four-page Life text (not advertising) feature purporting to give "an honest representation of the dream of most United States families." Its first double-page photograph showed a new and handsome house, a stationwagon, television set, power mower, washing machine, bath towels, refrigerator and other useful gadgets including a $48,500 helicopter. On the next two pages were given "a woman's dream," which included a $595 lace dressing gown and a $330,000 diamond-and-emerald necklace, and "a man's dream" filled with expensive sporting equipment. Fanciful as all this looked, Life said, "it is based on the hard statistics of consumer demand and manufacturers' unfilled orders."

Galantiere, not at all interested in defending Communism, still felt that Mrs. Luce did not have to go to Russia to find the mundane. He wrote the Herald Tribune to say that he "had been struck (as Mrs. Luce doubtless was) by the unreheved materiahsm of [Life's] view of the American people."

When Luce saw Death of a Salesman and talked about it later to a friend, the friend noticed that he did not entertain the thought that the play's theme might have direct apphcation to him. But like Willy Loman, the success-worshiping protagonist in Arthur Miller's play. Luce was not immune to occasional inward wresthngs. His mother continued to let him know that she worried about his soul. And Mary Bancroft's visit to America in 1947 brought him together in expensive restaurants with a woman he found both delightful and stimulating but whose suspicions of his magazines and his motivations put him on the defensive. She seemed to read every hne in his pubhcations, to place them alongside facts known to her through other channels, and to compare them in ways not flattering to Time Inc. Mrs. Bancroft sailed on the Maureta-nia in October to find aboard the handsome Virginian, Charles Wertenbaker, whose disagreements with the Luce-Chambers ideology had recently caused him to leave Time in a final though friendly separation. He was rejoining his wife in France, where he would finish a novel. Mrs. Bancroft had enjoyed his Write Sorrow on the Earth, and since she was also writing a novel, and they were equally fascinated by Luce's complexities, they had much to talk about. Their conversation aboard the liner came near impelling Mary to send Luce a cable: "Now you've got all that money and power, don't you think you might begin to try to do a little good?" but she decided against it and later included the same suggestion in a letter. Wertenbaker, planning a later novel whose central character would be a newsmagazine tycoon, and who still felt that what Luce needed for his political improvement was a tempestuous affair with a lady as hberal philosophically as she was romantically, insisted that it was her duty to ensnare him. She already had him so bewitched, he said, that he would follow her to the ends of the earth and she had only to be reasonably receptive. He used as a basis for this judgment the fact that she had already received some rather long, handwritten letters from Luce.

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Under all this badinage the two agreed that there was more than mere political wrongheadedness in Luce's course. They thought that Luce, with such capacities for journalistic greatness, was instead using his journalism more and more to promote his own personal and political power. After leaving the boat, the two would carry on a long correspondence about the progress of their respective novels in which further discussions of Luce would appear. Werten-baker, who had covered combat during the war, put her friendship with Luce in military terms. Addressing her first as "Corporal," he gradually raised her rank to reward what he saw as progress in her campaign of entrapment. Mrs. Bancroft, delighted by Wertenbaker's amusing and witty letters, went along with the jest. Many years later when she finally told Luce about this "game" she and Wertenbaker had played, he seemed to enjoy the thought that he had figured in what he chose to regard as "a sort of Noel Cowardish thing."

3. TROUBLE WITH THE DOTS

Luce's rejection of the evaluation of the American press for which he had put up $200,000 three years earlier, caused astonishment. A few in his own organization unkindly suggested (not to him) that he had felt subconsciously that the evaluators would automatically skip him on the theory that a burglar does not alert the police, or that the least the Committee on the Freedom of the Press could do would be to give a clean bill of health to the fellow who paid their expenses. When the commission had required $15,000 more to finish their work, he bowed out and his friend William Benton of Encyclopaedia Britannica supplied this final sum.

The commission's prehminary report, "A Free and Responsible Press," found that press freedom was indeed in danger. Among the general criticisms were some apphcable to the Lucepress: the increasing concentration of press power in the hands of a few, and the use of the press for propaganda. In many specific ways the report castigated the kind of journalism constantly employed in Time, Life and Fortune, without of course naming them:

"The first requirement is that the media should be accurate. They should not lie." ". . . Giant units [of the press] can and should assume the duty of publishing significant ideas contrary to their own ..." "[The press] ought to identify the sources of its facts, opinions, and arguments so that the reader . . . can judge them. . . . Identification of source is necessary in a free society."

Time gave virtually no bylines and seldom identified its sources. As has been seen, it was famous for its ability to find unidentified politicians or bystanders who would make statements on news events providing the very point of view Time sought to promote, usually in memorable language. Time's ability to find such unidentified people even in the days when its only sources had been the newspapers which themselves could not find them, had been a

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source of wonder to the working press. Newspapermen called Time's imiden-tified witness the Delphic Oracle or Disembodied Voice and got a kick out of going through an issue to count the Voices. Time seldom was able to find unidentified persons to make statements with which Time disagreed. To knowing readers (but not the unknowing) the unidentified commentator's mask came away rather easily and he was discovered to be the propagandist voice of Time. He was ubiquitous—always present at historic events, never escaping Time's reporter and always willing to be quoted if not named. When Jan Ma-saryk fell to his death in Prague, sure enough there was an unnamed Czech peasant woman leaning over a balustrade in the palace, an on-the-spot witness who told Time, "The damned, damned Communists killed him. They are worse than the Nazis."

The commission told how news could (but should not) be slanted and distorted:

... If the Chinese appear in a succession [of scenes] as sinister drug addicts and militarists, an image of China is built which needs to be balanced by another. If the Negro appears . . . only as a servant . . . the image of the Negro ... is distorted. The plugging of special color and "hate" words . . . such words as "ruthless," "confused," "bureaucratic"—^performs inevitably the same image-making function.

This could be construed as criticism of Time's methods of image-building and adjectivization. But still worse was to come:

Of equal importance with reportorial accuracy are the identification of fact as fact and opinion as opinion, and their separation, so far as possible. This is necessary aU the way from the reporter's file, up through the copy and makeup desks and editorial offices, to the final, pubUshed product.

Perhaps this was what made Luce throw up his hands and disavow the commission he had founded. "Impartiahty is often an impediment to truth," he protested. "Time will not allow the stuflFed dummy of impartiahty to stand in the way of teUing the truth as it sees it." He added strangely, "The commission is, in fact, complaining about the worst sections of the press, and to them it administers some well-deserved rebukes."

Luce's friend Dr. Hutchins, chairman of the commission, said, "It is inconceivable to me that Henry Luce would disagree with the general conclusions of the report." But Walter Lippmann was one of the few who lauded it. The commission urged the creation of a privately endowed agency, independent of both government and the press, to report annually on the press's performance. Luce was joined in rejection by the vast majority of the newspaper press, which dishked having even an independent body, with no power other than publicity, looking over its shoulder.

In 1948, Time's twenty-fifth anniversary was celebrated with a special twelve-page "biography" of the magazine written mostly by Max Ways, who

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had proved so able a man that his salary had skyrocketed and he was often called on by Luce to debate with him domestic and world problems. The suggestion of some critics that money had something to do with the Luce attitudes did not of course mean that his top men were insincere and motivated only, if at all, by cupidity. Some of them had been taking liberties with the news so long that it seemed as natural as for a chef to season a goulash. There were old-timers and newcomers, though perhaps not many, who truly be-heved in what they were doing. This was obviously the case with the strapping, intellectual Ways, whose sensitivity to news manipulation had not been dulled gradually. He had joined up as a forty-year-old newsman heavily experienced on the Baltimore Sun and Philadelphia Record to whom Time's facile shaping of events must have come as a sudden revelation rather than a slow and crippling disease.

Clearly he approved of Time, for the twelve-page biography was almost an unbroken hosanna. True, his admission that Time performed a certain processing or coloring of the news did not come until the very end of the appreciation, a point only the more determined readers would reach. He suggested that the additives Time combined with the news were not at all an imposition on the reader who might have thought he was getting unadulterated news, since there was no such thing as unadulterated news. There was no mention of the possibility that the additives were calculated to influence readers who might reach different conclusions if left to their own judgment, or that there might be something deceptive in all this. On the contrary, the additives reflected Time's concern over national and world events and its hope to instill the same care into its readers:

The shortest or the longest news story is the result of selection. The selection is not, and cannot be, "scientific" or "objective." It is made by human beings. . . . The myth of "objective journalism" reached its height about 1938-39, before the Hitler-Stalin pact, before the sharp cleavage of war reminded the Western world that the famed "two sides of a question" are not always, or even often, equal. . . .

Time in the 1930s was reporting the facts about Germany, for example, in a way that clearly showed Time's working hypothesis: that the Nazi Party was very bad medicine. It reports the Communist Party today against the back-grovmd of a similar hypothesis. . . .

Time's prospectus promised that "no article would be written to prove any special case." It tries hard to keep that promise. . . . Time is not dispassionate about news. It cares about what's going on in the world, and it hopes that its readers eare. . . . Fairness is Time's goal.

One of Time's researchers seemed to have been careless with a great many of her dots. Ways had not been with Time during the Thirties or he would have known that the magazine in those years coddled the Nazis, not to mention glorifying Mussolini and Franco and hovering around the edges of anti-Semitism. It was Uttered then, as it still was, with articles written to prove

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special cases. And if Time's ideal really was fairness, it could not reasonably be said that the ideal had often been reached. To some, such as Andrew Mellon, Wendell Willlde, J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas E. Dewey, NeviUe Chamberlain, Pius XII, General MacArthur, General Patton, Chiang Kai-shek and all the Soongs, it had been fair—really more than fair. But in all candor it had to be said that Time had not been fair to others such as Leon Blum, Maxim Litvinov, Manuel Azana, Haile Selassie, Hugh Johnson, Rexford Tugwell, Franklin Roosevelt, or to William Vogt and his book Road to Survival, to name only a few. Indeed some of these persons and many others had been treated not with the accidental unfairness that gets by in the deadline rush but with dehberate, vicious, repeated and prolonged unfairness.

What was revealed here about a newsmagazine staffed with sixty researchers which, on its twenty-fifth birthday, could make so many errors about its own recent and easily explored past?

There was revealed at least such a lack of liaison between the word-dotting researchers and the creators of Time's finished copy as to raise doubt of the system's validity. Some more effective control of the word-dotting seemed to be in order. The problem was to get the dots over the right words. Still the system, with all its inadequacies, was persevered in. As Time moved into its second quarter-century, it still placed implicit faith in the dots.

J. THE AUSPICIOUS STAR

In December 1947 Chinese Ambassador Wellington Koo visited New York with a whole bagful of decorations which he conferred on Luce, Thomas W. Lamont, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Paul Hoffman and others useful to Chiang Kai-shek. Around Luce's neck Dr. Koo hung the Special Cravat of the Order of the Auspicious Star. The retiring president of United Service to China (United China Relief's postwar name), former Governor Charles Edison of New Jersey, received an award one notch higher, the Grand Order of the Auspicious Star. It was taking nothing away from Governor Edison to say that no one in either hemisphere deserved more acclaim from Chiang than Luce. In Time alone, that infallible barometer, Chiang had set a record by appearing on the cover six times and was soon to be honored there for the seventh. To many Timen it came under the heading of "Harry's mania. "

The Lucepress demands for more aid to Chiang had reached a crescendo when William C. Bullitt went to China to investigate the situation for Life. In Nanking, where General Wedemeyer had followed General Marshall and was giving Chiang military advice he often ignored, Bullitt ran into John Melby at the U.S. embassy. "Like most others he is appalled by what he has seen and heard," Melby wrote in his diary. "He keeps muttering, 'Someone has not been telling the truth.' "

Although Bulhtt smelled the Kuomintang corruption, it would not do for him to show his wry face. His article in Life, titled "A Report to the American People on China," was ballyhooed by full-page ads in dozens of newspapers —always the sign of a high-powered Luce propaganda effort. It gave a partisan account of the background of the civil war, blaming Roosevelt for "betraying" Chiang, whom it glorified as a man who "bulks larger than any living American." It conveyed the idea that China was not in civil war, that the

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threat was purely external, that the Chinese Communists were mere agents of Stahn. Whether Bulhtt himself knew that this was not so, as a propagandist he knew it was the only line to take. The war-weary American public would never allow the country to be drawn into a Chinese factional bloodletting. The chances were better that it would defend China against Stalin. BuUitt was so aware of the tendency of money and materials to vanish in the hands of Chiang's friends and relatives that to his recommended program for saving the Gimo with $1,350 milhon more in American money he added eighteen suggestions for Nationahst reform and the dispatch of General MacArthur to supervise the whole operation. His plan would commit America to heav)' and open mihtary intervention in the civil war.

Perhaps it was these suggestions, which really amounted to an indictment of the Gimo who was yet so highly praised, and the thought of the Gimo being subordinate to MacArthur, which caused the decision that Luce should get only the Special Cravat. Yet he kept lobbying all the harder for more help for Chiang. Twice in ten months Time made Secretary of State Marshall its cover subject, in both cases less for the purpose of laudation than for warning and for the apphcation of pohtical pressure about China. Admitting that he had his points. Time asked that rhetorical question that always placed a pub-he official in doubt before the pubhc: "But is Marshall big enough for the gigantic task ahead of him?"

Not unless he pitched in for Chiang, Time warned, arguing against the theory that the U.S. should wash its hands of the Nationalist crowd "on the ground that some of its leaders were crooks." It seemed to come out for American support of virtually any government as long as it was anti-Communist, assaihng the "hoher-than-thou attitude that the U.S. could only associate itself with simon-pure, double-distiUed democrats conforming to the strictest tenets of the Anglo-Saxon moral code."

By now the China Lobby was an amorphous group, preponderantly Repub-hcan, boosting Chiang for reasons of anti-Communism and also as an issue against the Democrats. Luce was easily the lobby's most powerful member through sheer force of propaganda. With him were people ranging from Alfred Kohlberg, a wealthy importer of Chinese lace whose interests were in part commercial, to Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, a former medical missionary in China. The pressure was enormous, as Eric Sevareid said in a newscast:

Unless the Senate changes things, Repubhcan Representative Judd of Minnesota and pubhsher Henry Luce have won their fight to get more mihtary help to Chiang Kai-shek in China. It was inevitable that the great prestige of Secretary Marshall would come a cropper on some issues some time, but the curious thing is that he has failed to win his case on this issue of China's mihtary needs, a topic on which he has been regarded as the government's number one expert.

One Washington mystery was why Repubhcan Senator Arthur Vanden-

Luce and His Empire

berg, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, suddenly withdrew the committee's report excoriating the Chiang regime for "corruption and incompetence" in favor of a revised report much gentler with Chiang. There was speculation that Luce might be behind it, one of the rumors being that if Vandenberg did not get the Presidential nomination that summer he would quit the Senate and become editor of Fortune at $60,000 a year.

The China Lobby had already begun a course of calculated vengefulness against Chiang-doubters in the State Department. John Carter Vincent, one of the early Old China Hands in the Foreign Service to become disillusioned with Chiang, and who had since become chief of the State Department's Office of Far Eastern Affairs, was under such fire that he was relieved of that office and sent to Switzerland as minister to remove him as a target. The embargo on the shipment of munitions to Chiang was lifted. Chiang got 230 American planes, and American Marines withdrawing from North China left hundreds of tons of munitions to the Nationalist soldiers, who were beginning to show more interest in looting than fighting. The administration recommended financial support to Chiang less than the Luce-Bullitt demands. Yet Congress shaved it down, still voting a healthy $400 million in economic and military aid which justified the Chinese embassy entertainments in Washington and the Auspicious Stars. In Fortune, a thoroughly misleading apologia for Chiang and attack on Democratic policy was followed by steady propaganda in Life and Time, the latter assailing Truman for his "half-a-loaf" policy, although Congress itself had cut the loaf. It attacked Marshall for his insistence that money could not save Chiang unless he won back the public with democratic concessions.

"You can't win guerrilla warfare with the people against you," Marshall said. Like most of the professional China hands in the Foreign Service, he thought the Chiang government doomed because it would not or could not reform and was becoming totally dependent on American aid.

Luce, whose postwar experience in China was as nothing compared with Marshall's solid year of talk with both sides in the civil strife, had moved far toward his belief in money plus outright American military intervention. His magazines must have been the most influential single factor in enlisting some American legislators and much of the public in a belief that was quite mistaken—a mistaken belief that would cause enormous national turmoil—the behef that we were shortchanging Chiang in comparison with massive Russian help erroneously thought to be given the Chinese Communists.

There was concern among liberals on Time's staff, one of whom left an unsigned statement on Billings's desk:

The Time writers do not share the Management's enthusiasm for the Repub-hcan Party. There are five or six admitted Republicans on the staff. There may be a few Repubhcan fellow travelers. The writers are not Democrats either. The overwhelming majority were supporters of Franklin Roosevelt and are waiting for some political group which will continue his work. . . .

W. A. Swanberg

Practically all (perhaps all) the writers dislike Communism. But many feel that some of the anti-Communist material which has appeared in Time has been unfair, undignified and dishonest. They do not like to see Time descend to the Communist propaganda level by using semantics, unproved rumors, and hate and fear appeals.

Most of the writers beheve that much of the outcry against Communism comes from pressure-groups which are as undemocratic as the Communists . . . they do not applaud alliances with these groups. . . . Most writers extend their feehng about Communism to the foreign field. But they hate to see Time condone (as it has) objectionable foreign parties and governments just because they are anti-Communist. They feel that this pohcy is not only morally wrong but dangerous and ineflFective. . . . The religious propaganda that gets into Time makes them writhe. . . .

In the midst of all this, the rumors of intrigue that invariably circulate with special spite about wealthy people with churchly connections did not pass over Luce. They were given a fiUip by the publication in 1948 of the novel The Great Ones by Ralph McAlhster IngersoU. As Lewis Gannett observed, one could not read the book "without being aware that the author is the same Ralph IngersoU who . . . from 1930 to 1935 [was] managing editor of Harry Luce's 'Fortune,' from 1935 to 1936 general manager of Mr. Luce's combined enterprises, and from 1937 to 1939 pubhsher of 'Time.' " The novel's unlovable protagonist, Sturges Strong, not very bright but insatiably curious and hard-working at Yale, joins his far more gifted classmate Allen Bishop in founding a newsmagazine and carries it on skillfully after Bishop quarrels with him and leaves. He divorces his first wife to marry a famous and predatory beauty. He founds a new magazine so successful that advertising rates had been set too low and he narrowly escapes ruin before becoming more successful than ever. When his new wife seeks control of the magazine, he fends her off but lets her go abroad as a special correspondent, interviewing generals and foreign leaders—intervals during which Strong carries on affairs with other women.

In Orville Prescott's opinion, "What Mr. IngersoU has done is to take two of the most prominent persons in the literary-publishing world and rearrange their hves for the purposes of cheap and vulgar fiction." His observation that the book was "an affront to good taste and literary ethics" was echoed by Gannett, who admitted "having had a kind of low fun reading it myself" but thought it raised "large questions of the ethics of spite writing and publishing."

2. THE LITTLE OLD VOTER

In addition to influencing poUcy, Luce was pulhng strings to elect a President in 1948 and perhaps to get into the Cabinet himself. The scuttlebutt said

Luce and His Empire

that he was sponsor of a scheme to make Vandenberg the Repubhcan nominee (and certain victor) by promising to give Governor James H. DuflF of Pennsylvania "a powerful buildup in his publications" if Duff would swing Pennsylvania's delegates to Vandenberg. Duff would then be given the Vice Presidential post and Luce would at last achieve his dream of becoming Secretary of State. Governor Duff, son of a Presbyterian clergyman, did indeed appear on Time's cover, with the warmest kind of appreciation inside the magazine, in the issue appearing the very day the delegates were assembling in Philadelphia for the convention. Many of the newcomers were seen reading intently the publication whose red border framed the sturdy-looking likeness of the governor. No doubt about it, it gave the Vandenberg-boosting Duff the treatment:

. . . Strapping affable redhead. . . . Friendly, outspoken six-footer . . . rugged frame and electric blue-grey eyes. . . . Big Jim had come up . . . his roots were deep in Pennsylvania history. One of his ancestors was a member of William Penn's Council . . . unpretentious and homespun. . . . His rear was secure. . . . Key man, Keystone State. . . . Jim Duff would move into the firing line with his rifle cocked. . . .

Ex-Congresswoman Luce, who had been in Hollywood writing the script for Come to the Stable and had spoken to many Catholic groups, perhaps had not given up hope for the Senate or something better. She was a convention speaker and Luce a mere listener. Sure enough, she gave a strong plug for Vandenberg, far stronger than her commendation for Dewey and others. "Clare was a sight to see as she stood on tiptoe in her black suede flatties," wrote Dorothy Kilgallen, "and railed against 'the troubadours of trouble' and the 'crooners of catastrophe.' " She called Henry Wallace, whom she had once accused of Globaloney, "Stalin's Mortimer Snerd." She blistered both FDR and Truman with such gusto that the New York Sun headlined, "Mrs. Luce Roasts Democratic Party to a Turn." One of her points was that both Presidents "got along fine" with Stalin. "Good old Joe," she said, "of course they liked him. Didn't they give him all Eastern Europe, Manchuria, the Ku-riles, North China, coalitions in Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia? "

The commentator Raymond Walsh discerned the obvious: "The Republican Party . . . evidently plans to come to the aid of the Chiang regime on a larger scale than the Truman administration has. This policy is due to the influence of Mr. Henry Luce . . ."

The Chinese embassy people and Chiang himself took a sharp interest in the proceedings, naturally favoring the Vandenberg candidacy which, with Luce as Secretary of State, would solve many of their problems. Nevertheless, when Dewey was nominated they fell into line like loyal Republicans. Luce's mocking friend in Switzerland, Mary Bancroft, did not think highly of the po-htical company he was keeping. She referred derisively to "that great liberal and socialistic-minded fellow. Bill Bullitt, and that unassuming little blonde

W. A. Swanberg

Communist, Tom Dewey." Luce never knew quite how to take this lively lady whose raillery seemed calculated to puncture his pomposity and yet whose kindliness he treasured. She went on to challenge one of his firmest be-hefs:

Do you remember on that day when we lunched together and you forgot to eat that clam, you said to me that if the human race was ever going to work out a way of life or of living together they were going to work it out in the U.S.A. and then you went on with a lot of nonsense about how the U.S.A. was o.k. because everything worked and New York got itself fed? Well, the Swiss have worked out a way of life and if we would just learn everything they know and run our country as they run theirs—you'd have it—your human race hving together as human life was meant to be hved. . . . I've been here now only four days [after her trip to America]. I don't know who has raped who in Massachusetts or who has murdered who in the rest of the country nor do I know the ins and outs of Benny Meyers' love Ufe, but I do know what is going on in the rest of the world and I only have to read a newspaper of four pages with NO ADVERTISING in order to do so. Furthermore, in case you think this statement un-American . . . one of the four-page papers I can read ... is the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune.

Luce was victimized also by Westbrook Pegler, who gave Mrs. Luce credit for "scratching Harry Truman's eyes out with tinted claws" but who had an animosity caused in part by an implausible theory brought on by the confessions of Whittaker Chambers: that Luce was soft on Communists in his organization:

China-Boy Henry Luce gotta lotta money. China-Boy lives in swell hotel, tippy-top Waldorf-Astoria. Gotta full dress suit, gotta tuxedo, plug hat, fur collar, gotta No. 2 wife. Missy Luce veUy pUtty lady, makee talkee, plenty savvy. Henry Luce plenty big shot. Chucks his weight around. . . .

China-Boy Henry bom Shantung, speakee Chinee, catchee Chinee name.

In Chinese Henry Luce called Fuey Pi-yu, pronounced as it sounds. Your nose knows what it means. Fuey Pi-yu means Henry Luce.

Long time ago, Fuey Pi-yu came stateside to go to college. (Boola-Boola! Yale! Rah!) Never went out for football but got his letters in fan tan, mah jong and Chinese checkers. Sometime Fuey Pi-yu invented Timestyle, a nervous disease of the typewriter. . . . Life . . . began publishing pictures which persistently pressed toward absolute nakedness. . . . Life . . . began whipping and zipping around the place like a Peeping Tom's dream. It was such a pecuhar interest, this picking bits of lint off the female carcass, this nagging at a loose string of womanhood's union suit and winding it on a stick until the poor girl was almost stark naked, that people wondered and wondered.

It seemed that someone very influential at Life had a slant. As though the boss had just found out something.

Well, as the years went on, Fuey Pi-yu made just more money than he ever suspected the existence of. As he got richer and richer he began to sense, by the feel of people and current history, that an American, with all his money and his

Luce and His Empire

peculiar principles and vanity . . . could become a kingmaker. He could put men in fear of him by dirty slurs. If he could make a President of the United States, that would be the next thing to making a King. . . .

After Mr. WiUkie died, Pi-yu scanned the field and set a trap for Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg. ... If Henry Pi-yu could have put over Vandenberg he would have expected to be Secretary of State. He can't ever hope to be President because he was bom in China. . . .

Recently a backshd Bolshevik named Whittaker Chambers turned up in . . . Washington.

To put it in Timestyle: "Fat-faced, vapid senior editor of Time Magazine, New York smear sheet of Fuey-Pi-yu ..." Chambers confessed he had been a Communist Party courier and the Kremhn's contact man with officials of the State Department. . . .

Luce, who scarcely needed reminding of the international Communist menace, had the Chambers-Hiss case on his mind as he carried Dewey's banner in his magazines. If being reproached by Pegler for "dirty slurs" was an arresting experience, it had to be said that Luce did not deal kindly with Truman during the campaign, especially since he was the sure loser. As Time saw the President:

Harry Truman got sore. His talk was tougher than ever. His speeches were folksy but their well-hammered themes were fear and self-interest. ... At a midnight stop ... he interrupted his blistering attack on Congress to scold and silence a group of noisy boys. . . . In San Francisco and Oakland he was bitterly disappointed by vmenthusiastic audiences . . . But Candidate Truman was most infuriated by Candidate Tom Dewey's refusal to take his bait and get into a slugging match with him. . . .

[Meanwhile] Harry Truman had to make some kind of show of being President. . . . Truman's unbroken fealty to the Kansas City machine bossed by his great & good friend, the late, great-beUied Tom J. Pendergast. . . . There was not much left to the presidential campaign except counting the votes. . . . But Truman strategists hoped that their candidate stiU had a Sunday punch which would knock Tom Dewey off his high pedestal and force him to fight on Truman's level. . . . [When Truman] damned the 80th Congress and the Taft-Hartley law, nobody seemed really to care or to hsten.

The campaign came soon after the Weekly Newsmagazine's anniversary mention of Time's fairness, its endeavor to avoid articles proving any special case, and its compassion about the news. Its compassion for the good-as-elected Dewey was evident even though Dulles was slated to be his Secretary of State:

San Francisco received him with open arms. An audience of 9,000 interrupted him 32 times with applause. . . . Tom Dewey had observed one salient fact. At every whistle stop and cattle crossing, the hne that invariably drew loud applause was an attack on Communists in the Government. . . . Dewey cried: "The tragic fact is that all too often our own Government . . . seems to have so

W. A. Swanherg

far lost faith in our system of free opportunity as to encourage this Communist advance, not hinder it." . . . Tom Dewey was obviously gaining in confidence . . . He seemed less hke a candidate bidding for votes and more like a statesman speaking not only for his party but for his country. . . . [He called for] "an end to the tragic neglect of our ancient friend and ally, China." . . .

A Life feature, "The Truman Train Stumbles West," listed the President's poor crowds and speechmaking bobbles. In Shanghai and other Chinese cities, Life noted, Chiang partisans were carrying Dewey-for-President signs— the first time an American election had so gripped the Nationalist interest. But the Chiang forces to the north were so rapidly crumbling before the Communists that one New York commentator described the situation ironically:

. . . Mr. Dewey is supported by men-—for example, Henry Luce of Time, Life and Fortune—men who are aggressive supporters of the mihtary intervention policies of Generals Wedemeyer and Chennault. . . . [But] while Mr. Dewey has been running for the Presidency, Chiang has been running from the Communists, and it now looks as though Chiang would run to the ocean before Dewey manages to get to the Potomac.

Perhaps it was an omen that on the night before the election, thieves stole $20,000 in jewelry from the Luce Waldorf apartment. On election night at the biggest NBC television studio in Radio City, Life had the props ready to make victory visually memorable: a huge and expensive model of the White House rigged with a treadmill. The treadmill would be turned on electronically when the Dewey win became official and would show huge cardboard elephants marching in the door. TLF faces went incredulous as the night wore on in gathering electoral astonishment. The treadmill was never turned on because no one had furnished donkeys. The story of the unused elephants —one of those amusing human-interest oddities prized by editors—did not make either Time or Life. It furnished two entertaining columns for Time's competitor, Newsweek, and some outrageous fun in the New Yorker. Time essayed a stiff upper lip:

The httle old voter fooled everybody. . . . But pohtics is a show. Harry Truman, with his mistakes and his impulses and his earnestness, had turned out to be an interesting personality. He had often ranted like a demagogue. . . . [But] Harry Truman was now absolute boss of a resurgent Democratic Party.

In France, Wertenbaker wrote Mary Bancroft in humorous vein, admitting astonishment at Truman's election, aware that Luce had suffered more than astonishment, and venturing a political prediction fated to be confuted:

The foe [Luce] has suffered a crushing defeat. . . . Except for short periods of reaction, such.as '45-'48, and always barring a coup, I don't think there is any more room in our country for what he thinks he stands for. One man [Theodore White] told him about China, and left, and I tried to tell him about Spain. Why don't you tell him about himself?

Luce and His Empire

To Luce it was catastrophic. Sixteen years of dedicated labor in the Repub-hcan vineyards—a bumper crop all ready for the picking—and the Dewey blight had ruined every grape.

A few weeks later he had recovered enough to write Mrs. Bancroft, albeit in a vein still reflecting shock. Like many in America, he wrote, she was deluded by malign forces in a time of political decay. But while he condemned the illusions which misled her and the American majority, he praised her spirit and ended on a note of warm affection.

3. USING THE DEVIL

A large part of the Bancroft side of the Bancroft-Luce correspondence leveled exphcit criticism at the Lucepress for misinformation, quasi-information, fictionization and a general lack of the sense of responsibility expected of the world's most influential journalist. While Luce, on his side, sometimes expounded his political principles, not once did he discuss or defend his journalistic tactics. He seemed to avoid the subject. He did not so avoid it in talks with his editors, who were at his mercy as Mrs. Bancroft was not. He adjured them to take a stand, saying that mere fact without interpretation was empty, an evasion of duty.

If the $215,000 Hutchins commission of twelve famous specialists had failed to convince Luce that his journalism could stand correction, it was perhaps fantastic for the lady in Zurich to think she might reform him. Yet she was no tyro, having written frequently for American magazines and for a number of Swiss newspapers, including the Neue Ziircher Zeitung and Die Weltwoche. She read voraciously, was well informed about American and European affairs, and her OSS experience had schooled her in the ways of propaganda and the manipulation of power.

But her outstanding qualification was honesty, an unerring eye for the phony, the half-true, the misleading. At times in her letters she took the artful line that propaganda got into his magazines because he could not watch them closely enough:

... It seemed to me that there is such a divergence between what you really think and Time and Life, that it is a serious matter. . . . When I talk to you you throw out an idea—as an idea—something which is but an idea to you—and you have thousands of ideas—but your subordinates get hold of this idea and somehow believe in it. Since it is an idea and you had it, I should imagine that you enjoyed watching it become flesh and blood or at least printer's ink after which, because of the circulation and influence of [your] publications, said idea enters into the minds of people and does become flesh and blood with a life of its own. Yet it seems to me that in some ways all this is but a kind of trial balloon to you—and whfle in other times this is O.K. and interesting and instructive and comparatively harmless, right now it is deathly serious. . . .

W. A. Swanberg

She worried about the exploitation of mere crowd-pleasing "ideas":

The other evening at [a cocktail party] I listened to [a Time editor] talking ... it suddenly occurred to me that what I had overheard was him carrying the torch and beheving in or kidding himself that he believed in just one idea of yours which . . . was but a small part of the world picture. . . . This dance of ideas seems to me a dangerous thing—the results touching on the frivolous. . . . It strikes me that it is the fractional part of your thought which is dangerous . . .

Luce had perfected a method of propaganda that was to Pravda as a thousand flashing rapiers were to a clumsy bludgeon. In the end both methods had the same effect, leading the pubhc in the direction Stalin, on the one hand, and Luce, on the other, wanted them to go. Mrs. Bancroft called it "this business of using the devil to fight the devil," and pointed out that it might be a problem to see that "the user does not become possessed by the devil." She worked unremittingly for the reform of Public Enemy Number One, trying to transform him into the public benefactor she felt he should be, stunning him at times with occult observations:

... I don't love you for yotu- mind, Harry, really I don't—much as this thought may insult you. 'Tis your sovil I love. And I bet you don't even know what it looks like. It is blue, Harry. Quite Hght blue and there is a lot of white fog in the valleys of it. . . . If you don't believe me, the next time you are at a dinner party, turn to your dinner partner and ask apropos of nothing: "What is the color of my soul?" And see if I am not right.

She worked at intervals on his soul because of the contradiction she found between his professions and his deeds. She proposed that he accept the Biblical injunction to "renounce the world," give away his wealth and become a saint:

I wondered if perhaps I couldn't find a worthwhile outlet for my talents ... by forming some kind of international organization with headquarters at Geneva in connection with your soul . . . There is a fairly large group who feels that your soul is in danger. These people want you to put on bedroom sUppers and quiet down; they want you to do httle instead of big things. They want you to get interested in a butterfly or a mouse. They want you to take up with a fat, ill-dressed, noble, spiritual, but not necessarily stupid woman. As near as I can make out, the ideal woman for the purpose would be a cross between Mme. Curie, Pilar of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Mother Machree.

She was constantly reminded, she wrote him, of the power and responsibilities of his magazines, as when she rode in a Zurich bus and heard an Englishwoman say, "All that I know, I learn from Time, Life and Reader's Digest.' This was as nothing compared with the millions of Americans who could say that of Time and Life (let the proper proprietors worry about Reader's Digest). She picked on one of those swashbuckling imperialist articles in Time,

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ripped out the page and sent it to Luce with eight statements or arguments marked. She disputed either the facts or the conckisions or both in all eight, one of them being Time's complaint that American business was not spreading into Europe as aggressively as it should. This, she wrote, "strikes me as simply not true. I think only of . . . Coca-Cola [which is] waging terrific war with the Swiss, which has reached even to debates in the Swiss par-hament." Nor did she agree with Time's statement that ". . . the U.S. has not and cannot have a 'master race' complex or a 'lawgiver' complex." "1 have heard the exact opposite opinion in Europe," she wrote. "Americans there, for instance, particularly in Germany, behave and talk exactly like a 'master race'—are often referred to as 'having caught the illness from the Nazis.' "

She expended prodigious effort in trying to blow away that white fog from his lovely soft blue soul. She felt him bristling with slogans and cliches about capitahsm, and was annoyed at TLF's habit of Unking "America" and "free enterprise" as if they were God and Jesus:

Why won't somebody explain very simply so my elevator man to say nothing of myself will understand what the heU the capitalistic system is—not just "free enterprise"—but what it is and just how it is abused. The lack of so many people being able to see clearly on this issue which the Commimists hammer at, creates ... a tremendous undertow and drag . . . Communists are always whispering "This is an economic fight" and the words of all "rich men" become automatically suspect . . .

She resented, on a visit to this country, the Lucepress assumption of American superiority and America's "mission" to spread its superiority over the world:

You know, Harry, if I were an editor I would save my ardor & my crusades for within the U.S.A.—and just do educational stuff abroad—and by educational I mean things Kke the great religions, etc.—anything that makes people [in America] realize other people think, feel & are different & have a right to be so. I could go on & on & on about ardor & crusades for "the enlightenment of mankind" here in the U.S.A. & I think to do it here is the only way to do it there. You know—lead by example —"Look Homeward Angel"—"People in Glass Houses"—all that stioff. You know, Harry, there is a premise with which I disagree as an editor—I disapprove of telling Americans how wonderful they are and for the following reasons:

1. It drives the really wonderful Americans crazy for really wonderful people know just how wonderful they are not.

2. It makes aU the smug horrible ones & the ignorant ones more smug & insufferable than ever . . .

As an editor you can look at America two ways:

1. The most wonderful, wonderful, wonderful place in the world fuU of the most wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people who because they are so wonderful can ride forth to throw their weight where I as an editor think is right.

W. A. Swanberg

2. A great country that can still be a lot greater. at others 'til we morahze a bit at ourselves.

we can't be moraUzing

And she challenged that complacent phrase, "the American way of life":

. . . Before God I have no idea whatsoever what "the American way of life" is and I want to know myself—for myself—and so I can answer that absolutely incessant question from Europeans. I have found no Americans who can define it —and everyone I ask begins to giggle when I ask the question.

Wertenbaker, in the south of France, delighted by v^hat he chose to regard as the approaching success of their "campaign," spurred her on by mail: "Attack him frontally. Disperse his center, roll up his flanks, and demand his unconditional surrender."

4. THE CHURCH AND THE PENTAGON

If Vandenberg had been nominated and elected, and his reputed choice as Secretary of State had been given his head, there seems little doubt that American billions would have been followed into China by American soldiers and in all probability by morally justified atomic bombs. In later years, in a statement evidently representing his maturest thought, Luce wrote that Chiang had not been given a chance, that, "as I am in a position to testify— the great mass of the Chinese people were not yearning for land reform or anything else," and that what the United States should have done was to "give full support to Chiang, including the use of American troops."

The newspaper Hsin Min Wan Pao would not have been alone in questioning his authority on the matter of what the "great mass " in China wanted or did not want. It appears that to Luce it was largely a simple religious-moral question, perfectly apparent that the godless Communists had no more justification in the eyes of man than of God, and that complex considerations of statecraft could not affect this. Had he lived in the time of the Crusades, Luce would jurely have elbowed aside Count Raymond of Toulouse as leader of the first one. Yet it was perhaps tragic in its long-run effect on America that the Dewey-Warren ticket was not elected. The Democrats had been in power too long, Republican desperation and hatred were getting out of hand and if the Republicans had taken over the problem of China and grappled wdth it successfully or not the issue of McCarthyism might not have arisen.

To Luce, on top of the 1948 election disaster, his American-Century dream was turning into a nightmare in the realm he considered his own, China. At the same time, his mother was dying of cancer at the Severinghaus home in Haverford. A secretary made three appointments for him to visit her but he broke all of them on the score of the press of business. Knowing as he did that she was not entirely approving of his course and had some fears for his soul, perhaps he blanched at the thought of a final interview. She died on Novem-

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ber 6 at the age of seventy-seven, only a few days after that catastrophic election.

After attending the funeral near Utica, he went on to Milwaukee where he startled the United Council of Church Women by urging them to collaborate closely with the Pentagon in making war decisions against the Soviet evil:

... I believe that once the Church has accepted its responsibility, it will be in a position to make its voice clear and strong so that the war-making power of our nation is put under Christian judgment. Christian restraint—and the courage of Christian conviction. . . . This is fundamental but I beheve the Church can then go even further and lay down principles as to how we fight. In order to do this—is it hopelessly visionary?—I see the great leaders of ovu Church sitting down with our top military men and viewing them not as the enemies of society but as men who as much as any layman desire to do the right as God gives them to see the right.

He could hardly have been more frighteningly specific about his sense of rehgious-moral crusade and his linking of American policies with his own view of religion. The news headlines must have struck him hke blows. Eric Sevareid, for example, commented on the dispatch of William BuUitt to China once more, this time representing the Repubhcan-controlled watchdog committee examining foreign spending—an idea some thought to be Luce's, or at least inspired by the Bullitt piece in Life:

This mission can only result in a report, Congressional sj>eeches, and pressure from the Luce publications, all insisting on heavy American expenditiu^es to keep Chiang Kai-shek's government from complete collapse. Chiang now has his back to the wall, politically as well as mihtarily. There are food riots in his capital city of Nanking now. Mobs are roaming the streets there and in Hankow and Shanghai. Foreigners are beginning to pour out of those cities. Strikes are spreading as hunger and fear are spreading.

The rosy latter-day speculations about the benefits that might have derived if America had stood clear of the Chinese civil war and had given early recognition and aid to the Mao regime include the possibihties that neither the Korean nor Vietnam wars would have occurred, that the Soviet-Chinese spht would have taken place far earlier and that America would be the unquestioned world leader with unblemished moral reputation. One need not accept this picture, but it can scarcely be rejected out of hand in toto.

In December, Madame Chiang visited Washington again in a last desperate bid for more American millions. The glitter of her 1943 image had faded and the press treated her with the offhand attention given the representative of a lost cause. By now she was so inseparably hnked with Luce that a WOR newscast said, "Henry Luce and former Ambassador William BuUitt are said to be behind Madame Chiang Kai-shek's fund-raising mission here." And Walter Winchell, still feuding with Time, announced, "Madame Chiang Kai-shek is seeking an estate in Conn., near the Henry (Time) Luces. Just in case

W. A. Swanberg

her husband's regime falls." Life's full-length picture of Madame showed her in a silk gown with open-toed high-heeled pumps and a sumptuous beaver coat. ". . . it was impossible to say," Life commented bitterly, "whether her smile was hope or merely bravery."

5. EIGHTY FOUR IMPORTANT PEOPLE

When Winston Churchill reached New York in March 1949, after being feted in Washington, he lodged with his friend Bernard Baruch but was otherwise appropriated by Luce, who had become his chief literary employer and had made him rich. Luce arranged (and paid for) not one but two great private dinners for him. The first, at the Ritz-Carlton, was attended by 220 distinguished people from aU professions, not forgetting a group of TLF's biggest advertisers and the admen who handled their accounts. Probably Churchill had no idea that his prestige was helping Lucepress space salesmen to sell advertising.

The second, four days later at the Union Club on Park Avenue, was an intimate affair with only nineteen guests, all of them TLF editors and writers except Churchill himself. It was said that there were Time-Lifers who would have sold their immortal souls for invitations. Attendance was at once a tip-off on the current pecking order and a reward for good work, while the non-attendance of some indicated their occupancy of the Luce doghouse or, as it was called, being "strategically diminished" by the Boss. A couple of those being diminished this time were Noel Busch and John Davenport, both of whom had attended a Luce dinner for Churchill during his 1946 visit.

Tension rose as the upper editorial echelon awaited the selection of the seventeen (besides Churchill and Luce) who would attend. About a few members of Luce's inner Cabinet—Bilhngs, Matthews, Alexander and Longwell— there was never any doubt, but around the fringes there was bound to be either joy or tragedy. BiUings, long since installed as Luce's editorial prime minister, sweated over the choice with the Boss, and it was done. Churchill at the table was flanked by the Messrs. Ways and Osborne, regarded as Luce's foreign minister and minister of war respectively, both familiar with London and with British poUtics. Directly across from him was Luce, flanked by Matthews and John K. Jessup. At the last moment, to the displeasure of some of the others, Luce decided that a place must be made for WiUi Schlamm. Schlamm had not fought his way up the ladder like the rest and was regarded as a backscratcher. His name being German for "mud," there were occasional witticisms, one of them being, "Harry is stuck in the mud."

Luce, the blunderer in parlor social contact, was at his best in the formalities of a stated program. He made a graceful little speech, to which Churchill responded with his rumbhng eloquence. The great man relaxed later over brandy and cigars, admitted that he had enjoyed the repast and

Luce and His Empire

said, "My tastes are simple. I like only the best." The editors attending would not soon forget the occasion, nor could they forget that Luce was one of the few men in the world who could summon such gatherings. To his whole organization, even down to the telephone girls, it was a reflected triumph, one of those items of prestige that made TLF an exciting and "glamorous" place to work, and among the fringe editors left out there was perhaps the determination to execute such brilliant manipulation of the news that they could not be skipped next time.

To Luce himself, the greatest of promoters, the dinners (the small one cost him $1087.46, the big one almost $7000) were part of his calculated program of hon-hunting, of using the great not only for information and political leverage but to shed glory and profit on his organization and himself.

In April he and Allen Grover flew to Europe for more lion-hunting and (it almost seemed) to formulate American policy for combating Communism. But if he planned his journey as a Secretary of State would on a tour of exploration and inquiry, he worked harder than any Secretary of State. So did Grover, who served not only as Undersecretary but also, being at home in international society, as chef de protocol and arbiter of when Luce should or should not wear dress, something he was always uncertain about.

The overriding issue was the progress of Western Europe in combating Communism. One Lucean defect was growing: his impatience with people who could not grasp the logic and necessity of the solutions he prescribed.

The two envoys were scheduled to visit Rome, Milan, Geneva, Zurich, Vienna, Brussels, Paris and London. The journey was smoothed by advance planning by subordinates including clockwork precision of transportation, hotel reservations and VIP interviews at each stop. On this tour Luce had interviews, often at luncheon or dinner, with eighty-four important people, not counting Mrs. Bancroft in Zurich who had an importance of her own. They included (to name a few of the best known) Pope Pius XII, President Luigi Einaudi and Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi of Italy, Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium, President Vincent Auriol and Prime Minister Henri Queuille of France, General Charles de Gaulle (who had already appeared on Time's cover). General deLattre de Tassigny (who very soon would), Jean Monnet (later), the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (she had made it, not he), Winston Churchill (repeatedly), and Lords Beaverbrook (twice), Camrose and Kemsley. Luce made it a point on his journeys to list all the important people he had seen by name and title and pass it on to his executives along with his report on his discoveries. Few had any doubt that he took an ingenuous pleasure in publicizing his meetings with the great. H« frankly bragged about it at his annual TLF advertising meetings. Part of his own prestige, he knew, was money. His huge payments to Churchill and the Duke of Windsor for their writings had made world headlines.

Time's Rome bureau chief, Charles Jones, never recovered his standing with Luce because he failed to meet him at the airport. The Presbyterian

W. A. Swanberg

Luce negotiated a firm defensive alliance with the Pope (a good friend of Cardinal Spellman's) against the common Soviet foe. Premier de Gasperi had already appeared on Time's cover as a reward for his resourceful battle to prevent a takeover by the Itahan Communists. Grover, sitting with Luce during his interviews, was hterally exhausted after one day of solid talk ended at six when the editor of Osservatore Romano left their suite at the Excelsior Hotel following his report to the Americans.

"Al!" said Luce. "We have two hours until dinner. How'll we make use of the time?"

During one dinner in Rome, Luce's curiosity was intrigued beyond measure by two Italian gentlemen at a nearby table who leaned toward each other as they talked with great earnestness. "Al, what are those men talking about?" he asked—a question Grover could not answer.

In Milan, with Cambridge-educated William Rospigliosi of Time's Rome bureau as interpreter, Luce conferred with officials and industriafists, then was dehghted by the color and activity of the local fair. But his mood darkened when they dined. He had heard of the festive cake of the area, panet-tone, and had Rospigliosi order some. The waiter shook his head. They had none. Luce was incensed. This, he told Grover and Rospigliosi, was a regional specialty, something of which they should be proud, something they should never be without, especially during the time of the fair. The fact that they did not have it indicated a lack of efiiciency or national pride or both. The missing panettone seemed to affect him as strongly as an error of state. As they left. Luce commanded Rospigliosi to tell the manager that this was no way to give visiting foreigners a good impression of Milan.

Charles Wertenbaker, having heard from Mrs. Bancroft of Luce's coming visit, held to his military design. He sent an urgent one-word telegram to "Colonel Mary Bancroft": "Attack." Her promotion to a colonelcy was a measure of the importance he attached to the skirmish, but it was one she had to dechne. The relations between her and Luce, by mutual agreement, were always on a firm level of platonic-intellectual correctness, and to make it official when they met this time in Zurich, Grover was in the offing as chaperon. After their stay, the two Timen went to the airport to discover that their plane for Vienna would be delayed because of bad weather in Austria. Luce could not stand delay. "Is there a plane going somewhere right now?" he asked. There was one leaving immediately for Amsterdam. To Amsterdam they went, crossing Vienna off the itinerary and managing on short notice to have interviews with eight Dutch functionaries including the minister of finance, the chef de cabinet and the editor of Rotterdam's biggest daily newspaper.

In Paris, Time's bureau chief Andre Laguerre was Luce's companion in a call on President Auriol. Auriol had taken offense at Time's criticism of French coloniafism in Indochina and, as Luce described it, "Monsieur Auriol sat me down in front of his presidential desk and in his native Gasconese gave

Luce and His Empire

me a tongue-lashing for the best part of an hour." Laguerre later arranged a dinner for Luce and a group of personages at Le Berkeley restaurant, famous for its souffle. The dinner was crowned by the entrance of the dessert chef carrying the souffle, accompanied by the manager himself to confer special status. Luce, who had chosen this moment to make an informal speech to his guests, kept right on talking. The faces of the dessert chef, the manager and all the guests fell along with the expiring souffle. When it was served, flat as shoeleather, only Luce was unaware of the culinary crime he had committed.

Much as Luce despised General Marshall for his failure in China, he generously gave le plan Marshall credit for holding the line in Europe. His report gave a special laurel to Italy, where "Communists have been totally ejected from the police force ..."

In London, where he had a seven-room suite at Claridge's, he received kindly treatment from Beaverbrook's papers (as the Beaver always received in Time). The Daily Express called him "Vigorous, nonstop magnate Luce," warmly recalling his wartime service to England, while the Evening Standard noted, "He married one of the most beautiful women in the United States," adding, "He works incessantly; every luncheon is a business luncheon, almost every dinner is an occasion for entertaining politicians and statesmen." He took time for a hurried trip to Oxford, visiting hallowed "Ch. Ch." and taking tea with Lord David Cecil and Sir Hubert Henderson.

In London he had earlier played Chinese checkers with Walter Graebner and John Osborne. Graebner had been "boosted" to the directing of all European news from his London vantage point, while Osborne moved into his old post as head of the London bureau. Graebner thereafter found that he had virtually no new duties and that Osborne had taken over the old ones. Whenever Luce came to London, he saw that Graebner and Osborne visited him separately, never together. Now Eric Gibbs headed the London bureau but the situation was the same. What saved Graebner (who later solved the situation by becoming a prosperous London advertising man) was his continuing negotiations with Churchill for publication of his further writings, during which the old war-horse became friendly. He always sent his letters to Luce through Graebner, after first asking Graebner to read them. Luce never sent Graebner copies of his letters to Churchill, but Churchill always saw that Graebner got a copy at once. Graebner, who accompanied Luce on a couple of his visits to Churchill, found the press lord of Rockefeller Center so overawed by the masterful Briton that he was all but mute and very uneasy. It was the same in Zurich when Mrs. Bancroft introduced him to her friend Prince Constantine of Liechtenstein (whom he carefully included on his list of VIP's interviewed). At lunch the prince had to carry the conversation while Luce fidgeted, smoked and was visibly ill at ease. Although Liechtenstein's statistics were much less impressive than Time Inc.'s (population 12,000, no army, a nine-man police force). Prince Constantine, cousin of the ruling Fiirst in whose veins flowed the blood of the Hapsburgs, aroused a particularly bad

W. A. Swanberg

case of social malaise. There was nothing to cross-examine the prince about. No power to be wielded or harnessed. Mrs. Bancroft was amazed at the extent to which the tycoon was intimidated by nothing more than grace and charm. Churchill's Anglo-American ancestry was matchless in its own way, and she came to understand that Luce actually had a grudging respect for Franldin Roosevelt's family tree even though he usually disparaged the tree by calling the late President "that son of a bitch."

6. THE "LOSS" OF CHINA

In China, Chiang's final rout was humiliating. General Wedemeyer had said that the Gimo's soldiers could hold the Yangtze with broomsticks if they wished. They melted away. "Why," asked Senator Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "if he is a generahssimo doesn't he generahze?" The Nationalist government disintegrated and a group of Chiang's generals skipped with $30 miUion in U.S. aid money. The defeat was not one of lost battle but lost leadership. Chiang, once a great leader but always a warlord, had been disowned by his people. Months earlier. General David Barr, chief of the American mihtary advisers to Chiang, reported to Washington:

. . . The military situation has deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of United States troops could eflFect a remedy. ... No battle has been lost since my arrival due to a lack of ammunition or equipment. [The Nationalist] debacles in my opinion can all be attributed to the world's worst leadership . . . the complete ineptness of high military leaders and the widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the armed forces . . . [He recommended withdrawal of the U.S. Military Advisory Group in China.]

Chiang's remaining forces fled to Formosa where, after slaughtering some 20,000 Taiwanese, they established a dictatorship. Here Chiang declared himself to be still the true leader of the people on the mainland who had repudiated him. On October 1, 1949, the Mandate of Heaven settled on the Communists (who theoretically disbeheved in heaven) as they formally inaugurated their government in Peking. The Russians, who had been studiously correct and could easily have recognized them earlier, waited until the very end before switching their diplomatic recognition from Chiang to Mao. Russian recognition was quickly followed by that of other nations, some friendly to the United States but following a course of international reahsm which this country now eschewed.

Luce's mien, as Matthews noted, was a bank of thunderclouds. By evidence available even then, he was totally mistaken in the area he considered as much his specialty as the Holy See was by Pius XIL The half-biUion Chinese would have to go their own way forsaking God, the Soongs and the China

Luce and His Empire

Lobby. The idea that the United States could dictate China's form of government seemed an extension of the old missionary-and-gunboat attitude. The Truman administration desisted from further interventionist effort to prop ruin.

The "loss of China" was a shock to America in some part because the Lucepress had given America a biased and misleading picture of personalities and events there. The Luce publications, because of his background and his preoccupation with China, were widely regarded as authoritative. The China Lobby which denounced the administration's China policy had no feasible alternative to offer.

The charges about the "loss of China" and the "crime of Yalta"—both led by Luce before being taken up by partisan extremists and even middle-road-ers—were nurtured into noisy life by Republicans out of power since 1933 and rendered desperate by Truman's 1948 victory. One can imagine Luce seething on receiving the following request from the lady in Switzerland:

I wish . . . you would explain to me about the immense mass of negative Chiang Kai-shek stuff that has accumulated in my mind over the past 20 years— based on reading & on-the-spot reporting not from liberals. I still can't make out why, if his government were not both corrupt & impotent, it fell.

J. TIME MARXES ON

The Chambers-Hiss case occurred at a time when its shock value brought a great, though dangerous, pohtical benefit to Luce and the Repubhcans. Chambers's skills, since his shift from FN, had made him indispensable in handhng tricky cultural or rehgious subjects for Time or Life. Almost invariably he got anti-Communist propaganda into them. One of his recent assignments for Life, done at Luce's suggestion, was "The Devil," a long and clever sketch of the Fiend which made plain his presence on the side of the mahgn forces favoring Communism and threatening what the Lucepress always called Western Civilization. Chambers was a $23,0(X)-a-year man, emotionally and pietistically close to Luce. It was at one of their drugstore coffee chats that he informed Luce that he had been called to testify as an admitted ex-Communist before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and suggested that because of the adverse pubUcity, Luce would not want him as an editor any longer.

"Nonsense," Luce rephed. "Testifying is a simple patriotic duty." " According to Chambers himself—a man not addicted to simple truth— Luce sometime later took him and a third man, a European whom Chambers hid under the fictitious name of Smetana, to dinner. Chambers told them that Mrs. Phihp Jessup, wife of the Truman-appointed delegate to the United Nations, had been trying to "get me oflF Time" and went on, "Luce was baffled by the implacable clamor of the most enlightened people against me. 'By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave,' he said, 'the upper classes should be

° This and following quotations are from Witness, by Whittaker Chambers (Random House, N.Y. 1952).

284

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for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?'

" 'You don't understand the class structure of American society,' said Sme-tana, 'or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.' "

This kind of straight-faced simplism was as characteristic of Chambers as it was of Luce and the Lucepress. Was Smetana a real person—perhaps Schlamm?—or just one of those handy phantoms—a Disembodied Voice— Chambers and Time ushered before the reader for the purpose of making propagandist points? Chambers's account continued:

When Smetana presently rose to go, I started to leave with him. Luce drew me back. Alone, we sat facing each other across a low table. Neither of us said anything. He studied my face for some time as if he were trying to read the limits of my strength. "The pity of it is," he said at last, "that two men [Chambers and Hiss], able men, are destroying each other in this way." I said: "That is what history does to men in periods like ours."

There was another heavy pause. I knew that there must be something that Luce wanted to teU me or ask me, but I was too weary to help him. Suddenly he said, "I've been reading about the young man born blind." . . . Apologetically I said, "I haven't read Time for the last two weeks."

"No, no," Luce said impatiently. "I mean the young man born blind. It's in the eighth or ninth chapter of St. John. They brought Our Lord a young man who had been blind from birth and asked Him one of those catch questions: 'Whose is the sin, this man's or his parents', that he be bom bhnd?' Our Lord took some clay and wet it with saliva and placed it on the blind man's eyes so that they opened and he could see. Then Our Lord gave an answer, not one of His clever answers, but a direct, simple answer. He said: 'Neither this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.' "

Slowly, there sank into my mind the tremendous thing that Luce was saying to me, and the reahzation that he had brought me there so that he could say those words of understanding kindness. He was saying: "You are the yoimg man bom blind. All you had to offer God was your blindness that through the action of your recovered sight, His works might be made manifest."

In the depths of the Hiss case, in grief, weakness and despair, the words that Luce had repeated to me came back to strengthen me.

Chambers resisted any inchnation he might have had to play down his own role in this drama of history. He did not recognize the tests of truth observed by ordinary men. His career with the Communists as well as with Time Inc. had shown him to be as imbued with historic mission as Luce, without the slightest doubt of his authority and indeed his sacred duty to revise mere fact into a higher truth. As for Luce, his show of sympathy for both men—Hiss as well as Chambers—was one of those rare flashes of warmth that could be so winning. To the journahst and power-seeker in him, the Chambers-Hiss case

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was unmatched in the scope it offered for propaganda. It was divinely constructed to please God and help the Republicans. It had side drama which, with apocalyptic interpretation, could be ballooned into motifs enhancing the central theme. Hiss, the accused Communist spy, had been a functionary with Roosevelt's entourage at Yalta. He had been secretary of the San Francisco Conference which drafted the United Nations charter. He was a friend of Secretary of State Acheson, who had been a law partner of Hiss's brother Donald and who was a constant Luce target because he had allegedly quit on Chiang.

The Lucepress had long since given over its praise for the treaty Stalin gave Chiang's China as a result of the Yalta agreements. It had become a Repub-Ucan article of faith that Yalta was a Rooseveltian-Democratic crime. There was a united Republican effort to stress Hiss's presence at Yalta and make his role appear more important than it was. The same was true of Hiss's more responsible position at San Francisco. And the Republican propaganda possibilities in the Acheson-Hiss friendship, what with the increasingly malevolent use of guilt by association, were obvious.

Luce joined his party in an effort to portray Alger Hiss as the logical fruit of the Democratic administrations which had been in power since 1933 and which had allegedly been soft on Communism and had sold out China to the Russians. The British observer Alistair Cooke, amazed at American pohtical violence, wrote:

If we [the United States] are now baited in every direction by the Russians, it does not satisfy Americans to say that this is the turn of history. It must mean that somebody entrusted with our welfare betrayed us or blundered. A nation with a religious trust in progress simply cannot admit that even when the best is done, hard times may follow. In such a nation no man's honor is above suspicion.

James Bell of Time was assigned to provide all-out coverage of the Hiss case during both trials. His intensive day-by-day account, running to as much as 7000 words a day, was not for publication but for the information of Luce and others in the front office, and also served as the grist from which Duncan Norton-Taylor, who was then National Affairs editor, would grind his weekly Time account.

When Chambers testified that he had been a Communist courier deahng with Hiss, and Walter Winchell began a delighted campaign of suggestion in the Hearst press that Time had been "run" by a Communist, Chambers became an embarrassment. Luce had known that Chambers was a former Communist but not that he had been an active member of a spy network. His resignation was hastily accepted, but Luce made a generous settlement on him.

"Gee Whittaker!" said Winchell in his column. "Time Marxes on." He repeatedly said that Chambers had "edited" Time instead of being one of six senior editors working under a managing editor who in turn worked under

Luce and His Empire

Luce: "Timemag . . . was edited all these years by Whittaker Chambers, self-confessed Communist, accused perjurer and Russian spy! Time botches on!" The report that the Soviet spy Vladimir Gubitchev would be deported back to Russia brought the Winchell comment, "Too bad. He would've made a wonderful Senior Editor at Time." He inquired, "How can we get the Communists out of the State Dep't when we can't get them out of Time Mag's editorial dept? " All this was in reply to a steady Lucepress disparagement of the Hearst press and of Winchell himself. In one month he made forty-seven such derisive remarks concerning Luce or Time and their Communist editor-writer, all of them reported on by a Time factotum set to watch him. When Winchell mistakenly reported that Luce had donated $50,000 to the Repub-hcan Party, he received a chilly letter from Allen Grover informing him that this amounted to an accusation that Luce had violated the Hatch Act which put a $5000 limit on donations. Winchell made a quick correction in his column.

The Lucepress coverage of the trial scarcely achieved its ideal of fairness. Life ran one two-page feature by Bell devoted solely to ridiculing the psychiatrist Carl Binger, a witness who had described Chambers as a "psychopathic personality," even to the extent of running an unflattering picture of Dr. Binger with the caption, "Psychiatrist Binger assumes professional air," Time likewise derided Binger and presented the federal prosecutor, Thomas Murphy, as the guardian of national virtue. Both Time and Life referred with constant affection to him as "Tom Murphy," as they had to Tom Dewey. They did not report Tom Murphy's embarrassment when he attacked Dr. Philip Jessup, who had supported Hiss's reputation, as a member of such subversive groups as the Institute of Pacific Relations, and discovered from the defense attorney (who got no friendly nickname treatment) that other subversives in that organization were Newton Baker, President Gerard Swope of General Electric and, of all people, Henry Luce. Time assiduously placed Hiss at the President's side at Yalta (". . . an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta." ". . . at Yalta, he sat at Franklin Roosevelt's shoulder"). Time made evident in subtly non-libelous ways its behef in Hiss's guilt long before he was convicted.

After the verdict, reporters swarmed around Acheson. The Secretary, contemptuous of the methods of the attackers, was man rather than diplomat when he responded not with the expected bromide but with his famous statement in which he pointed out that Hiss's case was under appeal and therefore still before the courts, that "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss," and gave his reason in a reference to the Bible. Time stretched the facts visibly when it reported that "Acheson went to the defense" of Hiss. It said a "roar of-indignation rose from Capitol Hill" and listed roars from a group headed by Congressman Richard Nixon, the young Californian who had given his political career a momentous boost by his ardent pursuit of Hiss, and who called Acheson's statement "disgusting." Time urged its readers not to make

W. A. Swanberg

the error of believing that only Alger Hiss had been on trial but that Hiss, in some manner not clearly defined, bhghted all the Democrats:

Within a span of six hours one day last week, the case of the U.S. v. Alger Hiss became a major poHtical issue . . . [To] defend Acheson was to defend Alger Hiss. . . . Acheson, borrowing a scandal from the Roosevelt Administration, had hung Hiss so tighdy around the Truman Administration's neck that it would be next to impossible to shake him off.

The anti-Communist crusade was already so disfigm^ed by hysteria and expediency that it drove some thoughtful people into fellow-travehng postm-es simply out of indignation, Samuel Grafton wrote after Life had published a new Communist expose, running the photographs of fifty alleged American Commimists or Comsymps. Between the two great parties, the Communist issue had taken on the overtones of emotion and religion which both Luce and Chambers saw in it and which would mifitate against a rational American pohcy toward it. Both parties were "against" Communism. But for years they would quarrel bitterly about the reality and sincerity of their againstness. From this time on, the question of defining the nature of correct Againstness, and of analyzing politicians for their possession of this exact degree of Againstness, and their past records on the question of Againstness and also the records of their friends and associates, and even of disagreement among experts on how some people stood in Againstness, would take precedence over more constructive pofitical pursuits.

Three weeks after Hiss's conviction, that pioneer of Lucepress Againstness, Laird Goldsborough, now forty-seven, plunged to his death from his ninth-floor office in the Time-Life Building, wearing overcoat, rubbers, Homburg hat and gold-mounted cane. In his pocket was a note giving his Fifth Avenue home address and asking that his wife be notified. After his wartime service with the OSS he had since used the rented office as a free-lance wTiter for Reader's Digest and other magazines. His falling body struck a pedestrian a glancing blow, hghting near the building entrance Luce used. Myron Weiss, Goldy's old associate, recalled that he had had a gothic imagination and might not have been free from a wish to dramatize his death in the mind of his former employer and friend. Luce, who had been generous to him, was shaken. The tragedy weighed on his conscience and he talked about it occasionally with Max Ways, one of Goldsborough's FN successors, wondering whether he had let Goldy down.

2. GOD HAS HIS TV ON YOU

When Mary Bancroft read Whittaker Chambers's accoimt in the Satm-day Evening Post containing his grandiloquent "letter to his children," she wrote

Luce and His Empire

Luce, "I felt I was swimming in swill." Chambers was, she felt as a long student and friend of Jung, "emotionally ill," a man writing "statements in . . . maudlin prose which simply are not true":

... I think [Chambers] does more harm than good and I think he makes thousands of people who, but for him, would not even question Hiss's guilt, send up secret prayers to Heaven that Hiss somehow will be cleared—or what is even worse, say to themselves: "Well, all I know is, / would rather live in slavery under Alger Hiss, than in freedom beside Whittaker Chambers. ... To me he is as dangerous as an individual as Germany is as a nation ... he mucks up the whole issue and I am disgusted with the Satevepost for giving him aU that space . . . what is happening is that Chambers is making [some people] swing toward Alger Hiss in dangerous ways. ... I wish Mrs. Roosevelt had "caught" Alger Hiss—and the FBI had "caught" Chambers—then the two issues would never have become melted together in their present dangerous way. . . .

I think every time Chambers opens his mouth—^verbaUy or on paper, in any way—he does harm to Western Civihzation.

She had faith in her ability to "enlighten" Luce. She poked fun at him when he thought of running for the Senate. While Hiss was on trial, and Clare withdrew from the Connecticut race after being considered a contender, Luce was strongly tempted and his name was in headlines for some days. Some of his colleagues urged him against it, and Mary could not check her amusement at the thought of Candidate Luce attending rallies, shaking hands and kissing babies, nor did he seem likely to retain any last vestige of journalistic open-mindedness if elected. It was not these considerations, however, but a poll showing him very unlikely to win that caused his withdrawal.

More and more in his speeches he was taking the almost explicit stand that America as God's nation must be ready to destroy that work of the devil, Soviet Russia. On February 18, 1950, he traveled to Harrisburg to honor the "strapping affable redhead" Governor Duff in a speech ironically billed as a plea for tolerance. America, he said, was founded in reverence for God and the moral law:

It is precisely this article of faith that is most relentlessly attacked by Soviet Communism. . . . We are in very great trouble today, we and the whole of mankind. The organized form of that trouble is easy to name. It is Soviet Communism.

He quoted his venerated Teddy Roosevelt, who had said that peace was of no value "unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness," Luce adding, "We shall be prepared to sacrifice" for American ideals that "can only be known by faith."

Two days later, exhausted by work, the Chambers-Hiss ordeal, the sniping of Walter Winchell, the nail-biting about the Senate, the loss of China and his pervasive fear and hatred of world Communism, he boarded a train alone for Charleston. He read Mary's last letter and reread some earher ones as he

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rolled southward. Reaching his destination, Yeaman's Hall Club near Charleston, he wrote her an eight-page letter—remarkable for him.

He had been thinking about her, he wrote as he reread her letters, which he found fascinating. But he was provoked by her appraisal of the Hiss-Chambers case. She might have been kinder, he thought, since Chambers was a former associate of his and was undergoing a fierce ordeal—as Hiss was also, he added. Luce said his enemies were all on Hiss's side, not to mention some deluded friends, and he thought it amusing to find Mary joining the choir of sentimental unreason headed by Eleanor Roosevelt. Some day, he went on, she would have to explain why she could be so unexcited about Communism, brutal and bestial as it was. And, in a sudden plunge into despair, he said she ought to write and instruct him as to what he was to do with the rest of his hfe.

He admitted that a part of the reason for that unhappy question was her derision at the idea of his becoming a Senator. It hurt him to have his friends regard the thought as ludicrous. Obviously he had been terribly disappointed by the outcome—perhaps his last chance for the pohtical office for which he longed. He finished his eight-page letter, had a martini and a lone dinner at the club, then returned to his suite and wrote her a four-page letter to add to the first. Again he mentioned that, in their political disputes, she could be unintentionally wounding. But again he ended on a note forgiving and affectionate.

Clare arrived at the club next day to do some writing. The Luces had given up Mepkin in 1949, selhng all but the central 3000 acres and the buildings, which they gave to the Cathohc Church for the use of Trappist monks. The monks, who maintained themselves by their own labor, soon had altered the Stone-designed glass-fronted dwellings into cell-like cubicles and a chapel. They cared for the grave of Ann Brokaw and for that of Clare's mother, who had also been killed in an automobile accident in her late sixties and buried there. It was Clare's intention to join them there when she died.

Luce relaxed (if such a restless man could ever be said to relax) at golf, sightseeing and reading. When he heard that Billy Graham was preaching in Columbia, relaxation was over. His bureau chief in Atlanta, William How-land, was summoned to Charleston by plane. As Luce and Howland got into Clare's long Roadmaster, Clare said, "Harry, be sure not to drive; you don't even have your license with you. " But no sooner were they on the way to Columbia than Luce took the wheel and Howland hung on for dear hfe for some forty miles as the car seemed destined for the ditch with every belated steering correction Luce made. Howland, knowing that Luce would enjoy it, had arranged for them to join Governor Strom Thurmond at dinner. They dined with the Thurmonds at the governor's mansion, where Luce was impressed by the efficiency of the Negro servants and was startled to discover that they were "trusties" from the state prison, one of them a convicted murderer. After hearing Graham's service along with the Thurmonds at the nearby audi-

Luce and His Empire

torium ("God has his TV on you every minute," Graham shouted. "Are you ready?"), they picked up the evangehst and returned to the governor's mansion, where Luce and Graham discussed theology animatedly until after midnight, with not even the governor managing to get in more than an occasional word.

After being the governor's overnight guests, the two Timen drove back to Charleston, Rowland again going through the knuckle-whitening ordeal of moving over while Luce practiced driving. As they wheeled southward in fearful zigzags, a siren sounded behind them and Luce pulled over to the side with difficulty. He was questioned by State Highway Patrolman T. J. Jackson:

"You been drinking?"

"No."

"Let's see your license."

"Well—I left it home in Connecticut."

"What's your name, Bub?"

"Henry R. Luce."

"What's the 'R' stand for?"

"Robinson."

Released on payment of ten dollars' bond. Luce rehnquished the wheel and said very httle as they drove to Charleston. Always the editor despite all, however, he did instruct Howland to get a story on Graham, which appeared a fortnight later in different forms in both Time and Life.

His Harrisburg speech, reprinted with minor changes in The Christian Century under the title, "Moral Law in a Reeling World," received ten angry attacks and no praise in the correspondence pages of a later issue. The Rev. A. J. Muste reminded him that in appropriating the "moral law" for America he had forgotten a cardinal point in that law—to have regard for the "beam in our own eye." Another reader thought Luce's readiness to resort to military force hardly Christlike, that Roosevelt was the man who boasted about "taking" Panama, and "what haunts me is that this whole attitude smacks very much of Hitler." The rest assailed The Christian Century for presuming that "America's greatest hquor advertiser" could claim moral authority on any subject, much less international affairs, one writing, " 'Moral Law in a Reehng World' is an apt title for the address by Henry R. Luce. As I turn the pages of Life, Time and Fortune I wonder whether anyone is doing more to send the peoples of the world reehng to destruction . . ."

The Christian Century reached Mary Bancroft in Zurich, who read it and sent it on to Wertenbaker at Ciboure. Wertenbaker replied:

I sympathize with your reaction to that speech. After reading it and retaining my lunch, I looked hard at the picture and I said to myself, said I: "That man is really sick." . . . Talking morals to men in stiff shirtfronts undoubtedly contributed to the illness ... I was sorry to see that face because it has been hurt by a good many things, many of them avoidable and some reparable.

W. A. Swanberg

3. THE POWERS OF EVIL

The "exhausted" Luce resumed his compulsive activity the moment exhaustion receded. A speech in Bridgeport, another in Hartford, one in New Haven. Then, on May 25, 1950, a solo trip to Europe where, after picking up Andre Laguerre in Paris, he visited Frankfurt, Bonn, Diisseldorf, Berlin, and reached Munich June 2.

He had cajoled Mary Bancroft into meeting him at Munich. Wertenbaker, having heard from her about the coming reunion with Luce, addressed her as "Mme. General" and counseled impetuosity. However, Laguerre filled the office of chaperon at the Hotel Drei Konige. She noticed again, as she had at the time of Luce's visit with Grover, that whenever he was accompanied by a subordinate he had a majestic disinclination to bother with the details of paying tradesmen and hotelkeepers. He preferred to have his companion, in this case Laguerre, act as equerry and be ready with the wallet.

In the morning, she and Laguerre were having breakfast in the dining room when Luce joined them, scowling. He continued to be disasgreeable until Laguerre made an excuse and left. "You and Laguerre seem to have a lot to talk about," he said. "I trust I'll learn how you've settled the affairs of the world." But he brightened up later because of a luncheon with leading businessmen that had been arranged for him. That night, after cocktails and dinner. Luce and Mary went to a carpenters' ball at a huge beerhall.

". . . Harry danced and flirted with the carpenters' wives, the hveher and more buxom the better," Mrs. Bancroft recalled, "while I hopped about with carpenters who assured me they had fought only on the Eastern front, never against Americans and never even 'im Westen. "... The only time I thought Harry had any fun was at that dance, and there he was really a way I never saw him except there—quite coarse, if you can imagine it, sort of tickling a squeahng, plump carpenter's wife, a Tugboat Annie type, and ordering more and more beer and talking quite fluent German as he got more and more beer into him. He was really almost 'natural' that evening, and quite 'physical,' tickling and pawing, but never—interestingly enough—dancing with me. I was a 'mind' on this trip, and so he treated me."

The next day he was off with Laguerre for Strasbourg and Paris, making a speech at the World Organization for Brotherhood luncheon in Paris, where he let his hsteners know that his brotherhood did not extend to "our enemies and those who are neutral against us." Returning to New York, he was on the job for two months before he flew to Denver to meet Clare, who was addressing a seminar at Aspen. He also checked Time's Denver bureau under Barron Beshoar. Beshoar had made dry runs to brief himself on scenes and buildings the "question machine" would ask about. He did well as he rode in from the airport with Luce until the Boss pointed at a large excavation which

Luce and His Empire

Beshoar had neglected to investigate. "Harry," Beshoar said grimly, "that's a hole in the ground." Mrs. Luce meanwhile was telling reporters that U.S.-Soviet differences had no more than a fifty-fifty chance for peaceful settlement.

"We may as well settle down on a total war-footing now," she was quoted as saying. "We should build up our strength and force a backdown in Kremlin policy."

Returning to New York, Luce decided on a "Sabbatical" of six months to a year for "travel and study," which Time's board of directors, heavily under his thumb, granted. There is some evidence that the forlorn "what-am-Lsup-posed-to-do-with-my-life " mood was not entirely dispelled. Action and adventure and important people, if not unfailing antidotes for the horrors, were the best he knew. He left by air for Rome November 3, continued eastward and bounced back from a severe fever in Istanbul by taking sulfa. He had allotted himself a fortnight to investigate Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. His central problem was Iran, a scene of friction with Russia since the war. Its northern province of Azerbaijan had been occupied by Soviet, British and American troops during the war to assure a flow of Persian oil after the German destruction of Soviet oilfields. The Russians had stayed on and fomented sentiment for a regional government for Azerbaijan which would of course ultimately have become a part of the U.S.S.R. They had withdrawn after being condemned in the United Nations Security Council. The United States had swiftly moved in with loans and military and technical advisers.

The problem was to bolster the anti-Communist Shah, who had formidable opposition in his own country. Luce was checking on the Truman-Acheson policy of containing Russia, fearful that the fellows who had lost China would lose Iran too.

One of his first criteria for judging a nation's worthiness was its attitude toward his own. Turkey, whose modernization he had admired under the great Ataturk—one of his heroes—stood well here. "The Turks—at least the upper-class Turks," he wrote Billings, "really seem to feel that they have an affinity with America . . ." Because of his fever and his brief stay there, the most important personages he saw were a former foreign minister and the Turkish chief of staff. He took the trouble, as always, to check on Time's local stringer and found him good. Reaching Teheran, he called on Ambassador Henry Grady and was quickly surrounded by eminence. In Iran, as prearranged, he was in the hands of Max Thornburg, a former California Standard Oil executive, later petroleum adviser to the State Department and now a $72,000-a-year oil consultant for the Shah and a good Presbyterian.

"This afternoon a huge cocktail party is being given for me," Luce wrote. "Tomorrow I have an audience with the Shah in the morning and dinner with the Prime Minister at night." Next day he noted that "200 people turned up" at the party, "including . . . practically the entire government." The power of Time Inc. was not unknown in Persia. Luce was pleased that the Shah Riza Pahlevi gave him a ninety-minute audience. The Shah was under both inter-

W. A. Swanberg

nal and Soviet pressure because of the presence of a small U.S. military mission and a smaller group of American police specialists who were training Persia's gendarmerie. The military mission had helped to organize the army and to re-equip it with American arms. The Russians charged that Iran had been converted into an American military base on her border. There had been armed incidents on the Azerbaijan frontier, the Shah himself had been wounded by a would-be assassin the previous year, and he had outlawed Persia's Communist Tudeh party.

In return for his difficulties in behalf of anti-Communism, he expected a huge loan, far bigger than the State Department thought realistic. The Shah was doing a little pressuring of his own. Only ten days before Luce's arrival, a Soviet-Iranian trade agreement was announced, and at the very moment Luce was talking with the monarch, his government was ending the Persian-language broadcasts of the Voice of America. It was clear that he got his point across to Luce, who wrote in his report of the conversation:

. . . [W]e have failed to convey either to H.I.M. or to his people any idea that we, the U.S., are serious about Persia. And perhaps we aren't. If we aren't, then it's worse than foUy . . . Much better an honest "isolationist" like Taft than an irresponsible (if not worse) internationalist Uke Acheson. The bad internationalists will be the ruin of both America and the world.

Luce was delighted when Thornburg, who waited for him during his long audience, asked jocularly if he was taking over the royal job. In the English-speaking prime minister, General Ali Razmara, who was a national hero for his part in defeating separatism in Azerbaijan, Luce found the greatness he usually encountered on his journeys, writing Billings, "... the ablest man in Persia—a man in a class by himself . . . outstandingly able. . . . A prime candidate for a cover." Iran being under martial law. Luce received from Razmara a laissez-passer. With Thornburg as companion, he was flown to Tabriz, the mile-high metropolis of Azerbaijan, where they set out by car, with an escorting officer-interpreter leading in a jeep, for the Soviet border. As always. Luce wrote a travelog containing interesting observations and brimming with his boyish dehght in such adventures. The roads were ghastly, the scenery much fike Wyoming until they reached the border, where snow-covered Transcaucasian peaks pink in the sunset caused him to write, "This is one place where the Iron Curtain is breath-takingly beautiful. " Iranian soldiers were posted there—Soviet soldiers across the river. One has a picture of Luce, his blue eyes icy, straining to ghmpse his enemy and God's across the way. He wrote:

Here for 100 miles south and 200 or more miles north is the debatable land between Asia and an indiscriminate place called Russia . . . here in spectacular scenery, the line is momentarily drawn . . . against the powers of evil . . .

In Tabriz they stayed overnight with the American consul. At the Ameri-

Luce and His Empire

can Presbyterian mission in the same city, Luce praised these spreaders of the Word ("How very, very admirable!") and was pleased to find a nurse at the mission who had, a few years earlier, been a member of his own Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and of course had heard of him. The old senior missionary told him that it was perhaps not quite as difficult to make converts as in the years before the war, when any Moslem who became a Christian stood an excellent chance of being murdered.

Going on, Luce and Thornburg had tea with the governor general of Azerbaijan. They passed camel caravans. (Passing one long donkey caravan, Luce could not restrain his curiosity and had the officer-interpreter stop and ask where they were going. They were en route to Baghdad to visit the Golden Mosque and other Moslem shrines—something that stuck in Luce's mind.) Driving eastward to Ardebil, they saw the Caspian and an international bridge crossing into Russia:

When we came to the bridge, the colonel said that if we wouldn't talk any English, he would take us on the bridge. In the middle of the bridge was a high ironwork fence. This was literally the Iron Curtain. There we stood for a moment brooding and then turned back.

Had Hadden been living, he doubtless would have shouted, "Look out, Harry, you'll drop Iran." There was indeed a bit of the boy on the burning deck along with the Napoleon in Luce. With Thornburg he stayed overnight with a Persian major whose servant gave them vodka and turkey. They visited the mosque in Ardebil. They got stuck while crossing a stream and were soaked. Five days of this and they were back in Teheran, where the dehghted Luce left for Baghdad and Beirut.

"On the basis," he wrote, "of a two-day rather low-pressure visit to Baghdad, I will not put myself forward as an expert on Iraq." Still, he was a quick observer and his tendency toward instant expertise was strong. "The main points about Iraq are quickly stated," he wrote. "The first point is about Jews and the second is about Nationhood." He was astonished at the Arab feeling against the Jews and against America as being on the side of the Jews, and he was indignant at the plight of the Arab refugees. "The Jews of America are always making a great hubbub about humanitarianism—the really great thing for the Jews of America to do would be to raise a fund of $1,000,000,000 to take care of the refugee Arabs whom they banished out of their homeland. Time Inc. would undoubtedly suffer Jewish reprisals if we took up the subject vigorously, but there is evidently need of some courage in this matter. . . . And in any case America—including American Jews—ought to be told at how great a price of American good-will Zion has been purchased."

This was one of those rare moments when he showed genuine sympathy for human beings. The warmth for humanity simply as humanity, quite separate from his usual concentration on power, was so unexpected and appealing as to underline its gradual disappearance from his consideration.

W. A. Swanberg

I am glad I came into [Beirut] from the East. When one flies over the last couple of hundred miles of the Syria desert and over the last mountain range, one breathes suddenly the air of a different world—the Mediterranean, partly Christian, modern world.

It angered him that the French had arranged it so that one had to have a degree from the Jesuit college in Beirut in order to qualify for the civil service. "This college is supported by the atheistic government of France— France being in turn supported by the U.S." His patriotism was always near the surface: ". . . [L]et me revert now to the deep feeling of pride which as an American we may have in Beirut University. Today, of course, it is a prime U.S. asset in the great game of world pohtics."

He attended the American embassy's Thanksgiving reception—coffee and cake, no liquor out of deference to the many missionaries there. Reaching Rome, he told William Rospigliosi that he had sensed an upsurge of Moslem nationalist or spiritual feeling and that he must talk with the Vatican specialist on the subject. That would be Eugene Cardinal Tisserand, an acknowledged authority on the Arab world. The cardinal was skeptical when Rospigliosi arranged the meeting and Luce told him his impression. Did Mr. Luce speak Arabic? No? Well, one could not learn much in those countries speaking only French. Luce had to admit that his French, too, was almost nonexistent. Cardinal Tisserand did not precisely say so, but he made it evident that a man who knew no Arabic and little French, had spent only a fortnight in those countries and had never been there before, was hardly in a position to say that there was an upsurge of anything.

Nevertheless, as Rospigliosi later noted. Luce was right, as shown by the Arab revival that soon burst out under Nasser. Luck? Many of Luce's colleagues believed he sometimes had a sixth sense about news in the making, although he was sometimes terribly wrong. When he reached New York December 1, Mary Bancroft had already arrived there to market her first novel. He took her to dinner and smoked furiously as they debated such questions as: Were the Republicans justified in branding well-meaning Democrats as Communists or fellow travelers? And was there not a possibility that these tactics would damage the Western civilization they were supposed to preserve?

4. SUCCESSS IS HIS ELEMENT

Mary Bancroft, startled by the savagery of anti-Communism in America, wrote her old friend Dr. Carl Jung in Switzerland:

. . . Thanks to the fact that my family owned—and still own—"The Wall Street Journal"—and are in the Social Register and belong to the so-called upper classes, I am free of the suspicion of being a Communist. But almost ev-

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eryone who expresses a liberal view or says a kind word for Tolstoi is in danger of being reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A Communist witch hunt of truly incredible proportions is in full swing. However, I have several Communist friends and many Left Wing friends and they suspect me of being a "Fascist." You must be either a Communist or a Fascist. If you say you are a democrat, you are regarded as hiding your true feelings. . . .

Another thing that struck me was how much on the defensive everyone was. I would say, "These are pretty flowers." "Do you have better flowers in Europe?" someone would inevitably snap back. Everything American must be the best and must be recognized as such. A truck in the American Legion parade carried a sign "America—Love Her or Leave Her." And I was extremely careful to say I hved in Switzerland simply because I had a good job here—but if I got just as good a job in the U.S. I would return at once. Otherwise I feared being turned over to the un-American Activities Committee.

This was written months before Representative Nixon had told Congress that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had not only permitted the government to become honeycombed with Communist spies but had failed to combat them even when aware of their presence. It was almost two years before Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was heard from.

A prime reason for Luce's later reputation as a mugwumpish Repubhcan who could steer his party in benign directions was his alleged powerful opposition to McCarthy. A study of the Lucepress and Luce's own memos during McCarthy's four most fearsome years suggests an interesting reason for this misconception: The Lucepress itself, after McCarthy had turned from an exclusive preoccupation with Democratic "betrayal" to Communism and had begun to embarrass Republicans including President Eisenhower, began to dig into the Senator cautiously. At intervals in later years it propagandized itself as having "fought" McCarthy. With equal success it propagandized itself as having pitched into Hitler and MussoUni, to whom it had given steady aid and comfort, and it also propagandized itself as having attacked the Munich treaty which at the time won its sympathy, just as it later belittled the Chamberlain who at the time of Munich had been Time's cover boy.

The Lucepress's own retrospective morality and judgment was unimpeachable. Actually, it gave McCarthy more support than opposition throughout his career. In Luce's lifelong campaign to alert the nation against Communism, McCarthy for all his crudity was an effective successor to Chambers and Bul-htt. The Senator, however, became an issue of such hot controversy that an editor so preoccupied with circulation had to approach him with care. "Half my readers are Democrats," Luce often said, not wanting to lose one of them. As one observer put it with only shght exaggeration, "Mr. Luce had a genius for reading the public temper. He wasn't about to stomp McCarthyism until he was certain that witch-hunting was no longer popular among his readers." A McCarthy biographer saw it from the Senator's side: "During this period [after almost two years of McCarthy] Joe had nothing but warm praise for Henry Luce . . ."

W. A. Swanberg

This was not because the Lucepress praised McCarthy—something it did only a few times—but because the two were shooting at the same targets and because the Lucepress dignified the McCarthy operations by reporting them deadpan long after the Senator became a palpable national disgrace. For example:

Could Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy be stopped? After three tries, administration strategists were beginning to despair. Neither anguished denials of Communism in the State Department nor vitriolic attacks on McCarthy and his witnesses could quiet the uproar the Wisconsin Senator had caused.

The question of fairness was probably irrelevant to Luce since he felt the Republic to be in danger, as he did almost permanently after the war. His re-hgion inevitably entered in also. He believed that preachers entirely lacking in distinction but burning with faith could sometimes be chosen by God to utter great revelations. From there it was a short step to the acceptance of a demagogue like McCarthy or a dissembler like Chiang as instruments of the Lord. The occasional zigzags of the Lucepress on McCarthy suggested also a Lucean ambivalence as to the best political use to be made of the Senator whose first sensational charges were so patently incredible that it appeared that McCarthy, instead of aiding Againstness, would make it look ridiculous. Luce preferred Richard Nixon, the smart young man on the make who was sketching a more plausible picture of the back-street Democrat-Communist haison. McCarthy's pyramiding of lies seemed visibly absurd, a threat to Nixon's campaign of insinuation. In this early view of McCarthy, Life ran a worried editorial denouncing the "pro-Soviet" pohcies under the Democrats but denouncing also the McCarthy style of attack as a threat to national unity:

The danger of Communism is real. And we shall not cease to urge greater efiPorts in fighting Communism until it is hcked. But there is a right way and a wrong way to fight Communism. ... It is wrong when all officials of a vital arm of government—the State Department at the moment—are subjected to virulent and indiscriminate suspicion. . . . The past cannot be undone. We Americans desperately need to pull ourselves together to wage really eflFective political warfare against Soviet Communism— now.

Astonishingly, McCarthy, instead of being squashed by the Senate, kept shouting and demonstrated a powerful public following. The Lucepress then retreated into its largely noncommittal reportage for almost a year and a half, only occasionally beating the Senator with a feather. It slighted the courageous effort of Luce's friend. Senator Benton of Connecticut, to take action against him in the Senate. The Luce sixth sense about news was generally more valid in sensing the psychic state of his readers—their readiness to follow some new political turn suggested in his magazines—than in outright po-htical prophecy. It was, as Mary Bancroft described it, like a surfboarder judging the crest of the wave.

Luce and His Empire

The pragmatist Luce was watching the waves. His memos and letters showed his knowledge of McCarthy's extravagance along with recognition of the Senator's great service in spreading the anti-Communist gospel and charging a Democrat-Communist linkage as responsible for the fate of China. Luce also had his eye on Nixon. The young man was with the China Lobby all the way. Chambers liked Nixon, who had worked so dramatically for the conviction of Hiss. There were wheels within wheels here, for Luce admired Chambers and was thinking of taking him back when things quieted down and Walter Winchell might be expected to drop his tired attacks. Once when Luce returned from Washington in a Time plane, he landed at the sandlot airport at Westminster, Maryland, where a chauffeur-driven limousine waited to take him to Chambers's nearby farm. It would have been remarkable of them not to discuss the recently ended trial and the young California Congressman who had, so to speak, taken the tarnished Timan under his wing and made him presentable for public credibility.

(Unknown to Luce, Mrs. Bancroft had given samples of his handwriting to Dr. Oskar Schlag, who lectured on graphology at the University of Zurich. In Switzerland, graphology was taken seriously. Dr. Schlag knew only that the subject was an American, fifty-three years old. Judging from his report, one might feel graphology underrated in the United States. "The writer is an extremely self-willed personality," the 12(X)-word analysis began. "He is original and many-sided, highly gifted and very skillful in practical and organizational matters . . . He has sensitive antennae for the atmosphere around him . . . Success is his natural element. He needs it as a fish needs water." And the professor got down to details more directly related to Luce's involvement in American pohtics: "He will favor people who have won his affection or who have understood how to steal into his heart, for he does not possess a well-balanced judgment of people . . .")

Luce had blown such a monsoon of propaganda ever since the recall of General Stilwell as to envelop America in a steamy climate perfect for McCarthyist cultures. The Hearst press had helped, and the McCormick press too, as well as some independent papers even to the furiously right-wing Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire, but no American had so established himself in the pubUc and official mind as the owner-manager of correct American pohcy toward China as Luce.

America's foreign policy had been bipartisan and successfully anti-Communist in Europe, but in China it had lost bipartisanship abruptly when it became apparent that Chiang's leaky junk was sinking. The Lucepress had shrieked in pain and fury against the Democrats ever since, with others taking up the cry. The American public in general, vague about China except for a blind confidence that China was a dear friend, was so shocked at the discovery that China was no longer a friend—indeed might now be a friend of Russia—as to seek scapegoats. Luce furnished them. Probably more than any

W. A. Sivanberg

other single force, the Lucepress channeled the groping and disorganized emotions of American distress into McCarthyism.

Luce, like McCarthy, called down curses on the head of Dean Acheson, Marshall's successor. Unlike Marshall, whose seamed face suggested all the homespun American qualities, Acheson's glinty eye, upswept mustache and suavity matched the striped pants his job often obliged him to wear and matched also the Yale-plus-Harvard background so suspect to Middle America.

Also, Acheson dropped those three unguarded remarks that were (like Truman's assertion that the charges against Hiss were a "red herring") twistable and which were seized on and paraded before the public endlessly by the Lucepress. One was his statement that he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss. Another occurred after Chiang fell and Acheson said the State Department would "let the dust settle " before formulating a new policy, which could be construed as indifference and inaction instead of the reasonable caution it was meant to denote. A third occurred during a public speech when he neglected to include South Korea specifically within the U.S. defense perimeter, an omission which many felt caused the Communist invasion of that country. The Lucepress was unconscionable in its repetition of Acheson's refusal to turn his back, Acheson letting the dust settle and Acheson forgetting South Korea. Time and Life nagged about that unturning Acheson back as if it implied Communist sympathies or treason. They kept it up despite protests such as that of the New York Post: "If Life views Acheson's statements on Hiss as covert expressions of sympathy for Communism, Life really knows better."

Of course Life knew better. It was using a McCarthy tactic—the steady build-up of suspicion around a public servant for political purposes. When that master of the smear, Westbrook Pegler, called Luce "the master smearer of his time," he spoke truly if without sufficient self-examination. With Time's circulation almost two million, and Life's more than five million, and with each of them attacking Acheson almost on a weekly basis, the Secretary was under the most withering fire since FDR himself. For fifteen years Acheson had been a fellow of the Yale Corporation, an honor Luce still coveted and which may have aggravated the choler of a man so enamored of recognition. With help from other partisan publications. Time and Life so bemused the public about Acheson's crimes that his old friend and fellow member of the Corporation, Republican Senator Robert Taft, felt constrained to tell him that they had better keep separate during an academic affair in New Haven, lest they be photographed together to the Senator's political embarrassment. Later in the day, when they met in what seemed a safely remote comer, Taft relaxed and shook Acheson's hand—then froze as popping flashbulbs proved the corner unsafe after all.

In Washington, Representative Albert P. Morano, Clare's former political manager who had succeeded her as Congressman from her district, urged

Luce and His Empire

President Truman to dismiss Acheson and "appoint former Representative Clare Boothe Luce as his successor." Clare was informed of this in Hollywood, where she was writing a screenplay about Pontius Pilate, whom she described as the "arch appeaser of all time." She agreed heartily that a new Secretary of State was needed but neither affirmed nor denied her own availability.

Luce still watched the waves. In the fall of 1951, a year and a half after the Wheeling speech—by which time McCarthy had questioned General Marshall's patriotism and talked of "20 years of treason"—he decided that the country was ready to turn against the Senator. His September 10 memo to Life editorialist Jessup said it was time to hit McCarthy with careful aim. The Lucepress thereupon took its most courageous stand. A Life editorial roasted Senator Taft for his link-up with McCarthy, called on him to "renounce and repudiate" the connection and went on:

The cumulative debasement of U.S. politics has gone far enough. Somebody must forego the pleasure of further groin-and-eyebaU fighting. . . . The nation owes no debt to Joe McCarthy.

This was followed by a less forthright four-page Time review of McCarthy's Democratic-treason campaign (his picture on the cover was captioned "Demagogue McCarthy") stressing the point that while his methods were wrong, his aim was good. The Senator was tossed a few posies (". . . an ingratiating and friendly fellow. . . . Joe was liked and respected in college, liked and respected in the Marines, liked and respected in his home town. . . . He dotes on children . . .") but was described as a politician in danger of discrediting a good cause: