The Publisher (56 page)

As early as the summer of 1943, Luce had been gently chiding White for his increasing pessimism. “Last winter there was some feeling here that, on balance, we were giving a too favorable view of China.” But after the publication of some of White’s more controversial pieces and of Pearl Buck’s story in
Life
, he said, “we have pretty thoroughly discharged our obligations to print the bad with the good about China…. The plain fact, the great fact, the glorious fact is that China stands…. I think you can justifiably be more concerned to look for the facts which explain China’s strength than to look for the elements of weakness.” The
Life
story on Chiang clearly did not meet that standard. And while Luce had agreed to publish the piece, and had even praised it, he also wrote at length about White’s failure to recognize the obstacles to Chiang’s success and the remarkable fact of his survival. “I guess the hard tack I want to get down to is that we Americans are not in a very good position to tell China how she should integrate herself in a manner agreeable to us until we have integrated a little of our own ‘democratic’ might and majesty in a manner somewhat more beneficial to China.” White’s response—an impassioned nine-page letter about conditions in Chungking—expressed none of the optimism that Luce was advocating. To White the “great political fact” of China was not what Luce saw as its glorious survival but its growing internal chaos. “The Chinese peasantry turned on their own army and fought against it on the side of the invader!” he wrote. The people had developed “great contempt” for the army and for the government it served. “Even within the Kuomintang there is a bitterness that is completely new.” He had, he added, “been chided many times by Lt. General Stilwell for the lush and unrealistic tone of all American public writing on China and its war effort.”
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Joseph Stilwell, the American military commander in China, was a harsh critic of Chiang Kai-shek and his government. Known to many as “Vinegar Joe” for his tart, blunt manner, he had developed a great love
for China over several decades and had fought gallantly in the first years of the American war in the Pacific to open up a supply route from India to China—known as the Burma Road—after the Japanese had cut China off from the sea. By 1944, however, he had become appalled by what he considered the incompetence and corruption of the Kuomintang. He was particularly critical of the government’s apparent unwillingness actually to fight the Japanese. Chiang—whom the dyspeptic Stilwell called the “Peanut” in conversation and in some of his official dispatches—was, the general believed, more interested in holding on to power and isolating his Chinese Communist rivals than in winning the war. Stilwell’s contempt for Chiang was no secret to the American military or to White, who came to rely on the general for information about the war that the Chungking government was often reluctant to provide. As the feud between Stilwell and Chiang grew increasingly bitter, White found himself siding more often than not with Stilwell. He was shattered in the fall of 1944 when Franklin Roosevelt recalled the general from China after Chiang had balked at the American demand that Stilwell take command of Chinese forces. (From the day of Pearl Harbor, Stilwell told White at the time of his dismissal, “this ignorant son of a bitch has never wanted to fight Japan.”) At Luce’s request White prepared material for a cover story on Stilwell’s recall for
Time
. In it he made clear that he shared Stilwell’s contempt for Chiang (whom he was now describing as a “man of almost appalling ignorance”). “Stilwell was relieved,” he wrote in his memo to Luce, “because of Chiang’s embittered opposition to him; Chiang’s opposition sprang from the fact that he could no longer tolerate within his own country a group of men whose standards of honesty, efficiency and responsibility were so strikingly at variance with his own apparatus…. Chiang has outlived his historical usefulness.” Nothing White might have written could have been more certain to enrage Luce, and the cover story on Stilwell that actually appeared in
Time
on November 13, 1944, made clear how great the rift between them had become.
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The article, written mostly by Whittaker Chambers, was relatively kind to Stilwell himself. It blamed the Roosevelt administration, not the general, for giving Chiang an ultimatum that “no self-respecting head of state could countenance.” But Chambers made little reference to White’s dispatches (which Chambers boasted he routinely dropped in the wastebasket without reading). The story as published was not about the war against Japan but about what Chambers considered the much more important war against the Chinese Communists. “Stripped to the
bare facts,”
Time
proclaimed, the “situation was that Chungking, a dictatorship ruling high-handedly in order to safeguard the last vestiges of democratic principles in China, was engaged in an undeclared war with Yenan [the headquarters of the Communist forces], a dictatorship whose purpose was the spread of totalitarian Communism in China.” The piece continued with a gratuitous attack on “the tone long taken by leftists and echoed by liberals” in supporting Stilwell. And it concluded with a dark warning:

White heard nothing about the Stilwell piece until well after it had appeared in
Time
, and then only through scattered quotations from it that were broadcast over several Chinese (and Japanese) radio stations. But what he heard alarmed him, and he cabled Luce desperately. If the radio reports were true, he wrote, “I shall probably have to resign as I have no other way of preserving my integrity.” “Keep your shirt on until you have full text of Stilwell cover story,” Luce wired back dismissively. “Then roll up your sleeves and cable us what you regard as specific inaccuracies.” But by now it was already too late for agreement between them on the Stilwell piece—or on almost anything else related to China. Both men had moved too far from their earlier, more compatible stances.

Luce continued to believe that Chiang “may have greater influence than any other single human being of our age,” and he was determined to defend him on almost all points regardless of circumstances. His enthusiasm was stoked further by the sensational visit of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek to the United States in 1943, a visit Luce helped organize (with the help of David Selznick) to raise money for United China Relief. (Her public appearances across the country,
Time
wrote gushingly, had created “more effect than anything which has yet happened, in giving one great people the kind of understanding of another great people that is the first need of a shrinking, hopeful world.”) White—unimpressed by the Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang both—was convinced that Chiang was a hopeless failure and an insuperable obstacle to victory.

The outcome of this disagreement was, of course, foreordained. “I do not think it becomes you to get angry if for once your editor does not instantly follow your instructions,” Luce wrote coldly. His colleagues attempted to soften the tone of Luce’s cables to White, but Luce was in no mood for conciliation. “Having for many years been
for
Chiang,” he wrote to one of his colleagues, “White is now against him. Suppose our London correspondent was actually
against
Churchill or Moscow
against
Stalin.” White responded with a thirty-page critique of the Stilwell piece, repeating his threat to resign from
Time
, to which Luce responded vaguely that “you will receive a statement of China policy as clear as cable discretion permits.”

At about the same time, in what was perhaps a reckless effort to challenge Luce (and Chambers) directly, he sent a long dispatch reporting on the Communists in Yenan in mostly glowing terms. Where Chiang was corrupt and inept, the Communists, he claimed, were disciplined and committed. They had “an empirical wisdom that comes of ten years of civil war and seven years of anti-Japanese war. Within themselves they are trying to weed out the sins of intellectual dogmatism … [they] proclaim their friendship with America…. [T]hey are sincere and if reciprocated the friendship can become lasting.”
Time
editors ignored his memos. White, now almost frantic, wrote Tom Matthews: “Our columns on China ever since the publication of the Stilwell cover, have been indistinguishable from the official propaganda of the Kuomintang party.”
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White was far from alone in finding fault with
Time’s
uncritical view of Chiang. “You glorify Chiang Kai-shek,” one of many outraged readers wrote. “All competent observers seem to agree that Chiang has about as much respect for democracy as Hitler or Mussolini.” The journalist Richard Watts, stationed in China during the war, wrote in the
New Republic
that Time Inc., in its “policy toward the Kuomintang Party … abandons its lofty scorn for wide-eyed admiration.” In February 1945 Luce—aware of the growing controversy—asked one of his researchers in China to explore reactions to the magazine’s recent coverage. “Although the Stillwell [sic] cover on TIME … did not lack for readers,” she wrote, “they certainly lacked for defenders…. A very large segment of the U.S. Army stationed from Delhi to Chungking operate on the theory that the Chinese government is composed of thieves and cutthroats.” And the reporters in Chungking, she noted, “feel Teddy was sold down the river, should have made his resignation stick.” Luce circulated the memo among his colleagues in New York—and entirely rejected its findings. “For myself,” he wrote them, “I have not the slightest doubt that our policy has been right.”
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Through the remaining months of World War II, Luce never wavered in his steadfast support of Chiang. He rarely allowed even faint criticisms of the Kuomintang to appear in his magazines. His 1943 comment on Pearl Buck’s
Life
article—that there was “a very real question whether Pearl’s article would not do much more harm than good”—suggested even then how far he was moving toward using the news for his own purposes. Reporting the truth was taking a backseat to doing “good” for the causes he believed in, and it was not long before this stance shattered his relationship with White. “Luce in a dither about Teddy White’s ‘partisanship’ against Chiang,” Billings wrote in his diary in August 1945, “—and he wrote him a stern cable.” It was stern indeed. “I suggest you make supreme personal effort to give us nonpartisan news of Chiang in what we hope will be week of victory,” Luce wrote caustically as
Time
prepared another cover story on Chiang Kai-shek (which White opposed). “We realize this might be an unreasonable request in view [of] your avowed partisanship.”
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White hung on in Chungking through the end of the war, unable to get any material into the magazine that even hinted at the weakness of the Kuomintang. He began to focus instead on local-color stories and the fighting itself, and he remained in China to cover the Japanese surrender in August 1945. A few weeks later he was back in New York, hoping for a rapprochement with Luce. (“I would have done anything I could to keep or regain his affection,” he recalled in his memoir.) He took a leave of several months to write a book
—Thunder Out of China
, coauthored with his colleague and friend Annalee Jacoby. In the spring of 1946 he sent a copy of the manuscript to Luce “as a courtesy,” still hoping for some sign of approval. But the book, as White himself described it, was the story of “the inevitable collapse of Chiang Kai-shek.” Neither friendship nor persuasion could have prevented Luce from feeling angry about, and even betrayed by, its contents. A few weeks later White presented himself at Time Inc. to request a new assignment. Luce was “terribly angry,” called him an “ingrate,” and lumped him together with another of his “disloyal” star writers, John Hersey, whose remarkable account of the bombing of Hiroshima had recently appeared not in the Luce publications but in
The New Yorker
. Luce gave White an ultimatum: Remain at Time Inc. with a willingness to accept any job assigned to him, no matter how menial, or leave the company. White protested that he would be of no value to Luce except as a foreign correspondent. He wanted to go to Moscow. But to Luce the issue was loyalty, not utility. (“We must resist the tendency to think of Time Inc. as a plum pudding from which everyone is concerned only to
extract the plums of his choice,” he wrote in a bitter memo shortly after the confrontation.) On July 12, 1946, White informed Luce’s deputy, Charles Wertenbaker, that he “could not continue on Luce’s terms.” Unknown to White, Luce had already told Wertenbaker that “the bases of a satisfactory deal do not exist” (a euphemism for dismissal). White left the building no longer an employee of Time Inc.

The friendship between Luce and White, and its bitter unraveling, was the product less of their differences than of their similarities. Both men were somewhat disingenuous during their disputes in 1944 and 1945, because neither really aspired to “objective” or “nonpartisan” reporting. They saw journalism as a form of advocacy; and as their opinions diverged, their relationship inevitably frayed and ultimately collapsed precisely because they both had passionate views that they believed needed to be expressed. For White the termination of his job at Time Inc. was simply a small interruption in a brilliant career. A few days after leaving the company, he learned that his book was a selection of the then-mighty Book-of-the-Month Club. He was, for the time being, financially secure. And for the next four decades he successfully continued to combine brilliant reportage with his own deeply held opinions. For Luce the breach with White not only destroyed an important friendship but marked another significant step away from his willingness to tolerate a diversity of views within his organization.
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