The Publisher (64 page)

Back in New York, Luce encouraged his reliably loyal editor, Charles Murphy, to complete a massive four-part profile for
Life
of Chiang Kai-shek, which Murphy had begun several months earlier, undeterred by the fact that Chiang was already perhaps the most frequently profiled person ever to appear in his magazines. But Luce encountered staunch resistance from Billings and other senior editors to the gushing, uncritical article. They persuaded him first to reduce it to a two-part piece and then, after a year of indecision, to kill it altogether. Luce acquiesced, in part for fear of seeming too partisan in his treatment of Chiang, a decision he later regretted. But as if to make up for this failure, he aggressively recruited the former diplomat William Bullitt in 1947 to travel as a “special correspondent” to China to report on the state of the civil war. There was little enthusiasm for this project among Luce’s senior editors, who considered Bullitt an ambitious blowhard. “We all deplore Bullitt’s mission to China and expect nothing from it,” Billings wrote in his diary. “If only Luce could resist such arrant rascals!” But Luce’s eagerness for articles from this controversial figure, a newly ardent anti-Communist, was unstoppable—as was clearly evident in the almost unprecedented fee of thirteen thousand dollars Time Inc. paid for the effort, despite Bullitt’s lack of experience in or expertise on Asia. When Bullitt submitted his manuscript, Billings called it “superficial and mediocre,” but did not dare to kill it. C. D. Jackson bridled at running a summary of the piece in
Time
. The
Life
editors balked at its length (and eventually persuaded Luce, over Bullitt’s “violent objection,” to cut it down from two parts to one). Luce conceded that “some people think [Bullitt’s] a shit,”
but he remained committed to the piece, which ran both in
Life
and (as excerpts) in
Time
in October 1947. Unsurprisingly Bullitt echoed Luce’s own conviction that the loss of China to Communism was an unacceptable outcome to the conflict, no matter what the cost to the United States. Like Luce, he believed that virtually all of Chiang’s problems—the corruption, the bureaucratic incompetence, the brutality—were products of the pressures of war, that it was unrealistic to expect improvement until the Communists were defeated. He recommended sending Douglas MacArthur to advise Chiang on the conduct of the war (an oftfloated proposal that MacArthur had consistently refused to consider). “They would work together as brothers for their common cause,” Bullitt rapturously predicted. “The whole Far Eastern horizon would brighten with hope.” But if China were to fall “into the hands of Stalin,” his alarmist conclusion warned, “all Asia, including Japan, sooner or later will fall into his hands…. The independence of the U.S. will not live a generation longer than the independence of China.” Luce was delighted with the piece and helped arrange radio addresses and an exhausting speaking tour for Bullitt shortly after the article appeared.
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Luce was growing increasingly impatient with his own writers and editors, who were not, he complained, “observing the Editor-in-Chief’s China policy.” (Evidence of the problem, he believed, was the sandbagging of Murphy’s Chiang profile, even though Luce himself had been complicit in the killing of the piece.) He set out again to express his own views of the situation in China, which should, he insisted, become part of Time Inc.’s “policy.” He spent part of his trip home from China writing by hand an outline of his central precepts. What were the “fundamental motivations of Chiang Kai-shek?” Luce asked. Chiang aspired to “establish a China which shall be 1) united, 2) free of foreign domination, 3) progressively modern, hence a) strong, b) democratic.” What stood mostly in the way of this “double purpose,” he concluded, was a single problem: the Communists. Hence the principal goal of the United States must be to stop them so as to give Chiang the opportunity to achieve his “life purpose—the ‘unity’ of China.”
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Back in New York he continued to bombard his editors with the urgency of the task. “Luce came to my M. E. [managing editor] lunch and talked steadily about China—almost a repeat of yesterday’s lunch,” Billings wrote. Matthews also received a memo from Luce complaining that Time-Life International was “not paying enough attention to China…. Nearly all the correspondents in China are doing a poor job.” Hardly a day went by without a chiding memo to his senior editors: “It
seems to me
Time
has paid awful little attention to [Wellington] Koo,” he complained on one day. On another he wrote that “we need to focus again … on the prospects for success or failure, progress or chaos in China.” Editors frequently found Luce “in a huffy unhappy mood about some
Life
text on China,” or “suffering visibly over China.” So harried did the editorial staff feel under Luce’s pressure that they began to compile evidence that they were in fact reflecting his own strong views. The
Time
editors sent Luce groveling proof of their loyalty in April 1947 by listing the ways in which they had followed the editor in chief’s line:

A little more than two months after Luce’s return from China, Marshall moved from Nanking to Washington and became secretary of state. President Truman, members of Congress, and the majority of the public gave Marshall credit for attempting what turned out to be an impossible task, and most Americans slowly began to prepare themselves for the likely defeat of the Chiang regime and the triumph of the Communists. But to Luce, and to other strong supporters of the Nationalist cause, Marshall’s failed effort was part of a great and tragic betrayal—the willful abandonment of China to Communism through incompetence at best and a traitorous conspiracy at worst. Even before China fell, the recriminations began—and continued for a generation. The last years before the fall of Nationalist China produced stores of ammunition for those who were coming to constitute what became known as the “China Lobby.”

Luce was never as fevered a member of the China Lobby as were many others. He continued to admire George Marshall, despite his great disappointment with the general’s actions in China. He did not often accuse those he opposed of traitorous motives, and he seldom
associated himself with the more hysterical press lords of the pro-Chiang right—William Randolph Hearst, Col. Robert McCormick of the
Chicago Tribune
, and others. But beginning in the last years of Nationalist government on the mainland, and continuing for many years after, his bitterness toward those whom he believed had failed China in the greatest crisis of its history steadily increased. The folly of allowing China to fall, Luce believed, was so self-evident that only weakness, stupidity, or—worse—disloyalty could explain America’s course. “The measure of degradation of American policy in the Pacific,” he wrote bitterly in early 1948,

Like many critics of the Truman administration far to Luce’s right, he began to characterize his opponents not as people with legitimate disagreements but as dupes of the Communists or worse. “Where’s the agrarian democracy in mainland China that ‘experts’ … attributed to the … Communists?” he said contemptuously in the early 1950s. “On what basis,” he asked, did “… so many people on the left, and so many people in the State Department, come to believe that Mao and his allies were potential allies of the United States?”—repeating the longstanding canard that admiration for Mao was a principal cause of America’s abandonment of Chiang. In the heat of his despair he at times lost his ability to express disagreement—even with the people he most admired—in a restrained and respectful way. “I cannot think of any utterance which ever hurt me so much as your recent statement about Chiang Kai-shek and China,” he angrily wrote Henry Stimson, who had, like Marshall, expressed a lack of confidence in the Nationalist regime. “I would like to think that you found it painful to write what you did. But perhaps you only wrote carelessly and irresponsibly.” Increasingly he built on his already intense hatred of Franklin Roosevelt by joining the escalating right-wing criticism of the Yalta accords. “Suspicious as I was of Yalta,” he wrote in reference to what he considered the secret betrayal of China, “I couldn’t imagine that it was such a new high
in Rooseveltian deceit…. I wonder if
Time
has yet become as indignant about Yalta as perhaps it ought to be.” And even while he continued trying to persuade the leaders of government, he also began to reach out to people who shared his views on China, including some with whom he had little else in common—socially or intellectually.
⁵⁴

Luce’s slow, cautious, but steady movement into the world of conspiracy theories was reflected by, among other things, his souring relationship with an organization he had helped to create: the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR), a quasi-academic foundation in New York dedicated to helping Americans understand Asia and the Pacific. Luce had been a founding member in 1930 and had considered it an organization that “always strove for objectivity and the presentation of different sides of a problem, [which] were useful as references to
Time
and
Fortune.”
He had attended occasional conferences, offered modest financial support, and maintained a cordial and supportive relationship with the institute’s director, Edward Carter. In the early 1940s Luce joined an effort to construct an imposing new building for the institution, Pacific House, which would give the IPR a more important public face and would draw more attention to issues relating to China. Luce organized a dinner in 1943 to promote the idea. He recruited Juan Trippe, the president of Pan American World Airways, to head the fund-raising drive. And he assigned one of Time Inc.’s staff to assist with the effort. Despite his help, the project failed. But his supportive relationship with the IPR, even if somewhat strained, continued.
⁵⁵

In the spring of 1946 Alfred Kohlberg, a wealthy textile manufacturer who had significant investments in Asia and now feared that they were in danger, began a campaign to discredit the people he believed were participating in a vast conspiracy to undermine the Kuomintang and ensure the victory of the Communists. Among his principal targets was the IPR, of which he was a longtime but seldom-seen member. Kohlberg was an aggressive ideologue, and to him the IPR’s openness to multiple views, which included some sympathetic depictions of the Chinese Communists, seemed tantamount to treason. He began spending long days in the New York Public Library uncovering IPR documents that supported his view. The people who managed the IPR’s publications and research, he charged, “showed their bias by affiliation with a host of Communist and Communist front organizations.” In August, Carter invited Kohlberg to a meeting to “clear the air.” It only increased the animosity between them.
⁵⁶

Kohlberg had not been the first to warn Luce about Communist influence in the IPR. In 1943 his
Fortune
colleague Eliot Janeway had claimed to have discovered that the institution was “really manipulated by a group of dubious Communists and near-Communists who are intriguing madly behind a good front of respectable research men.” Carter, he said, was “a stooge for these gentry.” Luce, who usually respected Janeway’s opinions, had ignored him. Kohlberg, by contrast, was the kind of man—brash, crude, vindictive, impassioned almost to the point of fanaticism—with whom Luce under ordinary circumstances would never have associated. Kohlberg had once even implied that Luce himself was a Communist dupe. But by late 1946 Luce had become largely intolerant of divergent views on China and was thus more credulous of Kohlberg’s accusations. A Time Inc. colleague prepared a report for Luce on the activities of the IPR and concluded that the organization did not take a “communist line” and was, at worst, not wholly vigilant in keeping Communists and fellow travelers from publishing left-leaning material.

But Luce took no comfort from this mild and qualified defense. When Carter asked him for help in discrediting Kohlberg, Luce replied coolly that Kohlberg was “not ‘discredited’ in my opinion…. I am afraid, I would find that the Institute of Pacific Relations output had been of very little help in informing us on those aspects of Soviet or Communist behavior which present real challenges both to American ideals and American interests.” A shaken Carter quickly assembled evidence of the IPR’s substantial studies of the dangers of Communism, but Luce brushed it aside. “The main trouble with this letter is that it should have been written several years ago … the so-called Kohlberg charges are perhaps far from being judicial, nevertheless I am convinced that the question he raises with regard to I.P.R. cannot be brushed off with easy strokes of whitewash. In so far as I.P.R. has taken a ‘line,’ it is a line with which I disagree considerably.” He was, he concluded, resigning from the organization and cutting off his financial support.

Carter unwisely replied by warning him of “the loss that would accrue more to you than to IPR if you became identified in the public mind with such [far-right] critics of the IPR as Kohlberg, [the writer] Upton Close, and Hearst.” Luce did not communicate with him again, and Carter’s plaintive letters were thereafter answered by surrogates. Less than two years later Carter resigned from the IPR. “The sad story of the Institute of Pacific publications,” Luce wrote ruefully in 1949, “is one that I know all too much about—but I learned it too late!” Luce’s own repudiation of IPR was certainly part of what led Carter to resign.
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As the situation in China deteriorated, both Harry and Clare developed an unlikely friendship with Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who had served for a time as Chiang Kai-shek’s military chief of staff and had then succeeded Stilwell as commander of American forces in China. Wedemeyer was a talented and respected officer of highly conservative views. He shared Luce’s conviction that a Communist victory in China would be an unacceptable danger to America. One of the few high-ranking American officers with significant experience in China, he was repeatedly proposed for new missions there. But time and again, he believed, his hopes were thwarted by officials in Washington who found him too hostile to the Communists (with whom Marshall was continuing to negotiate) and too committed as well to the increasingly discredited Chiang regime. Out of Wedemeyer’s experiences (and out of Luce’s characterizations of them) emerged some of the foundations of the conspiracy theory of the Nationalists’ fall.