The Publisher (70 page)

Luce’s elation at Eisenhower’s election—“a pink cloud of delight,” one colleague wrote; “a date to see Eisenhower affects him like strong liquor,” another commented—helped mute his growing concerns about the new administration’s foreign policy. He grumbled occasionally about Eisenhower’s passivity. “What’s wrong with Ike?” he asked in an editorial meeting in June 1953. “Things are certainly going badly and he doesn’t seem able to pull them together into a ‘favorable situation.’” But he mostly kept his concerns to himself, even as the war in Korea moved in a direction that deeply disappointed him. Luce had clearly hoped that the election of Eisenhower would reverse the Truman-Acheson decision to limit war aims in Korea and preserve the prewar status quo. But Eisenhower and Dulles did not change Truman’s course, and the Korean War ended in July 1953 with the partition still intact and, more important to Luce, the “‘foot draggers’ in the Pentagon” still in place. Luce was “all for making some ringing ‘Wilsonian’ declarations,” Billings wrote after an editors’ meeting. “The net of the lunch was to knock down most of Luce’s hopeful and unrealistic notions about the Eisenhower Administration.” But Luce did not abandon those notions. He told himself that Eisenhower had entered office too late to change the course of the Korean War, and that over time the administration’s foreign
policy would become more assertive and principled. He was encouraged in this hope by John Foster Dulles.
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Luce had a closer, and longer, relationship with Dulles than he had with Eisenhower. They were not intimate friends, but their relationship was pleasant and mutually useful. After a lunch with Dulles early in 1953, before Eisenhower’s inauguration, he wrote that he “could hardly contain myself for excitement because Dulles was unfolding a policy of action which comported entirely with my own views,” a policy that would take a more aggressive stand against Korea than the Truman administration had done and that would recognize the importance of “launching Chiang Kai-shek against the mainland.” Dulles “would not settle Korea on the present terms” and would favor a line “north of Pyongyang,” which would give South Korea 90 percent of the country. But these were not the views of Eisenhower, as both men soon realized.

In 1954 Luce launched a “reappraisal” of how the magazines should portray the world. A
Life
article, “Policy for Survival,” would, he hoped, become a “Spur-to-Action” to the president. For weeks memos flowed from his office to the editors of all three magazines, followed by lunches and meetings and arguments without end. Few of Luce’s colleagues would challenge him directly, but many of them were at least partially resistant to the dark and even brutal quality of his view of the world. “We estimate that the climactic crisis of the 20th Century is at hand,” Luce wrote ominously. It would require fighting “throughout and beyond” any conflict, as opposed to settling for half a loaf as in Korea. It meant taking “the offensive in Asia, seeking and using every opportunity to limit, reduce, undermine and destroy Armed Communism in Asia.” American leadership, he claimed, “is in a decline, neutralism and appeasement are growing among our allies, communism is gaining among the masses, and the Kremlin is coming daily closer to … the domination of the world.” The only policy that “will not carry the big nuclear risk is a policy of constant appeasement, or slow surrender…. In short: Pacifism.” The three pillars of a successful foreign policy, he argued, would be “the attainment of atomic supremacy,” the “liberation of China” through a “rollback of the Iron Curtain with tactical atomic weapons,” and a reaffirmation of “the historic American stand in world politics of being for governments of
free
people, for
free people
, by
free
people everywhere.”
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Like many such impassioned interventions, Luce’s muscular new policy found little support even within Time Inc., let alone in the administration he was trying to influence. He did not promote it for
long. Instead he tried to persuade himself that Eisenhower and Dulles were following something close to his own course, even if quietly. Dulles, he wrote, “is the champion of the proposition that politics (including international politics) has something to do with morals and that morals have something to do with God…. We must surely support [him] as vigorously as we can in this effort to establish a moral basis for our world politics.” Luce must certainly have recognized that Eisenhower had no such inclinations. The president was concerned more about the economic cost of an aggressive military posture than about its morality, and he—with Dulles’s perhaps-grudging support—created a foreign policy that differed relatively little from that of Truman and Acheson. Eisenhower did not attempt to “liberate” the captive nations; he mostly resisted defending countries and regions that were not of high strategic interest to the United States; and he refused to take active steps to “liberate” China. Dulles tried to compensate for Eisenhower’s restraint with a largely rhetorical policy of his own, which he announced in
Life
in January 1956: “brinkmanship”—the willingness to use nuclear weapons against Communist aggression rather than rely on the expensive and difficult ground wars that Eisenhower opposed. The article created a firestorm of criticism from those who saw Dulles’s piece as a recipe for nuclear war. But
Time
eagerly supported the policy and offered a litany of foreign-policy successes that it claimed had been the result of Dulles’s supposed strength: “The fears and feelings of U.S. allies … must be balanced [against] the necessity of keeping before the world’s mind the central fact of the peace: Communist aggression has been deterred only by the willingness and the ability of the free world to go to war rather than cringe before the threats.” In reality there was little evidence to suggest that the president had any real willingness to go to war, and even less evidence that the promise of “brinkmanship” (a promise never actually delivered) had any significant impact on policy or its results.
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Luce’s effort to promote an alternative to containment found a new target not long after the cease-fire in Korea: a war in Vietnam that had begun almost as soon as World War II ended. The conflict pitted the former French colonial rulers against a strong independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh, a Communist educated in Paris and Moscow and a fervent Vietnamese nationalist. During and after World War II, Ho led a growing nationalist movement known as the Vietminh. The Vietminh had opposed the Japanese during World War II. (Most of the French
evacuated when the war began, and the few who stayed mostly collaborated with the Japanese.) Only a little more than a year after the Japanese withdrawal, the French bureaucracy and military moved back into Vietnam and tried to regain control of the country, which the Vietminh had already declared an independent nation under their rule. By 1950 the French and the Vietminh were engaged in an open war, which dragged on for almost four years.

Watching this spectacle from afar, Luce was once again excited at the prospect of a confrontation with Communists in Asia. He hoped that with American help the war might drive out the Communists and reunite Vietnam. But he hoped even more that the conflict might also spread to Vietnam’s northern neighbor, China, opening up another opportunity for Chiang Kai-shek’s forces to resume their war against the Communists. As early as 1947
Time
was describing Vietnam as “the sickest part of ailing Asia today,” an observation accompanied by a strong warning from William Bullitt in
Life
of the danger of “Soviet control.” Luce soon latched onto Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the commander of French forces, whom he now saw as Vietnam’s MacArthur, and whom he invited to New York in hopes of strengthening American support for Indochina. “It makes me proud to think that I have been of some service to you and to our common cause,” he wrote de Lattre after one such visit. Luce himself visited Vietnam late in 1952 and, while critical of the French for their “lack of moral seriousness,” remained convinced that “the war can be won.” And if the Chinese were to intervene, he added provocatively, “it will be quite as convenient for us to destroy Chinese Communist armies in Indo-China as anywhere else.”
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Vietnam was, to Luce, another test of the willingness and ability of the United States to protect Asia from Communism. “There must be no more talk of a ‘hopeless war,’” he ordered his editors. When his star photographer-reporter David Douglas Duncan published an article in
Life
in August 1953 in which he correctly declared that the French had already effectively lost the war, Luce, as usual unaware of what appeared in his magazines until after it was published, put him on the “inactive list” and accused him of exercising a “seductive power over managing editors” and of having an “emotional attitude towards the French.” He then began a campaign of damage control in response to strong criticism from the French and from many American supporters of Vietnam.
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But Duncan soon proved to be the prescient one. Six months after his reviled article in
Life
appeared, the French army in Vietnam was hopelessly surrounded in an indefensible corner of North Vietnam,
Dien Bien Phu. A frenzied debate began in Washington over what the United States should do. Hard-liners within the administration—among them Vice President Richard Nixon—advocated U.S. military intervention against the Vietminh and even considered the use of atomic weapons. Luce, of course, was not privy to these secret deliberations, although he would likely have sided with the “no substitute for victory” mentality that shaped such views. But Eisenhower was not persuaded. The French surrendered and abandoned Indochina, which left the United States now the principal Western benefactor of Vietnam. Eisenhower settled for a negotiated partition of the country that, as in Korea, established a Communist north and a non-Communist south. Part of the peace agreement, hammered out at an international conference in Geneva, included a provision for elections to reunify the country within a few years.

Luce was dismayed by the “loss” of North Vietnam. He began to cultivate politicians and scholars who were part of the American Friends of Vietnam, which others soon began to call the “Vietnam lobby.” And unsurprisingly Luce began to encourage his magazines to portray North Vietnam as a grim and oppressive police state awash in propaganda. It was, in the words of a 1954
Time
article, a “land of compulsory joy.”
Time
gave particular attention to one such piece of propaganda: a Vietminh announcement that “the Viet Nam revolution is an integral part of the world revolution led by the Soviet Union.” And it noted that the “articulate” among the nearly half a million refugees who moved from the north to the south after the partition claimed that “the Viet Minh has destroyed the customs and friendlinesses of the past, and has spat upon family ties and religion.” What should be done? “In the Asia of victorious Ho Chi Minh and his big brother Mao, there are millions marooned upon desolate sandbars: the act of rescue, if these Asians this late are considered worth saving, will take power, humanity and a steely nerve.”
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And yet despite all the presumed parallels between the “loss” of North Vietnam and the “loss” of China, Luce was on the whole surprisingly restrained in his response to what he considered the disaster of the Vietminh’s victory. He retained a lifelong contempt for the men he believed had abandoned China—especially Dean Acheson and Harry Truman (whom Luce once called a “vulgar little babbitt”). But he continued to admire and support the men who effectively abandoned North Vietnam—Eisenhower and Dulles. That was partly because Vietnam was not China, not the land of his birth and of his continuing preoccupation.
But it was also because his stake in the success of a Republican government, and in his personal relationship with Eisenhower, outweighed his disappointment with the outcome of the Vietnam conflict. Decisions he would have pilloried mercilessly under Truman he quietly accepted under Eisenhower. More than that, he gradually pulled back from his aggressive prescription for American foreign policy and turned instead toward a campaign that, on the surface at least, appeared to be an example of the kind of soft idealism that he might once have scorned.
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Throughout the 1950s, and indeed throughout the remainder of his life, Luce developed a strong and growing commitment to what he liked to call “the rule of law.” His interest in the law was unusual among the great causes he had championed in the past in that it produced little controversy. Virtually no one could object to a defense of the law. But Luce’s reasons for this commitment were not as simple as they sometimes sounded. They were, in fact, a reflection of some of his deepest and most contested convictions.
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Among the first visible clues to Luce’s controversial view of the law was a speech he gave at a convocation at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1951 to mark the opening of a new legal center. At first Luce had been reluctant to participate. He had never studied law himself (with the exception of the summer when he was an undergraduate at Yale in which he took some law-school courses), and he had no particular expertise in any legal field. To prepare for the speech he browsed through some legal journals in search of inspiration, and he came across an article by a legal scholar, Harold MacKinnon. It attacked the jurisprudence of one of the giants of American law, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had sat on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. It might be too much to say that Luce’s subsequent interest in the law was the result of the serendipitous discovery of MacKinnon’s argument. But many of his activities on behalf of the law in the coming years reflected this first, powerful encounter with the legacy of Holmes.
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The problem with Holmes, Luce believed, was exactly what Holmes’s admirers most valued: his unromantic pragmatism, his brusque rejection of fixed belief. To Luce, Holmes’s legal philosophy was “agnostic, materialistic.” What had Holmes believed? “He believed, most importantly, that there is no ultimate truth anywhere to be believed in.” Luce, on the other hand, believed that the law—and most other areas of human existence—had no meaning without being rooted in some kind of universal truth. For Luce that truth was “natural law,”
and the belief that “we live in a moral universe,” and that the law must “conform to a moral order which is universal in time and space.” Without the “immutability and unity of truth,” not only the law but all of society would be rudderless, would “stand for nothing.” To Luce, although not to all critics of pragmatism, the only real alternative to materialism was faith. “Freedom is real because man is created by God in the ‘image’ of God. Man carries within him something that the merely animal does not have, the divine spark.” And so when Luce talked of the “rule of law,” he was not simply talking about statutes and precedents. He was evoking the long history of belief in God’s active presence in the world, and the existence of a universal set of truths derived from that presence.
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