The Publisher (65 page)

In the spring of 1946 Secretary of State James Byrnes proposed Wedemeyer as ambassador to China, a position that had remained unfilled since 1941. To prepare himself the general began communicating with Luce, over dinners when he was in New York, through correspondence when he was away. “When I take over,” he wrote Luce,

Months later Wedemeyer learned that he would not receive the ambassadorship, which would go instead to Leighton Stuart. Wedemeyer himself was “disappointed but not angry,” one of Luce’s deputies reported. But he did show some bitterness, and he claimed that John Carter Vincent and others in the State Department had fought his appointment “to the bitter end.” Luce himself, of course, had been to a large degree responsible for Stuart’s appointment as ambassador. But that did not stop him from being drawn into the group who saw Wedemeyer as a martyr to the cause of China.
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A year later, at about the same time that Bullitt went to China for
Life
, Luce learned from Wedemeyer that Marshall had asked him to
return to China and prepare a report on how “to salvage the rapidly deteriorating situation.” It is difficult to understand why Marshall decided to entrust such a sensitive assignment to Wedemeyer, whose views were very different from his own. But the decision likely reflected Marshall’s respect for Wedemeyer’s military prowess. “It is obvious to you,” Wedemeyer wrote to Luce, “that although our government has committed itself openly and firmly to counter the spread of communism through the Balkans and in Western Europe, paradoxically we are refusing to apply a similar policy in the Far East.” He was, he said, “determined to submit recommendations [to Marshall] … that will embody ideas that have been evolved as the result of years of study of history.”
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On his return from China Wedemeyer offered Luce a summary of his findings. Much of it, to Luce’s dismay, was harshly critical of Chiang and his government: terrible relationships between officers and enlisted men in the Kuomintang army; “widespread corruption and incompetence” in the government; the blindness of Chiang and other Nationalist leaders to the dire condition of his regime. “I doubt seriously that [Chiang] realized the true conditions that prevail,” he wrote. But Wedemeyer nevertheless strongly recommended the provision of up to ten thousand military “advisors” to the Chinese army, a United Nations guardianship of northeastern China (a stronghold of the Soviets and the Chinese Communists), and significant additional American aid to the Chiang regime unconnected to reforms in his government. The report—which Luce and others eagerly awaited as a last chance for moving American policy toward a stronger defense of Nationalist China—did not appear, despite Luce’s strenuous efforts to persuade Marshall to release it. “Pressure from every facet is being placed upon me,” Wedemeyer told Luce. His efforts, he said, were being “stultified by vacillatory or European-conscious State Department officials…. I have pointed out to [Marshall] the implications of delay concerning the implementation of my recommendations, but so far nothing has happened.” Luce directed his editors to insert an ominous and incendiary note into
Time:

The answer, as Luce obviously suspected, was the State Department. Unhappy with Wedemeyer’s aggressive recommendations and, particularly, with his proposal to deploy American military advisers in China, Marshall and his colleagues first asked the general to amend his report, and then, when he refused, buried it.
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Not until two years later did the Wedemeyer report become public, deep in the annexes of a massive State Department white paper defending American policy. The white paper defended the “suppression” of the report in 1947 by claiming that Wedemeyer’s criticisms of the Chiang regime would have demoralized the Chinese government. The heart of the white paper, however, was a sharp rebuke to Luce and others who continued to claim that American policy was responsible for the defeat of the Nationalists. The blame for the “fall of China” fell, it argued, squarely on the shoulders of the Kuomintang, which “had apparently lost the crusading spirit that won them the people’s loyalty during the early years of the war.” Nationalist China had “sunk into corruption … and into reliance on the United States to win the war for them…. The reasons for the failures of the Chinese National Government … do not stem from any inadequacy of American aid…. [The Kuomintang’s] leaders proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops had lost the will to fight, and the Government had lost popular support.” This assessment, not surprisingly, enraged Luce and many other supporters of Nationalist China and greatly increased the bitterness that the Communist victory had already created. The “suppression” of the Wedemeyer report in 1947 and its eventual replacement by the State Department’s white paper became still more fodder for the belief that there had been a government-inspired conspiracy to undermine the survival of a non-Communist China.
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By early 1948 the situation in China was beginning to seem irretrievable; and while the Truman administration continued to insist that it was committed to the Nationalist government, material support from the United States was diminishing. Marshall had come to believe that defeating the Chinese Communists in the field was “an absolute military impossibility.” (Hence his ultimately unsuccessful effort to defeat the
Communists politically, through a coalition.) He was also convinced that the Nationalist army would not fight and that providing them with weapons was the same as arming the Communists. “Thirty-three divisions laid down their arms without a battle,” he told a group of reporters in a private meeting, “so their equipment—the stuff we supplied them out of our reserves—is now in communist hands without a struggle.” But the grim military prospects were only part of the calculation. Marshall and Truman also believed that the stakes in China were not high enough to justify an American intervention that was certain to be costly and had no assurance of success. “There are only four great centers of resources outside the U.S. which concern me a whit,” Marshall told the reporters. “These are in Japan, Germany, England, and Russia. China has no resources other than manpower, and there is a real question in my mind whether this great mass of manpower is an asset or liability.”
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For Luce, however, and for many others, no price could have been too high to defeat the Communists in China and preserve the Nationalist government. The cost of failure would be not only the loss of what Luce considered a great ally that could become an important asset to the democratic West. It would also be the beginning of Soviet domination of China and, eventually, all of Asia—a fundamental shift in geopolitical power. The unraveling of Kuomintang China was an almost unbearable prospect for Luce, especially as he saw many of the people who shared his commitment to China begin to turn away from the great project of saving it.
“Time
itself has not always been right,” the disillusioned Time Inc. reporter William Gray wrote from Shanghai, “and I hope your approach does not indicate any upcoming claim of omniscience on China…. In China even American businessmen accuse
Time …
of giving a ‘distorted picture without ever telling a specific lie.’” Luce ignored Gray’s evaluation in much the same way that he had rejected White’s.
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In May, Luce persuaded the Truman administration to send Charles Stillman, the president of the recently created Henry Luce Foundation, to China to help distribute American aid. “Charlie Stillman is the greatest single contribution which we of Time Inc. could make to the cause of upbuilding China…. He is
not
a diplomat or a college professor or a parlor pink or a rabble rouser,” he wrote. “He is a businessman.” But like the many other military officers, diplomats, reporters, businessmen, and philanthropists who had tried to rationalize the funding of the Nationalist government, Stillman found himself an impotent witness to the corruption and incompetence of the Kuomintang regime.
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As one effort after another collapsed, Luce became increasingly desperate
and bitter. He used his magazines to express his own more and more isolated views. “American behavior in and toward China has been the most completely disastrous failure of U.S. foreign policy since the war,” he wrote in
Life
. He leaped at even the most implausible proposals—including a vague and quixotic plan to energize Christians in China (“a simple concrete idea which … might help to solve the vexing problem of America’s relation to China”). He used memos to his staff to vent his frustration. “What happens next in China?” he wrote angrily in August 1948. “What, if anything, does the U.S.A. prefer to have happen? One answer, of course, might be that the U.S.A. doesn’t and shouldn’t give a bloody damn.” As the end approached and all hope vanished, he began to make the case for what might have happened had the United States acted more forcefully. The Truman administration had made three mistakes, he later wrote: “not to take Communism seriously enough … not to take China seriously enough …[and] to permit a personal distaste for Chiang Kai-shek to influence U.S. policy toward his government.” Had the United States not given up on the Kuomintang too early, if the Soviets had not been allowed to enter Manchuria, if American forces had remained in China after the war, everything might have been different. And perhaps most of all he sought, almost wistfully, to rehabilitate the now-widely discredited Chiang, whom Luce continued to revere as one of the great figures in history. Chiang, he insisted, had retained the support of the Chinese people until war (and ungenerous critics) undermined him:

As the dark year of 1948 progressed, Luce clung to a single hope: a Republican administration that would surely, he thought, commit itself more effectively to the defense of China. He was a strong supporter of Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a onetime isolationist who had converted to the new internationalism of the postwar era. But Vandenberg was never a serious contender, and Luce eventually had to place his hopes in a candidate he had never much liked: Governor Thomas E.
Dewey of New York, running for president in his second consecutive election. “We lack big men, leaders or potential leaders, men of talent and integrity,” Luce had complained in 1946, clearly remembering the death of Willkie and his disappointment in Dewey in 1944. But he eagerly embraced the great opportunity he believed the Republicans had. Democratic unity, he said, was “coming apart at the seams.” The country was “clearly in a more conservative mood.” And Truman himself was so deeply unpopular that even Democrats were dismayed. (
Time
described the audience’s reaction to a Truman speech at a Democratic fund-raiser as “polite, bored tolerance toward the man they are stuck with in 1948.”)
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Luce began a speech in the spring of 1948 with an almost cocky certainty: “On January 20, 1949, the businessmen of the United States will celebrate the [Republican] party’s return to power after sixteen years in the wilderness.” His own certitude drove
Time
’s reporting, which also threw caution to the wind. With unusual rashness the magazine repeatedly presented Truman’s candidacy as doomed to defeat. “Only a political miracle or extraordinary stupidity on the part of the Republicans,” the magazine claimed in March, “could save the Democratic party, after 16 years of power, from a debacle in November.” Dewey and his running mate, California governor Earl Warren, constituted “the kind of ticket that could not fail to sweep the Republican Party back into power.” Occasional stories toward the end of the campaign noted reviving enthusiasm for Truman, but
Time
never wavered in its confidence in the outcome. As late as November 1, the magazine crowed that the day of the Republican return to power was “surely at hand.”
Life
prepared a single photograph for its postelection cover: a smiling Dewey—but fortunately for the magazine, it was not ready in time for publication before the election.
“Time
was just as wrong as everybody else,” the magazine sheepishly reported once it was clear that Truman had won.
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By then, however, the chances of reversing the course of events in China had already vanished. Not even a committed Republican administration would have been able to save Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. “Our Christmas skies are darkened this year by the disasters which have overtaken your country,” Luce wrote Chiang on December 24. “Be assured that your friends here know, as history will surely make clear, that you have fought with integrity of purpose for a cause you have cherished more dearly than any personal fate.” On the same day he told colleagues at Time Inc. more bluntly that China was “down the drain, and what can the U.S. do about it?” Someone suggested “gunboats,” but
Luce said no, “that’s 19th century British policy.” And yet even then Luce could not abandon hope. Once again he made the lonely rounds in Washington, where all the officials he met continued to state the administration’s official position: “There is no disposition on the part of the U.S. government to give up China as a lost cause.” But it was obvious to almost everyone that these pronouncements meant nothing, that the United States was helpless to reverse the Communist victory. The government was continuing to support a non-Communist China only to defend itself from criticism.