The Publisher (66 page)

Luce outlined a course for Chiang that he still believed might change the outcome. If there could be “massive evidence that there does in fact exist in China a wide-spread will and determination to resist Communist domination,” the regime might still survive. For that to happen Chiang would need to “declare that the Yangtze will be defended under your personal leadership,” that he should “give to the ablest man in China not counting yourself the task of forming an entirely new government whose primary requisite shall be a capacity to govern,” that there should be “a mighty demonstration of loyalty to this government by governors of provinces, mayors of cities, leading intellectuals and other representative men.” But even as he wrote this hopeful, hopeless proposal, the man he was attempting to persuade was preparing for his exodus to Formosa. Chiang’s response to Luce was friendly but pointedly evasive: “Your implicit faith in the cause of China’s prolonged struggle against world totalitarianism will not fail to cheer the bleeding hearts of my people.” Meanwhile, at a managing editors’ lunch that Luce did not attend, Max Ways, the
Time
foreign editor, said bluntly: “We have lost China. The Communists do provide ‘law and order,’ and hence temporary prosperity. I suspect Luce has led us into folly and dead-ends with his China ideas during [the] last fifteen years.” No one contradicted him. Luce was now almost alone in his own company.
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T
he twenty-fifth anniversary of
Time
magazine in 1948 coincided with Luce’s fiftieth birthday. Despite the lavish celebratory dinners and the generally positive coverage of these landmarks, both events seemed to hit him hard. His marriage was in disarray. His company was beset by troubles. His beloved China was slipping from his grasp and into the hands of the Communists. To his colleagues he seemed even more restless and impatient than usual—frustrated by his inability to shape events as he wished, overwhelmed with ideas for which he could find no adequate outlet.

Allen Grover, one of Luce’s closest associates, believed after spending several weeks traveling with him in Europe that Luce was “getting bored with his office job at Time,” that he felt that he had “nobody to talk to in the U.S., nobody of his intellectual level.” Grover continued:

Billings, Grover’s partner in analyzing Luce’s state of mind, wrote of “the depth of [Luce’s] professional melancholy.” His conversations were
“practically impossible to transcribe…. So much of his communication is by gesture and expression … nobody would believe it…. He says that it is no use talking to stupid people and most people are stupid. He is utterly arrogant in his manners; his tempers are sharp and awful…. We wondered if, for all his brilliance, he was going crazy.”
¹

Grover and Billings were not alone in their views. A
Business Week
reporter, interviewing Luce for a twenty-fifth-anniversary story on
Time
, recorded his impressions of their conversation:

Stories abounded of Luce’s increasing distraction. Colleagues reported that at lunches and dinners, he would talk almost incessantly, shoveling food into his mouth as he did so, and then—at the end—having no memory of having eaten and asking indignantly why the meal had not yet been served. At one lunch he overlooked the meal he had ordered and unthinkingly ate only a platter of green beans that happened to be near his seat. When a soufflé was presented at Luce’s table at an opulent meal in Paris, he took a forkful and waved it over the dish interminably while his dismayed guests (and the chef) watched the soufflé collapse. He dressed expensively, but it was not usually noticeable. His secretary frequently called Luce’s home and had items delivered to his office because he so often wore unmatched shoes or socks.
²

By 1950 Luce appeared to be considering alternative paths in life. Early that year Connecticut Republicans approached Clare to see if she would be a candidate for the U.S. Senate. She declined but suggested trying to recruit Harry. And for several weeks, despite his previous refusal in the 1940s, he thought seriously about running. He had a “definite interest,” Luce told the
New York Times
in January. “Several Republican leaders who seemed very much to want me have asked me to think about it, and I am thinking about it.” He discussed the possibility with his editorial staff, insisting that he was unlikely to run but talking at length about the attractions of doing so. He felt, he said, “like a Pentagon general of propaganda who had a chance to get up under fire on the front lines.” How could he say no? But at other times he claimed to be miserable at the
prospect of entering politics. “I shouldn’t have gotten into this and it’s going to take a lot of coping for me to get out,” he complained. Part of what worried him was the prospect of running against his friend and Yale classmate, William Benton, who was up for reelection. But the real obstacle was his fear of giving up his magazines and the power they gave him—power that he rightly believed was greater than any he could wield in the Senate. Weary as he may have been with running the company, he could not give it up. Early in February he announced he would not enter the Senate race.
³

In the late summer of 1950 he announced that he would take a year’s leave from Time Inc. “to collect his thoughts and travel.” Billings would run the company in his absence and would even move into Luce’s own, palatial office as a symbol of his new, if temporary, authority. But as with the Senate race, Luce wavered, even after he had announced his decision. “He just sits in his office, doing nothing and staring off into space,” Grover reported. “He seems in the depths of gloom: certainly the happy prospect of a year off hasn’t lifted his spirits…. [He] hates New York because he has been a personal failure here, has not established himself and Clare socially among New Yorkers. True! True!!” (Luce even talked at times, probably not very seriously, of moving the company out of the city—to Indiana, or Texas, or Westchester.) His longtime secretary, alarmed at his pending departure (and the disruption of her own routine as a result) began telling Billings what had once been carefully guarded secrets about Luce’s life and his marriage. “Clare has no friends, and neither does Harry,” she confided. Ed Thompson, the editor of
Life
, said that Luce was “very lonely.” Billings wrote that Luce’s “nerves are shot…. He’s in bad shape.” Once his sabbatical formally began, Luce continued to find excuses to return to the building, many of them connected to the roller-coaster course of the Korean War. Early in 1951 he abandoned the sabbatical altogether, moved back into his office, and tried to pretend nothing had changed.
⁴

But things had changed. More than ever Luce felt isolated in his own company, unable to control the magazines as he wished and unable fully to articulate his own aspirations for them. As was often the case, he responded to frustration with travel—serious, purposeful, almost obsessive travel that would, he believed, help him understand the new postwar world that he still hoped to shape. “He seems to feel happily useful,” Billings told Grover, “only when he is on large tours of inquiry, shooting through the firmament like an inquisitive comet.” Luce took exhausting trips around the United States, calling on mayors, governors, business
leaders, and what he liked to call “characters”: “my favorite College President … [a] rich, civilized land owner … a busy country doctor … the civic-leading Rotarian … three fine, salty female characters.” In the space of a few weeks, he visited Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Boise, Seattle, Portland. On a later trip he went to Cincinnati and to Dallas, Fort Worth, and Snyder, Texas, and then, on another, to Chicago, Anaconda, Butte, and (again) Seattle and Portland. These travels seemed at least temporarily to refresh him, and he wrote back to his editors with enthusiasm about the “new America” he was discovering. Even in the smallest, least lovely towns, he found inspiration: “The Americans of Butte, Montana … do a job—a whale of a job, and they seem to be doing their big job with a) a considerable amount of fair and friendly dealing with each other; and b) a belief in progress.”
⁵

His trips outside the United States were even more frequent and more frantic. He often claimed that he did not want to spend his time meeting with important people, but in fact he did almost nothing else. The hapless Time Inc. correspondents in the cities he visited often spent nervous weeks organizing his meetings and events before confronting the tornado of his presence. “Our Mr. Luce … came and went, leaving us, among other things, completely limp and worn out,” one of his Time Inc. hosts wrote after a Luce sojourn in Brazil. It turned, she said, “into a mad whirl for all concerned and toward the end took on … gigantic proportions.” In the course of only a few days, he met with the president, a cardinal, the American ambassador (for a state dinner), ministers, business leaders, and one of the country’s biggest ranchers. In England he met with both Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, the first Labour Party prime minister, and left encouraged that Britain was not in fact turning into a socialist society. After a trip to the Continent—where he visited Germany and Austria—he wrote ebulliently about the progress American reconstruction had made and noted that there was “more political vitality in Europe of a non-Communist or anti-Communist nature than I had supposed.” Grover, after reading Luce’s copious memos of his travels, warned his colleagues that “the Boss has rediscovered Europe.” Having made the rediscovery, Luce made repeated return visits. After a 1949 trip his office compiled a list of the people he had met—more than a hundred, among them the pope, the presidents or prime ministers of Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and France, princes and princesses, statesmen, writers, and artists, Charles de Gaulle, Jean Monnet, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. After a trip around the “rim of Asia,” he compiled another such list of those he had
spoken with “at serious length”: the presidents of South Korea, Nationalist China, and the Philippines, the emperor and prime minister of Vietnam, the prime minister of Japan, and more than a dozen other governors, ambassadors, and ministers. “After all these encounters,” Luce noted proudly, “I flew in 33 hours, 8,000 miles from Singapore to London to dine at 10 Downing Street with Winston Churchill.”
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When he journeyed to more remote places, in which the famous and powerful were rare, he became an avid travel writer, producing long personal accounts of the landscapes, the people, and the cultures he encountered. On a trip through the Middle East, during which he visited Iran and the lands along the southern border of the Soviet Union, he wrote of the exoticism of the region: the “endless void” of the Persian deserts, the crude construction techniques of railroads in Tabriz, the strange markets in Azerbaijan, the shapes of mountains, trees, orchards, the lives of border patrols, men riding donkeys. But when he arrived later in Beirut, he reverted to his usual tendency to admire what was most “American” about the rapidly changing world. He was dazzled by the modern, business-driven city and its “American-minded” people. Its Western universities (most prominent of them the American University in Beirut) were, he said, “wonderful advertisements of what we like to think of as the ‘best’ in American life.”
⁷

Luce almost always considered the places he visited of enormous interest and importance, but he had a particular and somewhat gloomy fascination with the Arab world. The creation of Israel, he wrote, “was a shocking surprise to the Arabs and produced a reaction of bewildered disillusionment and hostility to the U.S. The Arabs are unable to explain the U.S. intervention except on the theory that America is literally ruled by the Jews.” U.S. support of Zionism had, Luce said, left “a trail of social injustice and the smell of injustice.” But always the optimist, he felt certain that “this bleeding can be stopped” if America would choose to act. “A Theodore Roosevelt, I believe, could settle this matter in a week.”
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Luce’s travels proved to be only intermittent distractions from the growing troubles facing his company in the dawning years of the Cold War. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers—no longer
Time’s
foreign editor but still a “special writer” for the magazine—testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and accused Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, of having been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. At first the accusation seemed
wholly implausible. Hiss was a respected diplomat who had accompanied Franklin Roosevelt to Yalta, had helped draft the United Nations Charter, and was a friend and associate of Dean Acheson, soon to become secretary of state. Hiss heatedly denied the charges and insisted he had never met Chambers (although he later conceded that he might have known him under another name). Given the contrast between the smooth, sleek, well-dressed Hiss and the rumpled, overweight, agitated Chambers, many people doubted the charges. But dogged Republicans, chief among them the first-term representative Richard Nixon, continued to pursue the case and kept it alive. In October, Hiss sued Chambers for libel. Chambers responded by making a new and explosive accusation. Hiss, he said, had not just been a Communist but also a spy for the Soviet Union. To support his claim he presented several reels of microfilm, which he had hidden in a pumpkin in the garden of his Westminster, Maryland, farm. The “pumpkin papers” seemed to support Chambers’s story, and Hiss—although not yet without influential supporters—began his long, lonely years of prosecution, imprisonment, disgrace, and struggle for vindication that continued, unsuccessfully, for the rest of his life. (Classified Soviet documents released in the 1990s seemed to confirm Chambers’s claim that Hiss had participated in espionage.)
⁹