The Publisher (77 page)

For more than two years beginning in the late 1950s, there were widespread efforts to determine why America appeared to be “falling behind.” In fact the United States, far from falling behind the Soviet Union, was still greatly surpassing it in wealth, science and technology, and military strength. The precipitants of the anxiety—
Sputnik
, Khrushchev’s visit, the U-2—were, in reality, symbolic and ephemeral events, or, in the case of the “space race,” the reflection of an inadequate investment in rocketry by the Eisenhower administration. But in the eyes of many Americans, Soviet achievements were by definition evidence of American failure; and the blame, many critics claimed, lay less with the government than with an insufficient commitment to the future of the nation by ordinary citizens. The “success” of the Soviet Union, Walter Lippmann wrote in late 1959, was a result of its ability to have created “a purposeful society in which all the main energies of the people are directed and dedicated to its purposes.” Americans, in contrast, “do not have great purposes which they are united in wanting to achieve…. We talk about ourselves these days as if we were a completed society, one which has achieved its purposes and has no further great business to transact.” Americans were becoming too soft and materialistic, other critics argued. What the country needed, they insisted, was a sense of “national purpose,” a bold and widely shared vision of what the United States should be. Few people embraced this view more enthusiastically than Luce, who now joined and, as always, hoped to lead the earnest search for the country’s new goals.
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Trying to change the world was nothing new for Luce. Like other sons and daughters of missionaries, he never stopped thinking about how to make the nation live up to the Providential righteousness of America’s destiny (a vision embedded in generations of American Presbyterian history). For years he had tried to define and promote America’s mission in his magazines and speeches (most notably, in his famous “American Century” essay) and in his occasional intrusions into politics. But Luce also exhorted (and often funded) others to study important national and international issues and provide answers to the endless questions with which he wrestled. He was a great champion of committees and commissions and believed that putting smart and eminent people together (he was drawn especially to what he called “philosophers and thinkers”) was always a good way to solve a problem. In 1946 he recruited Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, to form a Commission on Freedom of the Press. Its report disappointed him (“philosophically uninteresting”) but did not deter his interest in future inquiries. He eagerly joined (and helped to finance) the Fund for the Republic, another group of “eminent thinkers” gathered to answer big questions: “What is a truly free society? How can such a society be maintained?” He immersed himself in the work of the Rockefeller Brothers Study Group, which gathered “experts” to consider American defense policy. He helped organize an international Conference on Industrial Development in 1957, which focused on the relationship between economic growth and free labor. Luce pushed the group to consider “the responsibility of my country—America’s responsibility for the economic well-being of the world.”
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He was active as well in the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which proposed a “Free World Academy” (never created) to train people to “defend freedom.” (Norman Thomas, head of the American Socialist Party and one of the founders of the committee, resigned when Luce began to exercise leadership of the group; Luce, he believed, was turning the inquiry into Cold War propaganda. His dismay would likely have been even greater had he known that the committee was secretly funded by the CIA, a fact probably unknown to Luce as well.) Despite Thomas’s ill will, Luce developed an interest in socialism, noted its similarities to some of his own beliefs, and proposed an inquiry into “the notes of warning, still sounded by Thomas—specifically warnings against complacency over current U.S. prosperity.” He unsuccessfully invited Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota to form a committee to define what Humphrey liked to call “quantitative liberalism,” which Luce said contained “both much meaning and a lot of befuddlement.” Luce was often
rightly accused of bias and dogmatism, but he was also an intellectual omnivore, who devoured ideas from many sources and who sought out “interesting thinkers” on issue after issue.
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The growing interest in a “national purpose” was a natural cause for Luce to embrace. He asked Max Ways, now
Time
’s London bureau chief and a man Luce considered a “serious thinker,” to return to New York in 1958 to evaluate the magazines’ role in this new mission. Ways went further and wrote a book of his own,
Beyond Survival
, arguing for a more robust national commitment to the great goals the United States must embrace. Luce wrote an introduction to it calling for “the government and people of the United States to arrive at some convictions … about what they are doing in the world.” Luce had, he said, come to realize that the “most commonly shared opinion” in the nation was that the United States “lacks a clear sense of purpose in world activities.”
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Ways’s book, published in 1959, encouraged Luce to go further. He began summoning meetings in the Time-Life Building to discuss “an idea for bringing into sharper focus the current ground swell of interest in the National Purpose” and taking the lead in launching a “national conversation.” He invited philosophers, historians, sociologists, theologians, and many others to attend lunches, dinners, and daylong meetings. He considered creating a
“Life
contest” for “uncovering big thoughts from humble minds.” And he charged his own staff, and many others, to come up with “‘original’ statements on new basic principles.” Those principles might be few—“two, or three, or four,” Luce told his somewhat puzzled staff—“but certainly principles we must stand for and must be involved in our judgment—and our judgment in turn, we hope, working always on knowledge and more knowledge and understanding of what goes on in this extraordinary world.” The search for a national purpose, he said, would be an “‘adventure’ on a colossal scale.” It would be “dangerous,” a “formidable task,” for which the American people must be “nerved.” That could be achieved only by strong leadership—not just from political figures but also intellectual leaders, like Luce himself and like the big thinkers and influential men who were his usual companions in his search for “answers.” Americans, he complained, “had tried to escape from leadership…. Here we are at the beginning of a really possible golden age of western culture, and you still want to believe that tending to wealth alone will give culture and a decent standard of living to all men on earth.”
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As the clamor for a definition of “national purpose” grew in Eisenhower’s last years in office, the president attracted increasing criticism
for what seemed his own inadequate embrace of the challenge. In response, early in 1960 he summoned a President’s Commission on National Goals that he charged with sounding “a call for greatness to a resolute people.” Its report, issued in November shortly after the 1960 presidential election and titled
Goals for Americans
, was a pale restatement of long-standing Cold War convictions: that Americans should “preserve and enlarge our own liberties, to meet a deadly menace, and to extend the area of freedom through the world.” Americans should make democracy in the United States “more effective” and should make individual lives “freer and more rewarding.” The public response was tepid, and at times scornful. It was, the historian Stephen Graubard wrote, a “dreary piece” with no real substance. Even
Life
, which seldom criticized Eisenhower, noted its “generally indifferent and partly hostile press.”
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By early 1960 Luce had settled on a plan of his own that was in many ways strikingly similar to Eisenhower’s. He too would assemble a group of “big thinkers,” just as Eisenhower had tried to do. And he would commission a series of “big essays” on the national purpose to be published in
Life
(and copublished by the
New York Times
) over several months. The idea had emerged from a series of private meetings Luce had arranged with “brainy people” such as Dean Rusk, soon to be secretary of state, and James Conant, former president of Harvard. Their conclusion was “to get six or seven men of light and leading to state positively what the ‘national purpose’ of the U.S. is or ought to be.” Here, Luce deviated sharply from Eisenhower. He did not attempt to create a consensual report, which he predicted would be as bland and uninteresting as the president’s. But essays by individuals, he predicted, would lead to “various ways by which many thousands of people may participate in the discussion.” The “six or seven” essayists soon grew to ten (all men), and they were indeed distinguished thinkers and leaders drawn from what was by then known as the establishment: John K. Jessup, chief editorial writer for
Life
and the overseer of the project; Adlai Stevenson, two-time Democratic candidate for president; Archibald MacLeish, poet, playwright, and former Luce employee; David Sarnoff, founder and chairman of NBC; Billy Graham, the most famous evangelist in America; John Gardner, philanthropist and educational leader; Clinton Rossiter, eminent political scientist; Albert Wohlstetter, project director at the Rand Corporation; James Reston,
New York Times
editorial writer; and the columnist Walter Lippmann.
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“More than anything else,” Luce wrote in his foreword to the book that followed the magazine and newspaper publication of the essays,
“the people of America are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose…. From all over the land, there is evidence that this is what Americans are worrying about.” The ten earnest essays that emerged from Luce’s “National Purpose” project were far more interesting than the Eisenhower-commissioned study of the same subject, if only because they were by individual authors whose views were not always the same.

Not surprisingly the most common definition of a “national purpose” in the Luce-inspired essays was “freedom”—freedom as defined by the Declaration of Independence (“the pursuit of Happiness”) and freedom as defined by the past century of American experience (“the right of men to choose their own ideas and pursuits, to be free from the arbitrary intervention of governments, to ‘do what they like with their own’”). The “National Purpose” writers struggled to find a more robust and communal vision of freedom, something that would not only ensure individual happiness but would also enlist the broad public behind urgent national goals. Some called for a greater sense of shared morality, based in the founding documents of the Republic or in religious faith. “We must recapture our moral strength and our faith in God,” Billy Graham wrote. Others called for greater “discipline,” “hard work,” “seriousness,” and “sacrifice.” But what would such individual commitments mean? One answer was practical: paying higher taxes to fund the Cold War or to meet urgent social needs. Another was moral energy. To some of the writers there was something unattractively self-indulgent about rampant consumerism, or what Archibald MacLeish described as “the flatulence and fat of an overfed people whose children prepare at the milk-shake counter for coronary occlusions in middle age.” The people, as much as the government, needed a far more serious commitment to “large goals.” To Clinton Rossiter the great challenge was “the steadily widening gap between the richness of our private lives and the poverty of our public services,” an idea likely inspired by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s popular 1958 book,
The Affluent Society
.

Running through almost all the essays, however, was the question that had inspired the entire National Purpose project in the first place: Was America “winning” the Cold War? Few writers were as blunt as David Sarnoff, whose vision of a national purpose was “a Program for a Political Offensive Against World Communism.” But almost all shared at least some part of Sarnoff’s fearful vision. “For the first time in American experience,” Walter Lippmann wrote, “we are confronted with a rival power which denies the theory and the practice of our society, and has forced upon us a competition for the leadership of the world.” Stevenson called for “recovering the public image of a great America”
and for the “certain knowledge all round the world” that challenging the allure of Communism “and nothing less had been for years the public policy of the United States.” MacLeish urged an expansion of America’s confrontation with Communism from Europe to Africa, Latin America, and Asia. “The most important implication of our great prosperity,” Albert Wohlstetter argued, “is that we can afford larger efforts … for protecting the political independence and self-development of the noncommunist world.”

Only James Reston seriously challenged the premises of the National Purpose project. The solution to the nation’s problems, he insisted, did not lie in the character or behavior of the people. “Most of the great political crises of the American past,” he wrote, “have been resolved by the will power or obstinacy of their leaders.” Americans had accepted the sacrifices their government had asked: high taxation, military conscription, policing the world. “These are not the acts of a slack and decadent people. There is nothing in the record of free peoples to compare with it.”
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Judged by its impact on its own time, the National Purpose project would have to be considered a success. The essays had a broad readership, in
Life
, in the
New York Times
, and in the subsequent book. They attracted much comment and considerable critical praise. The National Education Association, the Brookings Institution, and dozens of other organizations embraced the project and helped disseminate it. The book was circulated widely in schools and universities and remained a prominent and respected text into at least the mid-1960s. After the 1960 political conventions, both candidates—Nixon and Kennedy—contributed essays to the project, which, although too late for inclusion in the book, were published in
Life
and other venues. But it would be hard to argue that the project achieved its ostensible purpose as “a summons, of some urgency, to national debate.” Nor have the essays survived as texts important to later generations. Taken together they were more confirming than alarming—thoughtful and intelligent statements of a broadly accepted set of conventional assumptions about American life at a particular moment. But for Luce, at least, they served his purpose: challenging what he had come to consider the complacency of his age, helping to push others to think more boldly about, if not a national “purpose,” at least a national agenda.
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