The Publisher (57 page)

It was not only Russia and China that drew Luce more deeply into battle. His concerns extended to American politics and the state of the world. The nation’s entry into the war, far from calming Luce’s fears, had launched him into a period of ideological and political crusading far more fervent and dogmatic than during any earlier period of his life. The hard certainty of his own views—about how to fight the war, about how to plan for peace, and about who should lead the nation—made him increasingly vocal, both in his own public statements and in what he demanded of his magazines.

Among other things the war years intensified Luce’s already strong dislike of Franklin Roosevelt. His contempt for the president was based in part on Luce’s assessment of Roosevelt as a man without conviction or principle, unreliable and frequently dishonest, unfit for the great moral project that Luce believed the war demanded. He was not alone in finding Roosevelt frustratingly evasive. Even the president’s own aides and allies understood that he confided fully in no one and that he was a fundamentally political man despite his occasional flights of idealism. But
most of those who knew Roosevelt well recognized the great strengths of his political nature and believed that he was moving the nation in the right direction, even if not always boldly. Luce had no such faith in the president’s aims, and he was constantly incensed by what he considered the administration’s failure to move forcefully and clearly enough into the fray. At least equally important was his deep personal dislike of Roosevelt—a dislike that was clearly mutual.

The feud between Roosevelt and Time Inc. picked up in January 1942 almost exactly where it had left off the previous December, with a new dispute over the coverage of Latin America. A story in
Life
, published shortly after Pearl Harbor, made an erroneous reference to a “U.S. [Air] Field” in Brazil. A few weeks later a
Time
article entitled a story on a Pan-American Congress in Rio de Janeiro as a “Big Roundup” and referred to “corralling the 21 American republics into a homogeneous herd.” The Brazilian and Chilean governments both protested, and Roosevelt once again lashed out. “Honestly I think that something has got to be done about Luce and his papers…. What to do about this attitude, which is definitely unpatriotic in that it is harmful to the U.S. to a very great degree.” Even some of Roosevelt’s aides were surprised at the strength of the president’s anger, and they worked to calm him down. Stephen Early, the president’s press secretary, told him that, “in all fairness,” Luce had received approval from both the American and the Brazilian governments for the material in question. The editors at
Time
also argued about how to respond. Eric Hodgins urged his colleagues to use more “sedate language” in describing South American affairs, but Manfred Gottfried,
Time
’s managing editor, snapped back that they should “tell F.D.R. to go jump in the Potomac … the hell with sedate language!”
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Days later George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, summoned Luce to Washington and (as Billings recorded Luce’s account) “gave him and the company the devil, just on general principles…. Marshall raked up all the past grievances—and warned that the Luce papers must behave themselves.” Everyone assumed that it was Roosevelt who had ordered up the “verbal caning.” Several weeks later the president continued to fume about the “Luce papers” and ordered Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to file a “formal protest with Mr. Luce” on all articles “which in any way hurt the Good Neighbor policy with Latin America or tend to promote disunity among any of the United Nations…. In other words, it is time to build up a complete case.” Welles, like Early, tried to assure Roosevelt that Luce was being cooperative, but to little avail.
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Luce was enough of a realist to understand that a public fight with the president in wartime was not in his own or his company’s interest. But like the president, his hatred continued to burst to the surface time and again, even though, also like the president, he faced constant efforts by his staff to keep him calm. “A session in Larsen’s office … on Luce’s anti-Roosevelt attitude,” Billings wrote early in 1942. “You can’t fight the Prex. Of the U.S. in wartime and expect to win.” But Luce would not be deterred. Although he grudgingly permitted favorable coverage of Roosevelt by reporters and editors who admired the president, he pushed continually for more negative portrayals: “Do you realize what it means to have the President of the U.S. treated as a ‘battleship’ …?” he told his editors in 1943. “Nothing is doing more to create a misunderstanding between the U.S. and other peoples than the exported adulation of F.D.R. The notion that F.D.R. is adored by all Americans (except a few evil millionaires) is not only a dangerous lie; it is also just a plain lie.” He did not restrict his complaints to his own staff. He wrote testily to other journalists about their attitude toward the president. “Has Ray Clapper bowed down to the doctrine of the Indispensable Man or Men?” he asked the prominent columnist. “Are we hereafter helpless without Fuhrers singular or plural?”
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But Luce’s hatred of Roosevelt was not just political. It was also intensely personal, and nothing stoked his resentment more effectively than the president’s decision to bar him from traveling abroad during wartime. Roosevelt was careful to announce the ban as a matter of general principle: “On account of the extreme stringency of transportation, credentials at present are not being issued … to publishers, editors, and executives who wish to make visits to combat areas.” Roosevelt’s dislike of publishers was long-standing and well founded, and the new policy had the advantage of barring many people he disliked from traveling and finding new ways to criticize him. He was certainly as eager to keep the rabidly anti-Roosevelt publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
, Col. Robert R. McCormick, from traveling to the war zones as he was to bar Luce. But the ban, which was announced just as Luce was applying for permission to travel to China, was primarily directed at him—as Secretary of War Henry Stimson, unhappily saddled with the job of explaining the ban to him, privately confirmed in his diary: “It arose apparently out of the White House’s rumpus with Luce.” For almost three years he battled to have the restrictions lifted. “I am not, to be sure, a regular correspondent,” Luce wrote Army Chief of Staff Marshall, whom Roosevelt had asked to enforce the ban. “But I take personal responsibility for reporting
the war to upward of 20,000,000 Americans…. Surely it should not seem odd or unreasonable that I should have an occasional opportunity to visit the fighting fronts.” The relatively reasonable tone of his imploring letters to Washington only occasionally revealed how distraught and angry he was. “It is, I am sure, unnecessary to point out to you how painful this situation has been for me personally,” he wrote Marshall at one low moment. To others he spoke privately about what he considered a “deliberate insult,” an act of “petty retribution,” and an example of “vindictive and arbitrary power.” Eventually the White House gave him permission to visit England, using the pretext that Britain was not technically a theater of war. But the ban on traveling elsewhere remained in place until after Roosevelt’s death.
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If Roosevelt believed that barring Luce from the war zones would limit his ability to attack the administration, he was badly mistaken. Had Luce been allowed to travel, he would likely have spent much of his time visiting battlefields, writing enthusiastically about the American military, and serving as a cheerleader for the war. But stuck in New York, he was led by his anger at Roosevelt and his own frustration at being isolated from the most important event of his lifetime into a sullen period of hard-edged partisanship.

He insisted that the president had “fumbled the crisis.” He expressed contempt for “the idea that Roosevelt alone did his job with anything more than average courage or average efficiency.” The president’s consistent “deceit” was something that “even my tin-lined stomach can’t quite digest.” The administration was “tired and stale in seventeen symptoms.” Roosevelt exhibited a “capacity for cheapening the finer traditions of America.” Luce wrote particularly harshly about the emerging consensus that Roosevelt had been a skillful steward of foreign policy leading up to the war. On the contrary, Luce charged, the president “was in the 1930’s the high priest of the isolationist-pacifism of that decade.” Claims to the contrary were the result of “successful, almost completely untruthful propaganda.” Roosevelt, he wrote toward the end of the war, “has so confused war and peace that it is doubtful at this point whether we will ever unscramble the two. This Rooseveltian achievement is, of course, wholly in character, being simply a part of the 12-year-old Roosevelt technique of maintaining perpetual crisis.”
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More visible to readers was Luce’s increasing identification with the Republican Party. His full-throttled support of Willkie in 1940 had exposed him to considerable criticism; but in that campaign Luce had
been less a Republican loyalist than an insurgent supporting a maverick candidate promising (however unconvincingly) a new kind of postpartisan politics. Luce’s 1940 position had in many ways been a critique of the Republican Party’s hidebound conservatism and an effort to move it toward a more moderate course. As the 1944 election approached, Luce once again supported Willkie’s candidacy, although with far less emotional engagement than he had in 1940; but Willkie himself withdrew from the race early in April after coming in last in the Wisconsin primary. (“I had been encouraged to believe that the Republican party could live up to the standards of its founders,” he explained bitterly, “but I am discouraged to believe that it may be the party of negation.”) Luce responded equally glumly to the prospect of Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York, as the Republican nominee. “In the past few weeks,” Luce told Willkie in June, “what I have been doing, as relates to politics, comes about as close as possible to zero.” A month before the election, Willkie died of a heart attack following a strep infection. There had been much speculation in late summer 1944 that Willkie would have ultimately supported Roosevelt, with whom he had worked closely during much of the war and with whom—unknown to the public (and to Luce)—he had begun discussions about the possibility of a new party that they might form together.

Luce hardly paused before throwing his support to the front-runner, Dewey, a man he had previously viewed with considerable contempt.
Life
openly endorsed Dewey not long before the election.
Time
was more restrained. But Luce instructed his staff that the magazines should “render not merely passing judgments, but, practically, verdicts on candidates for and occupants of offices other than President of the United States.”
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“What has been going on in TIME in the last several years,” Luce explained, when he began to receive criticism from some of his colleagues, “has not been the sudden acquisition of prejudice or conviction but the attempt to make our implicit convictions explicitely [
sic
] coherent and rational.” With that cursory justification, he began talking and writing about the Republican party with almost the same breathless enthusiasm and confidence with which four years earlier he had written of Willkie. “The nation is today actually Republican,” he announced in 1942. “Taking into account Conservative Democrats, the New Deal (what remains) is a distinctly minority party.” By 1944 he had convinced himself that the nation was as weary of Roosevelt as he was, that supporting the Republicans was almost as obvious a position for his magazine
to take as supporting the war. “If we want the ‘better side’ to win in November,” he wrote in 1943, “what we do now may be no less important than what we do (or don’t do) on election eve…. It seems to me that we may as well agree that our disposition is definitely in favor of the Republican Party.” So certain was he that the tide was turning toward Dewey that he asked Billings in early August “to throw out the monthly Roper survey [in
Fortune
] because it showed gains for Roosevelt.” Billings protested, and Luce compromised by running a Gallup Poll showing Dewey ahead alongside the Roper. Not until shortly before election day did he finally acknowledge that Roosevelt would likely win. Even so, Billings noted, he was “deeply wounded” when some of his most intimate colleagues decided to “desert him politically” by voting for Roosevelt. Some prominent readers were also deeply alienated.
Time
had become a “Republican magazine,” he heard increasingly from Democratic politicians and other public figures. And while Luce denied the charge, he could not honestly refute it. Shortly after the election he even began to consider working with the Republican National Committee on a reorganization of the party. “I am in no mood to perform an ‘act of leadership,’” he explained. “But maybe we have got some moral obligation to give expression to some words of helpful wisdom to the Republican party … the whole to be scanned and evaluated by some top writer [from Time] … and the chief points assayed by [a] LIFE editorial. All this might really ring a bell.”
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For a time in 1942 and 1943, there was speculation—some of it fueled by Luce’s friends and colleagues—that he would run for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut or become secretary of state or otherwise thrust himself into public life. Luce himself publicly repudiated that idea and insisted (unpersuasively) that he would not only not run for office but that he would “retire completely from politics or personal leadership in public affairs.” But in the fall of 1942 he rallied behind another political proposal—that Clare run for a seat in the House of Representatives in a district that had until recently been occupied by her stepfather, Elmer Austin.
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Clare’s decision to run—a decision over which she publicly agonized for several months before entering the race—was not due just to ambition. It was also a result of her declining fortunes as a writer. Her effort to transform herself from playwright into political and war reporter, which began so promisingly in 1939 with her successful publication of
Europe in the Spring
, had by 1942 become something of an embarrassment.
Her articles for
Life
, once eagerly published, became a source of awkwardness for editors who found them glib and superficial but feared the consequences of turning them down. Billings described them in his diary as “just a jumble of words … a mess.” Colleagues from Time Inc. and from other publications began to balk at the number and the triviality of her articles in
Life
. “On all sides,” Billings noted, “we are running too much ‘Clare Boothe,’ and her pieces are becoming a general joke.”
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