The Publisher (69 page)

In the aftermath of this visit Luce added MacArthur to the pantheon of those he considered truly great men: among them Theodore Roosevelt
(whom he had never met), Wendell Willkie, Chiang Kai-shek, and Winston Churchill. Almost immediately he began lobbying his editors to choose MacArthur as
Time’s
next Man of the Year, even though by late fall, the pendulum of public opinion was already swinging away from him. “He won the Korean War,” Luce implausibly argued (at a moment when the war still had almost three years to go). MacArthur had made “one of the speeches which will ‘go down’ at least in American history.” And, Luce added, the “Old Soldier has not ‘faded away.’” On the contrary he was a leading candidate for president—and one of very few Americans “who have a big popular following.” His editors eventually overruled him and chose instead Mohammed Mossadegh, the new prime minister of Iran, who was already beginning to nationalize the nation’s oil reserves (an action that would lead to his CIA-assisted overthrow in 1953). MacArthur, Luce’s editors argued, was no longer the big news. What they almost certainly also thought was that any MacArthur article would be shaped by what Billings called “his excitement and enthusiasm for the Great Man,” an example of “Luce’s boyish susceptibility to Greatness.”
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But Luce’s adulation of MacArthur, which continued intermittently through much of the rest of his life, was not simply a product of starstruck infatuation. It was also because he thought MacArthur represented the best and perhaps last chance for the fulfillment of Luce’s great dream—a strong American commitment to a non-Communist Asia and to the liberation of China. He wrote of his hopes in a
Life
editorial even before his eventful meeting with the general. MacArthur

MacArthur would, Luce predicted, lead the United States out of “the passive, helpless and hopeless position” into which Truman and Acheson had maneuvered America. “Can any man rise to the greatness our perils demand?” he asked. “[In] the dreary landscape of our time,” only MacArthur “seems to have been shaped by greatness.”
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MacArthur did not become a serious presidential candidate in 1952 as Luce had once hoped. Instead, as he himself had publicly predicted in his speech to Congress but had probably not really expected, he began slowly to “fade away.” Luce never lost his deep admiration for “the great man,” but his principal goal—especially now that the Korean War had failed to produce the results in Asia he had hoped for—was to defeat the Democratic administration in the 1952 elections and bring back a Republican government for the first time in twenty years. “I felt that it was of paramount importance to the United States that a Republican should be put in the White House,” he explained years later of his position in 1952. “It had been 20 years since there had been a Republican Administration.” Americans, he argued, “should have the experience of living under a Republican Administration and discovering that they were not thereby reduced to selling apples on street corners.” It did not take him long to switch his loyalty to another popular general: Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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Ever since Wendell Willkie’s death, Luce had been searching for a candidate whom he could unreservedly admire. He had supported Dewey in 1944 and 1948, but he had never really liked the man or had any significant relationship with him. He was friendly with Robert Taft, senator from Ohio and son of a former president. But Taft was too conservative and too isolationist for Luce to feel comfortable with him. Eisenhower was different. He was famous, popular, and, even without being particularly articulate, charismatic. His policy views were largely unknown, which allowed Luce (and many others) to imagine whatever positions he liked. “Luce is dazzled by Eisenhower’s glamour…. He is deeply in love with his candidacy,” Billings wrote after a lunch with his boss. Luce was an early and generous contributor to Eisenhower’s campaign. But much more important, he mobilized his editorial staff to support it, showing a partisanship that was at times greater even than the favoritism the Time Inc. publications had shown toward Willkie in 1940. In the first issue of 1952
Life
ran an effusive story making “The Case for Ike,” who had not yet agreed to run. Eisenhower later, flatteringly, told Luce that the article had been “one of the factors” that had persuaded him to announce his candidacy (an announcement that also included his first declaration of membership in the Republican Party).
Life
itself took credit for being the “starters’ gun” for the campaign. Once Eisenhower’s candidacy was official, Luce accelerated his strong public support for him. He actively recruited two of his most important writers and editors to take leaves to work for the campaign. Emmet John
Hughes and C. D. Jackson became Eisenhower speechwriters. (Luce was less encouraging to Eric Hodgins, who wanted to work for the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, but grudgingly agreed to let him go as well.)
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During the Republican convention,
Time
pointedly argued that Eisenhower had a better chance of winning the general election than did Taft. The magazine identified critical states whose votes were still in flux, where Eisenhower would be particularly helpful to local candidates. The
Time
reportage accused the Taft campaign of “stealing delegates” and actively supported an effort to award disputed seats to Eisenhower. Particularly helpful to the Republicans was the publication of
Time
a day early to allow the Eisenhower campaign to distribute it widely to the delegates. “You were a veritable tower of strength,” Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Eisenhower’s campaign manager, wrote to Luce after the convention, and “played a tremendous part in laying the basis of public opinion” for Eisenhower’s victory. “One of the lasting satisfactions of this adventure,” Lodge added, “has been the fact that you and I have worked so closely for this great cause.” During the campaign Luce himself, for the first time since the Willkie campaign, began writing speeches and memos and funneling them to Eisenhower through Jackson and Hughes. Eisenhower seldom used them but always remembered to thank him, a flattery that spurred Luce onward to even greater efforts. He even occasionally sat on the platform during Eisenhower rallies and joined the candidate on his campaign train, things he had never done even when Willkie was running. It was not just his loyalty to the party that drove his efforts. It was his enthusiasm for Eisenhower and the prospect of a close relationship to a president of the United States for the first time.
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Luce’s blatant partisanship triggered a significant backlash within his own company, greater than the one he had encountered during the Willkie campaign. Even some colleagues who shared his politics felt uncomfortable with how one-sided they believed the coverage of the election was, although only a few dared to say so publicly.
“Time
’s political bias for Eisenhower is bringing in a deluge of protest letters,” Billings noted, and editors were “moaning and groaning” over the company’s stance. “Is
Time
a Republican magazine?” T. S. Matthews, the pro-Stevenson editor of
Time
, asked. “Open partisanship would certainly be better than surreptitious. Though best of all, I think, would be to be openly non-partisan…. How can
Time
possibly hope to attain and maintain a real integrity if it’s partisanly concerned with getting somebody
elected?” At one point a group of Time Inc. researchers (all women) tried to raise money to run an advertisement denouncing the magazine’s “Ike slant.” After a few days of pressure (and perhaps threats from above), “cooler heads … prevailed among the Stevenson girls.” But the bitterness among the many Stevenson supporters in Time Inc. continued to grow until Luce finally accepted Matthews’s advice and invited the entire editorial staff to a large dinner at which Luce hoped to “introduce himself” to his employees. His speech—long, rambling, at times unintelligible—was nevertheless a revealing event for many members of the staff who had rarely if ever seen him. But it did nothing to placate the anger of those who resented
Time
’s political position. He made clear that he supported Eisenhower and said bluntly that as the leader of the company he had the right to present the news however he thought best. “I am your boss,” he unrepentantly announced. “I guess that means I can fire any of you.”
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Luce continued to insist that
Time
was not a “Republican” magazine and that the institution did not favor any particular candidate. But he barred Matthews from handling a cover story on Eisenhower shortly before the election and edited it himself. Eisenhower, Luce wrote, “has picked up more real political experience than many politicians … get in a lifetime…. Ike is in top form, with a new self-assurance and gusto.” The rebuke, and the partisan character of the story, helped Matthews to decide to resign.
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Despite his enthusiastic public support of Eisenhower, Luce remained uneasy about the candidate’s ability to pursue the policies Luce hoped he would advance. “I think Ike is a good man—an extraordinarily good man,” he wrote before the Republican convention. “My difficulty as to Ike lies in the area of ‘great issues.’” Those issues were, of course, “how to cope with Soviet Communism,” how to discredit the Truman-Acheson foreign policy, and how to ensure that the new president would pay sufficient attention to Asia. “The question,” he wrote his editors, “is whether there is any validity to my reservations about Ike, and whether, if so, then there is any editorial duty to utter them.” Without expressing his doubts openly Luce tried to put indirect pressure on Eisenhower through his relationship with John Foster Dulles, who was widely believed to be Eisenhower’s likely choice as secretary of state. Dulles eagerly responded with an article entitled, “A Policy of Boldness,” which expressed the hard-line foreign-policy views that had become a hallmark of the campaign (and that would be largely ignored after the election). It was in this article that Dulles first outlined what
became a famous and controversial set of policies that seemed to repudiate much of the restraint that the containment policy had ensured. He called for the “liberation of the captive nations,” for striking back against enemies “where it hurts, by means of our own choosing,” and for using atomic bombs as “effective political weapons.” (Dulles also wrote the foreign-policy plank for the 1952 Republican convention, echoing many of the ideas he had expressed in
Life
.) Luce happily called it “the embryo of a united Republican foreign policy.” But he was far from confident that Eisenhower himself would abide by these principles, and he was worried that the candidate would be discouraged from boldness by “timid advisors.” “In my judgment,” Luce wrote not long before the election, “Ike wins or loses the election in the next few days, depending upon what he says on this Foreign Policy issue.” Would Eisenhower continue to embrace the “do-nothing” containment policy? he wondered. “The U.S. has to take the most out-and-out stand against Communism,” whether or not it antagonized America’s allies and whether or not it ran greater risks than the Truman administration believed were wise.
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Eisenhower did little to allay Luce’s worries in the last weeks of his campaign. The candidate did not focus much on foreign policy. Instead he continued to rely on his sunny personality and his vague suggestions of undefined change. His most important campaign promise was his pledge to “go to Korea,” as if a brief visit to the front would itself transform the character of the war. But the effectiveness of this tactic underscored the enormous advantage Eisenhower’s military experience made in a campaign in which Cold War issues were in the forefront of public opinion. Voters seemed to trust him to handle foreign policy whether or not he gave them any clues as to what that foreign policy would be. Even Luce, who had badgered Eisenhower for weeks to take stronger positions, forgot about his concerns in the elation of the growing strength of the Republican campaign. And when Eisenhower finally won by a substantial margin, bringing a Republican Congress with him, Luce felt in some ways as though the triumph was his as well. “Victory, its wonderful,” he wired to colleagues and friends.
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In many ways Eisenhower’s presidency met, and at times even exceeded, Luce’s expectations. Luce had never had much of a relationship with previous presidents. Eisenhower showered him with attention. Luce in turn lavished praise on the man he still called “Ike,” both in his private communications with the president and in his magazines. Within weeks
of the election he had lunch with Eisenhower to talk about Asia, exchanged friendly letters with him, boasted to colleagues about Ike’s tips on golf, “marveled at [Ike’s] knowledgeability.” His one disappointment came when Eisenhower turned down an invitation to dinner at Luce’s home, but Luce remained undeterred. And Eisenhower in turn made great efforts to keep Luce in his camp. Republican leaders courted him elaborately during his trip to Washington for the inauguration, and he received the first of many invitations to the Eisenhower White House only a few weeks later. “We must give a full presentation of Ike in color photos,” the bedazzled Luce wrote the editors of
Life
late in 1953, “at least four pages of Ike, Ike, Ike, to make the point [of Eisenhower’s extraordinary “physical vitality”] unmistakable and unforgettable.” Eisenhower’s first, unremarkable State of the Union address a few weeks after the inauguration was, Luce proclaimed, “brilliant.” A rumor circulated that Eisenhower was considering appointing Luce secretary of state, a flattering gesture even though both men knew that Dulles was the president’s choice. “Some discussion of the plain fact that we are now regarded as Eisenhower’s mouthpiece,” Billings worried a few weeks into the new presidency. “Perhaps we have cheered a little too loud this first month.”
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