The Publisher (79 page)

Having encouraged Billy Graham to write a piece for
Life
about his admiration for Nixon, Luce ultimately pulled the story after talking with Kennedy about it. (Graham was relieved, fearful that publication would have politicized him.) When Kennedy finally won the close presidential election, Luce wrote Nixon expressing deep disappointment at his defeat. But he wrote Kennedy as well, saying that “we didn’t find it difficult to find respectful and complimentary things to say about the President-elect.” And soon after, he wrote to a friend: “We find it difficult to do anything but cheer the 35th president of the U. S…. At the moment there is a kind of good excitement in the air—reminding some of us old fellows of our boyhood hero, T. R.”
⁵⁸

Luce’s enthusiasm for Kennedy did not diminish once the election was over. He and Clare traveled to Washington for the inauguration, sat in the president’s box for the swearing in, and attended a private dinner that night at which the new president was a guest. When Kennedy’s
Why England Slept
was republished in 1961, Luce wrote an update to his 1940 introduction:

Luce’s relationship with Kennedy was never as intimate or rewarding as his friendship with Eisenhower, who had been a regular correspondent and who included Luce frequently in the president’s famous “stag dinners” and other events. Kennedy was more aloof and, at times, less conciliatory. His tough White House staff, sometimes known as the “Irish mafia” (or what Luce once called “the whole blinking Clan—including selected O’Learys, O’Briens, etc.”), could react furiously and even vindictively if they did not like the Luce magazines’ coverage of the president, as they frequently did not. Kennedy himself could be waspishly critical as well. Luce in turn was not always happy with Kennedy’s policies. He opposed the president’s tentative efforts to improve relations with China (efforts that produced no significant results). He was dismayed by the ill-begotten Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, not because of the decision to invade but because it so conspicuously failed. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, former Army Chief of Staff and soon to be “military representative” to President Kennedy, came to New York with a seventeen-point rebuttal to the
Time
account of the Bay of Pigs; Luce disputed all his criticisms, and Taylor left without rancor. But complaints from the White House did not stop, in part because Kennedy himself was, as Luce put it, a “regular and careful” reader of
Time
, convinced of its influence and importance, and thus highly sensitive to even minor criticisms. Luce was particularly irritated by a long critical analysis of
Time
’s coverage of Kennedy from Theodore Sorensen, the president’s special assistant. It was, Luce said, as if “some schoolboy … had written an analysis for the White House which was cited by Mr. Sorensen.” And he was annoyed as well by the barbed and slightly condescending congratulatory message that the president sent to the fortieth anniversary dinner of
Time
in the spring of 1963 (which, to Luce’s great disappointment, Kennedy failed to attend). After kind words about Luce the president’s message turned to the magazine itself:

Luce shrugged off his disputes with the Kennedy White House and remained, on the whole, an admirer of the President, who—despite his
occasional testiness—continued to cultivate Luce through letters and occasional invitations to the White House. Kennedy, Luce believed, echoed his own long-standing commitment to a more energetic pursuit of America’s mission and purpose. Kennedy, like Luce, wanted a more robust and flexible military capacity that would give the United States the ability to pursue its goals without relying on nuclear weapons. And Kennedy, like Luce, called constantly for “action,” for “getting the country moving again,” for setting great goals. Luce loved Kennedy’s space program, as its avid coverage in
Life
made clear. He greatly admired the president’s Berlin Wall speech, with its ringing denunciation of Communism. (He was less pleased by the conciliatory speech at American University a few weeks earlier, in which Kennedy called for better relations with the Soviet Union.) Luce was especially impressed by Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis (perhaps in part because of Kennedy’s flattering summons to Luce, in the midst of the crisis, to come to the White House and offer advice, a meeting that was probably also designed to influence
Time’s
coverage). Kennedy asked Luce if he supported an invasion—the favored course for most of the president’s military advisers, and at the time apparently the president’s own inclination. Luce supported a blockade instead, which was the option Kennedy ultimately chose. The successful resolution of the crisis was, Luce later wrote, “a high point” in American foreign policy.
⁶¹

Luce was leading an editorial meeting in a private dining room in the Time-Life Building on November 22, 1963, when he heard the news of the assassination of President Kennedy. The editors dispersed immediately, leaving Luce behind, slumped over the table, his head in his hands. But he soon joined the epic effort to cover this extraordinary and terrible event—which included
Life
’s discovery, purchase, and partial publication of the famous Abraham Zapruder film, the home movie shot by a bystander in Dallas that became the most important recording of the assassination and the basis of myriad conspiracy theories. There was a vigorous debate over whether
Time
should violate its consistent policy of never putting a dead person on the cover of the magazine. Luce ordered a picture of Lyndon Johnson instead, a decision that produced much criticism. Equally controversial was Luce’s insistence that the publisher’s letter in the front of
Time
take note of Kennedy’s “special feeling” for the magazine, a decision that also angered some readers, one of whom accused the magazine of deciding “to eulogize itself rather than the late President.” But on the whole the
Time
and
Life
coverage of the assassination was extraordinarily thorough, visually powerful, and sensationally
popular—so much so that the company quickly sold out the postassassination issues even after almost doubling the print run. A few weeks later
Life
issued a “special memorial edition” that combined two issues of
Life
coverage into one massive magazine (with no advertising). It sold nearly three million copies.
⁶²

On the day after Thanksgiving, Jacqueline Kennedy called Theodore White—Luce’s old protégé, sometime antagonist, and once-again Time Inc. correspondent—and asked him to come see her in the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport. White drove up from New York through a storm in a rented limousine (frantic because he was leaving behind his aging mother who had just suffered a heart attack) and sat late into the night listening to Mrs. Kennedy’s concerns about how her husband would be remembered. She worried that “history was something that bitter old men wrote.” She wanted to get her own story out first. After a long and emotional description of her experience in Dallas, she told White that she could not stop thinking about “this line from a musical comedy.” At night in the White House, she said, she and her husband sometimes lay in bed listening to the melancholy Lerner and Loew song “Camelot.” The line she remembered was “almost an obsession,” she said: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” And she gave special emphasis to the sentence, “There will never be another Camelot again.” White dictated a story to his
Life
editor from the Kennedys’ kitchen telephone at 2:00 a.m., and the “Camelot” theme became an iconic one that suffuses the public memory of John Kennedy to this day.
⁶³

Luce was not an emotional man, and ordinarily he would have recoiled from the treacly sentiments that ran through the “Camelot” interview in
Life
. But he was not immune to the deep sense of loss that permeated American public culture in the weeks after Kennedy’s death. His view of Kennedy was, in fact, mostly consistent with the image that Theodore White’s article had unleashed. Luce’s relationship with Kennedy had been intermittent and not always warm; but he found himself nevertheless deeply shaken by the death of what he called “this memorable figure, this young man … [this] great and courteous person” whom he had known and admired for more than twenty years. “For my part,” he said later, “it was a great privilege to know him for himself and to have had the privilege of knowing him when he was President of the United States…. There is no question that he made a tremendous contribution to the intangible attitude of the American people—toward government, toward life, toward the things that mattered.”
⁶⁴

L
uce’s professional life in the late 1950s and early 1960s remained one of ambition, purpose, and commitment. But for a time, his private life was in turmoil. In late summer 1959 Clare discovered Harry’s affair with Jeanne Campbell, after overhearing a telephone conversation between them and then asking friends, who were surprised she did not already know. Not long after she confronted him, Harry asked her for a divorce. For almost a year they battled over their future—a period of misery and anxiety for them both.

Harry wanted a divorce only partly because of his infatuation with Jeanne. As he looked ahead to the remainder of his life, he saw a bleak picture. His marriage, he had concluded, was irreparably broken. For years now he and Clare had lived mostly separately, with occasional reconciliations and periods of chaste companionship, among them the aberrantly pleasant years in Rome. He complained of the emptiness of his life—that he had no real friends other than his colleagues at Time Inc., that he was “not getting enough out of life,” a problem he attributed to a “regrettable and even serious flaw in my make-up.” There was, he wrote, “literally nobody in this big town [New York] who ever asks me to a friendly dinner or slightly social dinner, not even my good Time Inc. friends ask me…. What I get asked to is banquets or group-meetings.” The affair with Jeanne was, in short, an effort to bring some companionship and warmth into an otherwise lonely life.
¹

Clare was at least equally unhappy, deeply resentful of Harry’s neglect and what she considered his betrayal; but she was also fearful of life without him. Both Harry and Clare had conducted multiple affairs during their years of sexual estrangement. There was a tacit understanding between them that they would ignore these relationships as long as they were casual and brief. But as the Jean Dalrymple episode had made clear years before, Clare became almost obsessively frightened and angry when there was a real threat to their marriage. Harry’s request for a divorce therefore threw her into a psychological tailspin that made both their lives much more difficult. In many ways the battle over Jeanne Campbell raised the same issues that the battle over Jean Dalrymple had raised more than a decade before.

Clare, suddenly removed from the political world, had been working on a novel through much of 1959 in an effort to relaunch her now long-deferred literary career. She was, she later claimed, making good progress on the book, working mostly in Caribbean resorts and in Phoenix. But when Harry proposed divorce, her work on the novel abruptly stopped, never to be resumed. Instead Clare spent the better part of a year writing almost obsessively about the travails of her marriage, in dozens of letters to Harry (many of them unsent); in multiple and redundant accounts of conversations about their troubles (some of them based on real conversations and some of them fictional ones in which Clare tried to inhabit Harry’s mind and imagine his own view of their relationship); and in long private memos, filling hundreds of pages, in which she poured out her fears, hopes, resentments and, at times, self-loathing. Her titles suggest the range of her emotions: “A Memorandum on Bitterness,” “‘Go in Peace,’ or ‘Stay in Peace,’” “Suspicious of HRL’s Motives,” “A Questionnaire on Love and Warmth,” “What Happens to Me Without You,” “The Situation.” Sometimes she reproached herself for her treatment of Harry: “I have too long deeply wounded your masculine pride and your self esteem,” she wrote shortly after learning about the affair with Jeanne. “The wounds continue raw and bleeding.” But she blamed Harry as well: “You also have wounded, quite as badly, my femininity.” Late one night a few weeks later, very drunk, Harry poured out a self-pitying story of what he now described as his many years of agony and humiliation, in boyhood “and well into manhood,” a story that, Clare perceptively concluded, “formed in him the habits of extreme sensitivity to criticism, humorlessness, and lack of self confidence, which in succes, have turned him into an aggressive, overly assertive and talkative man who
will
not
be interrupted.”
*
On another night she poured out her own self-loathing: “I was absolutely overcome by rage … rage with myself…. I suddenly
did
realize it—that out of cowardice, funk, despair, I had ruined my own life. For twenty years I had lived alone—alone as a woman—in a cage whose door was always, at all times, open.” She was obsessed at times with money and possessions, even though she had always had significant resources of her own from her first marriage and her plays. “I do not own one acre or brick of any of our ‘homes,’” she lamented. “The paintings [Harry] gave me for birthdays and Christmases … were not
really
gifts to me” but the property of Harry’s estate.
²