The Publisher (53 page)

Luce’s 1941 visit to China launched another important relationship. Waiting for him as he descended from his plane to the dry Chungking riverbed was a young man wearing khaki shorts and a sun helmet: Theodore H. White, known to everyone as “Teddy.”

Only relatively recently had
Time
abandoned its tradition of simply rewriting news borrowed from other organizations. But by the late 1930s the magazine was posting correspondents in numerous areas of the United States and the world. The war rapidly expanded that effort. By the time World War II had begun, the staff of correspondents was already large and growing rapidly. White, then
Time
’s principal China correspondent, was someone about whom Luce was already curious. White was then twenty-six, short, wiry haired, round faced with oversize glasses and an infectious smile. He had grown up in what he later called the “Jewish ghetto” in the Dorchester area of Boston and had graduated from the famed Boston Latin School, open to the brightest of the city’s children and an avenue of social mobility for the lower middle class. In the fall of 1934 he entered Harvard on a scholarship and almost by chance took up the study of Chinese, which soon led him to John King Fairbank, a faculty member only three years White’s senior and soon to be the most influential historian of Chinese-American relations of the twentieth century. He became White’s longtime mentor and friend.
White graduated summa cum laude and was awarded two Harvard traveling fellowships, which he used to finance a trip to China. Shortly after he arrived he accepted a position in the China Information Office, the Kuomintang’s propaganda agency in Chungking. A few months later he encountered John Hersey, then a
Time
editor visiting the city in search of correspondents. He hired White more or less on the spot, offered him ten dollars a dispatch, and allowed him to continue his work for the Chinese government at the same time. White’s lengthy, copious memos quickly attracted attention in New York, and soon he was on the Time Inc. payroll full-time.
⁶⁴

White was Luce’s kind of correspondent, despite the great social differences between them. Like Luce, White loved China with an almost romantic passion. Also like Luce, he loved to talk, to argue, and to push the intellectual boundaries of conversation. Perhaps even more important, he had no qualms about using his dispatches to convey his own opinions and sentiments. “The chief fault that you are liable to find with my production is a pro-Chinese bias and a Chinese enthusiasm,” he wrote to his editor in New York. As if to prove his point he wrote in one of his first dispatches, published in
Time
almost unaltered, that the “present Chinese Army has spirit. It glows. The men are willing to die. They mix and tangle with the Japanese with a burning hate that is good.” He was for a time an ardent admirer of Chiang Kai-shek and his government. Chiang’s “personal record,” he wrote, “is one of the most positive and virile of any government leader today.” Under Chiang’s leadership, he observed, “China made such magic strides toward self-consciousness.” And while White was observant enough to see the many flaws in Chiang and the Kuomintang regime, he kept his reservations mostly to himself. He had an obligation, he believed, “to say nothing at all that might help the Japanese … and to say nothing that might hurt the cause of China in American eyes,” a position that he conceded “made impossible the telling of the rank corruption, inefficiency and stupidity that exists in high places in Chungking today.” Little wonder that Luce found him so appealing. The two men spent much time together and formed an unusual friendship. White showed little of the timid deference that characterized Luce’s relations with most Time Inc. employees. They were “Harry” and “Teddy,” a mismatched pair who interacted—at least in Chungking—almost as equals. When it came time for Luce to return to New York, he brought White with him and appointed him the Far East editor of
Time
, a post he held for only a few months before returning to China to cover the war. Luce viewed him as
an indispensable asset in the effort to generate support for the Chinese government, someone who shared his own view that, as White wrote shortly after his return to America, “If the United States must face the Axis on two fronts, it can do so for just one reason: that a Free China is fighting the Battle of the Pacific.”
⁶⁵

Luce’s publication of “The American Century” and his reengagement with China greatly increased his commitment to driving public debate over intervention in the war. His magazines attacked the “isolationists” and “appeasers” with almost gleeful vigor, and they continued to lambaste the Roosevelt administration for what Luce considered its timid and erratic path to war.
Time
even criticized the legendary Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s secretary of war, for being too old and feeble to run the military. “The whole civilian defense machinery,” the magazine wrote, was “running without any responsible head” and was pursuing “uncertain policies … fresh confusions piled on stale confusions.”
Time
referred so often to the “fog” in Washington that the
Harvard Lampoon
ran a parody: “Fog settled down over Washington last week. Coming by way of Chesapeake Bay at a mean rate of 10 m.p.h.”
⁶⁶

Luce’s simmering feud with Roosevelt burst into the open once again in November 1941 over what was, in fact, a trivial issue.
Time
had run a short notice about Chilean president Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who was encountering political troubles. “While the Popular Front swayed,”
Time
wrote, “bushy-mustached President Aguirre felt more and more like a man who does not govern but merely presides. He spent more and more time with the red wine he cultivates.” A few days later Aguirre died. The Chilean consul general in New York protested, and Roosevelt seized on the issue to do something he had long talked about but had never done: go after Luce. “The Government of the United States has been forced to apologize to the Government of Chile for an article written in
Time
magazine,—a disgusting lie,” he wrote. “This article was a notable illustration of how some American papers and writers are stocking the arsenals of propaganda of the Nazis to be used against us.” Luce seemed mildly shell-shocked by the ferocity of the attack and responded meekly and defensively that “no one had [previously] said anything in
Time
’s report was untrue.”
⁶⁷

By the beginning of December, after a series of failed American efforts to thwart Japanese expansion, Luce—and many others—came to believe that war in the Pacific was imminent, perhaps inevitable. “Everything
was ready,”
Time
proclaimed in the December 8 issue (published on December 1):

On December 7 the Luces hosted a luncheon for twenty-two people at their home in Greenwich—an event typical of their lives ever since Harry’s marriage to Clare. Among the guests were diplomats, theologians, business leaders, and some of Luce’s colleagues from Time Inc. It was a crisp, clear day, and the guests were in good spirits, avoiding too much talk of war and enjoying the meal, the august company, and the lavish surroundings. Shortly after dessert was served, the butler—violating a strict rule never to interrupt a meal—handed Clare a folded piece of paper on a small tray. She glanced at it, tapped her glass, and said, with a tone of mockery perhaps unsuited for the occasion, “All isolationists and appeasers, please listen. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.” Most of the guests rushed to the radio or the telephone. Harry raced to his car and within an hour was back in his office in Manhattan. Both
Time
and
Life
were already in production for the following week. Luce interrupted the press runs and helped remake the issues. For
Time
, he created a new department on the spot: The U.S. at War, and oversaw a lead story that called the attack “premeditated murder with a toothy smile.” He added that “the war came as a great relief, like a reverse earthquake, that in one terrible jerk shook everything disjointed, distorted, askew back into place. Japanese bombs had finally brought national unity to the U.S.” Luce and Billings completely remade
Life
as well, with a new lead cover story on Pearl Harbor—although forced to use photographs taken well before the attack. Louis de Rochemont and his staff hurried to recut the December
March of Time.
⁶⁹

Sometime late that day Luce called his father in Pennsylvania to talk about their shared relief that the war had finally begun. “We will now all see what we mean to China and China means to us,” Rev. Luce told his son. After hanging up, Harry, Sr., told his wife how reassuring it had been to hear from their son. Not long after the conversation he retired
for the evening and died quietly in the course of the night. Harry left no record of how he viewed the symbolism of these two enormous events—one global and one personal—occurring on the same day. “My father was profoundly shocked by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor,” he later wrote a friend. To others he noted only that “it was wonderful that he lived long enough to see America and China as allies.”
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A few days later Luce wrote to Roosevelt, offering something short of an apology for his earlier criticisms but a modest effort at conciliation. “We wished to do every last thing in our power, to strain every nerve, to assist our country to face the ordeal and triumph of it,” he wrote of the months preceding Pearl Harbor. “We have made mistakes and fallen short of our best intentions. But … no company of men and women … have ever worked harder … to do their duty as they saw it.” Time Inc. would, he promised, not only comply with wartime regulations but would “think of no greater happiness than to be of service…. For the dearest wish of all of us is to tell the story of absolute victory under your leadership.” In a handwritten note attached to the letter, he was more frank. Referring to the president’s attack on
Time
’s recent coverage of Chile, he wrote: “The drubbing you handed out to TIME—before December 7—was as tough a wallop as I ever had to take. If it will help you any to win the war I can take worse ones. Go to it! And God bless you.” Roosevelt wrote back that he liked the letter, that it “combines honest patriotism with genuine sportsmanship…. The waters of Pearl Harbor have closed over many differences which formerly bulked big.” But this warm truce in their long and sometimes bitter feud did not last for very long.
⁷¹

T
he most terrible war in human history was in many ways very good to Time Inc. Its magazines had never been more popular.
Time’s
circulation exceeded a million copies a week by the end of 1942, and
Life’s
was approaching four million, making the company, according to Eric Hodgins, “the largest publisher of news on a national scale.” And despite paper shortages that limited the size of the magazines, advertising revenue remained strong. The
March of Time
newsreels were shown in more than eleven thousand theaters, and the weekly
March of Time
radio broadcasts had an audience of nearly eight million. Time Inc.’s profits were the highest in the company’s history—over ten million dollars a year even after steep wartime taxes. Its expenses were growing as well. The company’s News Bureau, modest until the late 1930s, now maintained bureaus in almost every major city in the United States. Where it was possible to do so, it opened bureaus around the globe as well: London, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, India, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, Switzerland, and China. The reporting staff—more than a hundred full-time correspondents and many more parttime employees and stringers—was one of the largest of any news organization in the world, and the comprehensiveness of war coverage in the magazines was one of the reasons for their great success. The company generated additional goodwill through its distribution of 750,000 copies of
Time
and 650,000 copies of
Life
free to American troops abroad through a special “Air Express Edition,” copies that were
passed around to so many servicemen, according to one
Time
correspondent, that they literally fell apart. More than 60 percent of soldiers and sailors named
Life
their favorite magazine. Time Inc., through its March of Time division, also produced training films and publications for the military and worked hard in other ways to show its commitment to the war effort.
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The war also had personal benefits for Luce. His own profile and influence, and even his own popularity, rose significantly. A poll commissioned by the company early in the war found that more than 80 percent of those who had an opinion viewed him favorably. Perhaps more important, the war gave Luce a new sense of purpose. He was, of course, committed to chronicling the conflict and contributing to what he considered America’s inevitable victory. But his larger mission was now to envision a postwar world that would remedy the failures that followed World War I. This war, he believed, must lead the world toward a stable and lasting peace and guide the nation into a position of global leadership. By early 1943 he had already created a Post War Committee within his company, with a full staff of editors and researchers committed to examining “the foreign and domestic post-war problems of the U.S…. post-war relations with Britain and the post-war problems of the Far East.”
²