The Publisher (78 page)

Luce’s own agenda was changing too. His personal loyalty to Eisenhower remained unaltered, and neither he nor his magazines ever expressed any significant disillusionment with what many critics considered
the president’s flaccid leadership. But by 1960 Luce was clearly envisioning a more dynamic future than the Eisenhower administration had ever pursued. He was quietly breaking with the policies of the 1950s while remaining supportive of the president himself.

Luce differed with Eisenhower perhaps most notably on the issue of race. Eisenhower was a reluctant and halfhearted supporter of civil rights for African Americans, convinced that the law was an inadequate tool for producing racial justice and that only a change in the “hearts of men” (by which he meant white people) would lead to true equality, which to him was a relatively long-term goal. Luce, on the other hand, had been an outspoken supporter of civil rights for decades—beginning with
Time’s
attacks on lynching in the South in the 1920s and 1930s, and continuing with
Life’s
growing effort to portray African–American life with sensitivity and respect in the 1940s and 1950s. For a 1938 photographic essay, “Negroes,”
Life
commissioned dramatic pictures by some of the magazine’s best photographers, pictures that challenged stereotypes of “the bale-heaving stevedore … or the crapshooter.” Instead,
Life
announced, “the white man will … be surprised at the achievements of the Negro in America.” Five years later Luce circulated a memo to his staff stating that “TIME is unshakably committed to a pro-Civil Rights policy and pro-square deal policy for Negroes as for every kind of American.” He was particularly pleased by the gratitude he received from the Harlem community for
Life
’s 1949 story, “Life Goes to a Ball in Harlem.”
⁵¹

By the late 1950s Luce’s views—and those of his magazines—had evolved into active support for desegregation, to the distress of the recently retired Billings, now living in South Carolina, who was much less sympathetic to the cause of civil rights. “It seems to me,” Luce replied curtly to Billings’s dismay, that “we have done a pretty good job on this most difficult of U.S. questions.” Luce applauded the 1954
Brown
decision; and in 1956, at his urging,
Life
ran a series of articles on African–American life that provided a tough and at times harrowing picture of the poverty and injustice facing black men and women. In 1957, when federal courts demanded that Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, admit its first black students, the attempts to enforce the ruling produced such violence that Eisenhower finally had no choice but to send federal troops into the city to restore calm. Luce personally oversaw an ominous cover photograph in
Life
of paratroopers in Little Rock, accompanied by a harsh editorial that questioned Eisenhower’s commitment to his own action. There was,
Life
declared, “room for doubt as to
whether [Eisenhower] himself believes in the law he is enforcing” and had “resisted all public and private cries for drastic action.” The president’s reluctant and legalistic explanation for intervention in the crisis created an “inference that the president equates the Fourteenth Amendment with the Eighteenth (Prohibition), a disagreeable thing which has to be done even though it may be unwise.” What the president appeared not to recognize, the editorial claimed, was the great progress African Americans had made on their own since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. They now had every right to expect “a living and progressive law, adjusting itself to changed realities, [which] must now include desegregation as part of [their] citizenship.”
Time
simultaneously ran a cover story on Little Rock with harrowing accounts of the “racists” and “goons” who were helping create violence. In the meantime, at a meeting with his editors, Luce took note of the many criticisms
Time
and
Life
were receiving from the South—including a not-insignificant number of canceled subscriptions. He said that the magazines should keep after the story and that they should do it “big and good.” In response Edward Thompson,
Life
’s managing editor, began an ambitious effort to examine racial discrimination in the North. Over the next five years the resources devoted to covering the civil rights movement steadily grew. Reporters, photographers, and stringers were occasionally beaten and otherwise injured, as were journalists from the many other organizations working in the South.
Life
began commissioning articles from prominent African Americans—among them the black-power advocate Stokely Carmichael and the great if controversial scholar W. E. B. DuBois. Luce was occasionally distressed by what he considered the extremism of some civil rights activists, and he was not even always wholly admiring of Martin Luther King, Jr. But he almost always supported his more liberal editors as they pressed harder and harder against what Thompson called the “great moral issue of our time.”
⁵²

Luce’s commitment to the civil rights movement was, like his engagement with the “National Purpose” project, a sign of his increasing engagement with the liberal activism that was coming to be embodied by the image and rhetoric of John F. Kennedy. And it came as something of a surprise to many readers of his magazines, and many of his own friends, that Luce was an admirer, if not necessarily a supporter, of the young senator. Luce had urged his editors to put Kennedy on the cover of
Time
in 1957 as he began his ascent. The story his editors wrote was as gushing as anything the magazine had written since Wendell Willkie:

This was not the first evidence of Luce’s admiration for Kennedy. In 1940 Luce had written an introduction to
Why England Slept
, a book drawn from Kennedy’s recently completed senior thesis at Harvard in which he traced the failure of British leadership in the late 1930s to avert what became World War II. Joseph Kennedy, the future president’s father and in 1940 the American ambassador to Great Britain, was a friendly acquaintance of Luce’s, and it was he who had proposed that Luce write the introduction. Luce had asked to see the manuscript. He later recalled that “I was very impressed by it. I was impressed by the scholarly work.” In the introduction itself Luce wrote: “I cannot recall a single man of my college generation who could have written such an
adult
book on such a vitally important subject during his Senior year at college…. If John Kennedy is characteristic of the younger generation—and I believe he is—many of us would be happy to have the destinies of this Republic handed over to his generation at once.”
⁵⁴

By 1960 Luce was in something of a quandary. In every election since at least 1940, he had been an impassioned supporter of the Republican candidate for president, or a passionate opponent of the Democratic candidate, or both. But the Kennedy-Nixon race was a clear exception. Luce was certainly not opposed to Nixon. He entertained the Nixons at his home in Phoenix in 1958 and in his New York apartment in 1959. He wrote fan letters to the vice president, praising him for various speeches and articles that he claimed to have admired. And in the summer of 1960 Luce praised Nixon’s acceptance speech at the Republican
convention, beginning his letter with: “In a few short months it will be ‘Dear Mr. President,’ so we hope and pray.” But Luce was clearly also attracted to Kennedy. He sent flowers and notes to the ailing senator during his periodic hospitalizations in the mid-1950s. The two men had occasional lunches together in Washington in 1959 and early 1960, and they carried on an intermittent but mutually admiring correspondence. Kennedy’s visit to the Time-Life Building in August 1960 was a notable event in the company’s history. Many candidates had paid visits to the Time-Life headquarters over the years, but none produced so remarkable a response. Inside the building, employees lined the hallways as he passed; outside, large throngs crowded the streets waiting for a glimpse of the candidate (whom Luce uncharacteristically escorted to the door and into the crowd). Like many people in 1960, Luce was impressed by Kennedy’s glamour, sophistication, poise, and ability to engage with intellectual issues. He was particularly impressed with Kennedy’s voracious reading, and once expressed astonishment that the candidate, in the midst of a campaign, had read a new biography of McKinley that Luce had also just finished. (Charming and impressing smart people was one of Kennedy’s most notable talents; Nixon had few such skills.) Luce was also attracted by Kennedy’s well-educated view of American foreign policy and his strong commitment to anti-Communism and the Cold War—a stance that Luce sometimes considered stronger than Nixon’s. (Kennedy’s seeming toughness was particularly important to Luce because he had never forgotten, or fully forgiven, what he considered Joseph Kennedy’s weakness in giving up on England in 1940.)
⁵⁵

Luce’s magazines swung back and forth in their enthusiasms, reflecting not only the long-standing political divisions among the editorial staffs, but also Luce’s own uncertainty about whom he preferred. After the Democratic convention
Life
praised the party’s platform for “urging us all to look forward again—instead of backward, upward or around.” In the past it had gone without saying that the Luce magazines would endorse the Republican candidate. But in 1960 Luce was bombarded with questions about whether or not he would do so again—and for a time he was uncertain of his answer. When the
New York Times
wrote in early August that Luce had expressed a “personal preference” for Nixon, Luce denied the story the next day. The
Wall Street Journal
reported that Luce was toying with “the surprising notion of backing Kennedy.” Luce did little to dampen the speculation, replying in
Life
that “we have applauded both candidates for saying that world policy—and U. S. purpose—makes up the paramount issue.” The sudden illness of Otto
Fuerbringer,
Time
’s managing editor and a staunch Republican, led in late summer to the temporary editorship of Thomas Griffith, a Democrat who was committed to rigorously fair and nonpartisan coverage (a significant departure from earlier
Time
election years). That made it easier for the magazine to reflect Luce’s own admiration for Kennedy as well as for Nixon.
⁵⁶

On July 15, 1960, the night of Kennedy’s acceptance speech in Los Angeles, Luce was at home in New York when Joseph Kennedy called and asked to stop by to see him.
*
Luce eagerly agreed. Kennedy arrived at about seven o’clock at Luce’s Waldorf apartment and joined Luce and his son Hank for a lobster dinner. Over coffee they began a conversation about the magazines’ attitude toward Jack. Luce later recalled saying that “of course Jack will have to be left of center,” since that was what the Democratic Party required. “We won’t hold that against him.” But, he added, if Jack were to show “any signs of weakness … toward the anti-Communist cause, or … any weakness in defending and advancing the cause of the free world, why then we’ll certainly be against him.” Joe replied, “Well, there’s no chance of that; you know that.” When they gathered in front of the television to watch Kennedy’s speech, the candidate’s father interrupted frequently, often with obscene remarks about politicians who had not supported his son. He was particularly vitriolic in his characterization of Adlai Stevenson. Luce remembered the acceptance speech without great enthusiasm, but with “no particular criticisms of it.” (He kept his lukewarm response to himself.) When Joe Kennedy got up to leave, he stopped at the door and said, “I want to thank you for all that you’ve done for Jack.” Luce was “a little taken aback” by the comment and wondered “did we do too much” since he had never openly supported Jack Kennedy. But they were both aware that the Luce publications had treated Kennedy well—much better than they had treated any Democrat in many decades. And Luce could not disguise his fascination with John Kennedy, whom—shortly after his dinner with Joe—he privately described as “one of America’s great success stories … a stirring prospect … a tough fellow, but educated, with a good and even beautiful mind.” Several years later Luce recalled the evening with Joe: “It was a memorable moment in my life.”
⁵⁷

Luce did, in fact, consider endorsing Kennedy that fall. There were long conversations with his senior staff, whose opinions were divided;
and there were some editors, occasionally including Luce, who believed that Kennedy was in fact the more reliable leader in confronting the Communist threat. Luce wrote a private memo about a month before the election in which he said that “a lot of good” would come from a Kennedy victory. “It will shake up the country and perhaps bring on a great new burst of the old American dynamism.” But in the end, and perhaps inevitably,
Life
endorsed Nixon, although in a guarded way that seemed designed to reduce the impact on Kennedy. Luce was never fully satisfied that Nixon’s positions on foreign policy were as strong as Kennedy’s, and he suggested as much in the late and somewhat tepid
Life
endorsement of Nixon days before the election. It praised Nixon’s domestic policy but was silent on his foreign-policy positions.