luce's influence -- 5/5/25
Today's selection-- from The Power and the Money by Tevi Troy. Making the "Case for Ike".
“Luce's effort to raise up MacArthur flopped, but he eventually got a president he admired after Truman left office. In getting there, however, the Democrats would need to lose the presidential election in 1952, something they had not done since 1928. After strongly backing Landon and Willkie, Luce had backed Republican Tom Dewey in both 1944 and 1948, although with less effort and less enthusiasm. In 1952, however, Luce was determined to see a Republican back in the White House.
“Luce pursued his pro-Republican strategy for a number of reasons. First, he himself was by this point a Republican, and preferred Republican policies, especially in international affairs. Luce was a bold pro-American anti-Communist, whose coinage of the phrase ‘the American Century’ helped define American foreign policy for a good part of the twentieth century. Second, Luce obviously had personal issues with both Roosevelt, whom he hated, and Truman, who did not think much of Luce. But there was also the factor that Luce thought it was bad for the country to have one party rule for too long. Luce ‘felt that it was of paramount importance to the United States that a Republican should be put in the White House.’ Following a long interregnum, he felt that Americans ‘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 is important to remember here that Luce was a patriot, and someone who wanted what he thought was best for America. Yes, he was passionate and forceful, and he could have his hatreds and his feuds, but he did have a larger vision. His advocacy in both the halls of power and in his magazines was not just to serve his considerable ego, or even to advance the interests of his growing company, but to put forth his vision of a powerful America that led the world in the fight against communism, as well as of a democratic nation with shared party rule.
Given his quest to get a Republican in the White House, the question became which one. Ohio senator and soi disant ‘Mr. Republican’ Robert Taft did not appeal to Luce, so he began to look elsewhere. In January of 1952, Luce traveled to Paris and met for two hours with Dwight Eisenhower, former commanding general of the Allied forces in World War II Luce was impressed. He liked both the ‘sound of the man's voice’ and the ‘the twinkle’ in his ‘brightest blue eyes.’ Overall, the Paris visit left Luce ‘under the agreeable spell of a great personality and with a sense of confidence that the Republican Party had a winner.’
“Of course, wanting Ike to win and getting him over the finish line were two very different things. After all, Luce had tried and failed with both Willkie and Landon, and the Republicans were on a six-election losing streak, a spiral never before or since repeated by the GOP. But Ike was different, and Truman was deeply unpopular. Shortly after the Ike-Luce get together, Life wrote a compelling editorial, ‘The Case for Ike,’ which argued that Ike was an optimist who could help improve America.
“Ike read the editorial and liked what he saw. In a follow-up letter to ‘Dear Harry’--avoiding FDR's mistake of calling him ‘Henry’---Ike modestly claimed that the editorial ‘erred grossly on the side of generosity in your estimate of my capacity.’ More importantly, Ike later credited the editorial as a factor that ‘helped influence’ him to throw his hat in the ring.
“With Ike on board, Luce was prepared to help in a myriad of ways. He provided two speechwriters, Emmett Hughes and C. D. Jackson, as well as campaign adviser John Knox Jessup. Hughes was a Princeton grad who served as a bureau chief abroad for Time-Life before coming to New York and becoming editor at Life. He would write the most famous line of Eisenhower's campaign, ‘If elected, I shall go to Korea’ The line indicated the seriousness of purpose with which Eisenhower would address the Korean War, a conflict that had frustrated both Truman and the American people. The line helped Eisenhower win the election over Adlai Stevenson, and Ike fulfilled the pledge shortly after his victory.
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| Luce in 1954 |
“Jackson also attended Princeton, seventeen years earlier than the younger Hughes. After a stint with the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA), Jackson became publisher of Fortune. He took over Eisenhower's disorganized speechwriting operation and gave it some coherence. Ike thanked Luce for sending over Jackson, calling him a ‘G-dsend’ who saved Ike's sanity, ‘such part as is salvageable.’ Like Hughes, he would also join the Eisenhower White House staff.
“Jessup was a Yale grad and chief editorial writer for Life. He did not go to work in the Eisenhower White House, but loaning him to the campaign was a big deal as Luce valued him so highly. TIME editor in chief Hedley Donovan would say of him that, ‘I think Harry esteemed Jack Jessup, as a mind and as man, as much as anybody he knew, in Time Inc. or anywhere else.’ Jessup would later write a 1969 book, The Ideas of Henry Luce, demonstrating his close understanding of Luce's thinking.
“In addition to lending Eisenhower some of his top people, Luce also effectively lent his magazines as pro-Eisenhower organs. TIME profiled Eisenhower from his home of Abilene, Kansas, observing that the American people favored Ike ‘in way they could scarcely explain .... He made them proud of themselves and all the half-forgotten best that was in them and in the nation.’ TIME was so favorable to Eisenhower that Ike's campaign manager Henry Cabot Lodge would distribute copies of the magazine to guests. Lodge wrote a thank you note to Luce, calling him ‘a tower of strength’ and gushing that ‘one of the lasting satisfactions of this adventure has been the fact that you and I have worked so closely for such a great cause.’
“In addition to working to get Eisenhower elected, Luce also aimed to shape Eisenhower's policies in a favorable way. In the spring of 1952, Luce had approached John Foster Dulles–the likely secretary of state in an Eisenhower administration-to sketch out a Republican foreign policy vision. The subsequent Life article, ‘A Policy of Boldness,’ articulated a Luce—friendly, pro-America, anti-communist, foreign policy vision, and would be echoed in the eventual GOP platform that summer. The article called for aggressive policies such as the ‘liberation of the captive nations,’ and for hitting opponents ‘where it hurts, by means of our own choosing.’ Luce loved it and called it ‘the embryo of a united Republican foreign policy.’
“Eisenhower won the presidency, with Luce's help on the press, personnel, and political fronts. Luce was ecstatic, wiring the phrase ‘Victory, it's wonderful’ to selected allies and friends. The benefits of victory came almost immediately: lunch and letters with Ike, invitations to the White House, and staffers like Jackson and Hughes joining the Eisenhower administration. There was some talk of Luce as a possible secretary of state, but Dulies had that in the bag, and Luce did not feel himself qualified for the job, either.
“While Luce himself would not join the administration, his wife would. Clare Boothe Luce was a brilliant and vivacious woman, a former actress and former Republican congresswoman who, like her husband, had strong views on foreign policy. She had also extended herself for Eisenhower, campaigning on his behalf in the presidential race. After the election, she met with Eisenhower at the transition offices in the Commodore Hotel in New York to discuss a role in the administration. Eisenhower proposed the secretary of labor position for her, but she demurred. Although she considered herself ‘certainly smarter and abler’ than Frances Perkins, Roosevelt's secretary of labor, she was more interested in foreign policy. They discussed both the Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights and the Ambassadorship to Great Britain, but both were already taken, before moving on to Ambassador to Italy. There were other competitors for the job, but Clare got it, in part because of Harry, noting that ‘in honoring the wife, he sought to honor and please the husband!’ Regardless, the post was hers, and she would serve there for three and a half years.
“With Clare in place in Rome, Luce would have multiple ways to influence the Eisenhower administration and some direct contact with a friendly Ike. Former aides like Jackson and Hughes were in the White House. Secretary of State Dulles was an ally, and his wife was also a good medium for passing on policy ideas and suggestions. And then there was TIME Inc., with over 30 million subscribers as a platform for ideas and suggestions to the favorably inclined administration. In many ways, the Eisenhower years were the peak of Luce's influence and the peak of his vision for leadership in the American Century. All of the decades of seeking to be able to influence the presidency seemed to have come to fruition. As Luce later wrote in his never finished memoir, ‘The eight Eisenhower years were great years for the Republic .... Largely by their own efforts, individually or in voluntary association, the American people made giant strides in nearly every field of endeavor under the benign laws of their Republic.’
“Still, while the 1950s showed the potential benefits of the Luce approach as a model for influencing the president and the presidency, Luce's very success also showed the limitations of the approach. Despite all of his pathways to the president, Luce still was not always happy with the results. While Dulles and Eisenhower were indeed anti-communist, there was no global crusade to liberate captive nations. Ike's Korea policy did not differ much from Truman's, and the Korean War ended in a stalemate. According to Billings, TIME editors staged an intervention to ‘knock down most of Luce's hopeful and unrealistic notions about the Eisenhower Administration.’ Luce would occasionally complain, ‘What's wrong with Ike?’ but for the most part would disassociate his disappointments with the administration's policies from his admiration for Eisenhower the man and the president.”
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