A Time to Remember

The Publisher. Alan Brinkley. Knopf, 531 pages, $35

Luce is one of the original 20th century right-wing blowhards who used his position in the media to push not objectivity but his own agenda. He did hire Margaret Bourke-White to shoot photogrpahs he included in Fortune magazine from its very beginning; her photogrpahs were also prominently published in Life magazine for many years.

Alan Brinkley's "The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century" marshals all the material for a devastating portrait of Luce as a bombastic, autocratic press lord who was full of idolatry for "Great Men" like Chiang Kai-shek and Gen. Douglas MacArthur and who made his magazines mouthpieces for his own ideology and obsessions. Instead, Mr. Brinkley has told Luce's saga with scrupulous fairness, compelling detail and more than a tinge of affection for his vast ambitions and vexing frailties. The author chronicles how Luce built the spindly Time into the world's greatest media empire of its era, with influence unmatched by any other American magazine. Still, Luce emerges as a man of manic energies and enthusiasms who, for all his fervent yearning to do good, bent the journalism of his magazines to propagandize for dubious crusades, most famously urging the "unleashing" of Chiang in the late 1940s to recapture a China lost to communism.

That was the sort of myth that the right wing of the Republican and Democratic parties used for years to bludgeon President Truman, FDR's memory and legacy, and subsequent Democrats: that they had lost China, as if it was for the US toi keep or lose.

at a "Turkish ball" at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1934, he met Clare Boothe, the bright, beautiful daughter of a kept woman, and Luce had a coup de foudre. For all his righteous scruples, he dumped his wife of more than a decade and mother of his children, embarking on a tempestuous marriage with Clare that lasted until his death in 1967. They competed with each other, cheated on each other, tormented each other and nearly divorced a dozen times.

[coup de foudre: a thunderbolt; a sudden, intense feeling of love.]

Perhaps it is from this man who ignored his own "righteous scruples" that Rudolf Guiliani learned the trick of dumping his wife and mother of his children for another woman. And after such effrontery to the morality they so busily lectured others on, and after violating its very basic tenets, they continued to appear in public without the least show of shame.


Mr. Brinkley, who teaches American history at Columbia University, neatly captures the tone of the couple's skyscraper-in-the-clouds idyll. Luce once bragged to Clare, the author of "The Women" and onetime U.S. ambassador to Italy, that he couldn't think of anyone who was his intellectual superior. Clare replied: What about Einstein? Well, countered Harry, Einstein was "a specialist."

Modet, too.

Clare had proposed a picture magazine called Life to Condé Nast—the man, not his company—when she worked as the managing editor of his Vanity Fair in the early 1930s. Luce had the same idea, and the triumph of Life gave him an unmatched pulpit where he could preach his increasingly right-wing vision for the U.S. and the world.

What a bully pulpit, too.

It was Luce's impatience with Franklin Roosevelt's tip-toeing into the war before Pearl Harbor that spurred him to take an active role in presidential politics. He fell hard for the Republican Wendell Willkie in 1940 and made his magazines such partisans of every successive GOP candidate for the White House that many of his editors despaired. Time Inc. magazines not only liked Ike, they slobbered over him. Luce did respect John F. Kennedy (although he backed Nixon) and succumbed to Lyndon Johnson's transparent flattery. An old-school anti-communist, Luce had "a strong distaste" for Joseph McCarthy, Mr. Brinkley writes, as a "crude and coarse man" whose "excesses threatened to discredit more legitimate anti-Communist activities," and the publisher never warmed up to Barry Goldwater's frontier conservatism.

Well, nt altogether a distasteful man, at any rate.


Mr. Brinkley has told the cautionary tale of the Luce Half-Century with the rigor, honesty and generosity that Luce's own magazines too often sacrificed to the proprietor's enormous ego and will to power.