What Luce Wrought DAVID
BERNSTEIN
What Luce Wrought TIME REMEMBERED By Robert T. Elson Atheneum. 500 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by DAVID BERNSTEIN Editor, the Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin" It is the prerogative of middle age to...
...Elson's book is not quite that self-assured about the Luce empire, but neither does he minimize its remarkable story...
...To this day callow young reporters try out the inverted sentence as if they had just discovered it...
...Jackson was at his most ingratiating...
...Nor does Elson conceal the arguments that raged within the family...
...Luce and Time Inc...
...It must be said, to his credit, that the achievement never warped Henry Luce...
...The weekly news magazine could not expect to startle its readers when it told them what the President said at his press conference or how a revolution in South America turned out...
...It was the only time I ever saw him in a flap...
...payroll during the late 1930s, but devotes much space to the battles between liberals, like Archibald MacLeish, and reactionaries, like Laird Golds-borough...
...Yet, surely, that is the point of the story...
...After the brash early years, most informed people had an opinion?not necessarily about the things the magazine wanted them to worry over, but about Time itself...
...It was even more significant that, as President, Roosevelt considered it imperative to issue a stern public rebuke to Time for something it had said about a South American President—and that when Pearl Harbor came Time Inc...
...the gamble on Life, which started out too successfully and had the devil's own time reaching the point where it showed a profit...
...With disarming candor he describes the financial fluctuations of the company: the rough days at the beginning...
...This is the middle-aged Time talking about its youth, and the implication is that the editors today are too busy getting out their magazine to struggle with political and intellectual currents...
...Would a Time cover story 30 years ago have begun (as did a cover story early in November 1968): "The Vietnam war has divided and demoralized the American people as have few other issues in this century...
...The cutoff date between this volume and the next was chosen by Luce himself, presumably because this turning point in American history was equally important to Time Inc...
...Only a few weeks ago (27 years later), I saw a leaflet put out by the sds chapter at the State University campus in Bing-hamton denouncing "the American Century...
...the launching of Fortune at the bottom of the Depression...
...but, more often, about the main political and intellectual currents of the times...
...Time dealt not only with events but also with ideas and trends...
...For Luce and many of his key lieutenants, the destinies of America and Time Inc...
...For all its foolishness, Time introduced into American journalism a respect for interesting writing previously limited to a few sports writers...
...The first of two volumes, by veteran Time man Robert T. Elson, has now appeared...
...The editorial position is less assertive...
...It was a newsmaker...
...Life . . . L-l-F-E" Jackson shouted...
...He recognized that a magazine written from clippings and memos by a man sitting in an office, checked over by research girls, and then polished to the final gleam by one or more editors, could hardly be considered the product of individual journalists...
...Jackson put down the phone, his face red as a Time cover...
...What does not come out so clearly is an evaluation of what Luce wrought...
...But it has long since dropped the antic style and lapsed into a respectable language that shows a somewhat tired tolerance of the cliche...
...Reviewed by DAVID BERNSTEIN Editor, the Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin" It is the prerogative of middle age to reminisce, and a publishing firm as highly individual as Time Inc...
...Of Life . . . Life magazine," said Jackson...
...It carries the story from before the beginnings of Time right up to Pearl Harbor...
...the famous translations of Timestyle into radio and film...
...It would be too facile to drop the matter of style with this observation...
...There is smoother, more careful reporting, and the words don't get in the way of the information...
...The Council's function was to make sure the American people, not yet in the War, would not fall apart as Luce had seen the French do in 1940...
...Whatever his opinions, however others disagreed with him, Luce continued to regard himself as a journalist rather than a businessman, as an editor rather than a publisher...
...Briton Hadden would have vomited, and Henry Luce would have written a thundering memorandum...
...It is possible to read a piece on some subject one knows well without being irritated by error, misplaced emphasis, quasi-deliberate slanting...
...But it is still one of the four periodicals with the greatest influence on the current, though fading, President and his staff...
...Time's "back of the book" covered law, the press, medicine, science, business, the theater, religion, etc., as if they were interesting and significant, which of course they were and are...
...The trouble was that Time's comment mattered...
...He is, for all his flaws, the late great editor...
...asked the Greek editor...
...It has become corpulent, worried, respectable, but more influential than they had dreamed...
...Jackson, was my boss in 1940-41 when he was president of an organization Luce had helped create, the Council For Democracy...
...General manager of what...
...In the years between 1923-41, the Luce enterprises became more than reporters of the news...
...The "front of the book" presented comments in the guise of interpretation and fuller explanation...
...it mattered because Luce himself thought it did...
...extended its support to him, privately, as pompously as if it were one of the allied governments...
...The result is less annoying, possibly less stimulating, but also more useful...
...If he skirts over the difficulties between Luce and Hadden, the Founding Fathers, he plows sturdily into the rise and fall of Ralph Inger-soll, whose success caused him to forget who was Luce and who Inger-soll...
...And every time radio stations around the country present their fakery of local news reporting by summarizing the day's police blotter, the second sentence of the inevitable fatal automobile accident begins: "Dead are . . ." with not even a bow to the memory of the old-time Time...
...Yet it was in the atmosphere of these voluble exchanges that Henry Luce tried (although Elson points out that his staff crossed him up a bit in print) to elect a President in 1940...
...Both Life and Time have settled down to a solid, Luceless middle age...
...He and his associates kept hurling office memoranda at one another...
...asked the Greek...
...It reminded editors and reporters that the hard fact becomes harder and more factual when it is accompanied by the illuminating detail...
...He pointed out that he regarded the work as so important he had taken a year's leave of absence as general manager of Life...
...All this comes out clearly in the book...
...Never heard of it," said the Greek...
...The man told him he was too busy for such nonsense...
...It is juicy reading, especially if you are curious about how a great and profitable business can be created by essentially editorial people —and what happens to their editorial judgment once they have a property making milhons...
...the surprise of realizing, only a few years later, that Time Inc...
...If the other magazines that have aped Time here and abroad are well written, if indeed magazines generally are more interestingly edited, if newspapers have come to recognize the need for the color story, the interpretive story, the in-depth report—Time is at least partly responsible...
...and the success that seemed to crown each new year...
...without the comma, please) is bound to exercise its rights handsomely...
...was big business...
...The group journalism of Time created a new kind of personal journalism, at the very moment when the thrust of newspaper journalism was toward total depersonalization...
...For with the exception of the New York Times and one or two other newspapers, it was impossible for readers around the country to get such news unless they subscribed to specialized, often incomprehensible periodicals...
...were intertwined...
...What Elson's history reveals, more than anything else, is that the difference between Time today and Time yesterday is a man named Henry Robinson Luce...
...When you read Time you could not possibly think you were reading some other magazine...
...the flyers in magazines that didn't quite make the grade...
...What magazine...
...Elson only hints at the boring from within conducted by Communists on the Time Inc...
...In these memos they struggled with each other, tried to convince each other, often about procedural matters (Who is responsible for accuracy...
...This may well have been the reason for its success...
...On the other hand, national and international news stories always were carried in the daily newspapers, with greater or lesser sophistication...
...One day in 1941, the Council was organizing a meeting of editors of foreign-language newspapers in New York City...
...Jackson decided to phone him...
...Even more important, its concept of news has changed the practices of journalism today...
...Like Robert Kennedy, it had its own charisma, it polarized people, and those who hated it read it even more avidly than those who liked it...
...Times have changed, and so has Time...
...There comes to mind first, though it is not the most important thing, the influence Time has had on our language...
...Not long before his death, Henry Luce directed that a history of the enterprise, both "intimate" and authorized, be written...
...To cope with this, Time chose to write national and international news as a series of editorials...
...foreign policy to this day...
...At the outset Luce and his partner, Briton Hadden, were obsessed with the idea of a magazine that would rewrite newspaper items and present a coherent account of current events each week in a fresh, irreverent style appealing to educated people...
...One of those lieutenants, CD...
...But it was not quite group journalism either, for it had a personality all its own...
...For years it was in love with the sound of its words, and its inventions, its revival of obsolete terms, its sadistic torturing of the English sentence became so closely identified with the magazine that many people think Time is still written that way...
...The writing style has lost its fizz...
...His concept has been with us ever since, and in many ways represents the philosophical underpinnings of U.S...
...It was as if the man had said he'd never heard of the United States of America...
...And now, in mid-passage, there comes the nostalgia about that exciting adolescence, along with considerable satisfaction with the way things are...
...Yet the style—parodied and abominated as it was through the years—had its effect...
...Time broadened the recognition of what and where news is...
...Acceptances had come in from everyone except the man who ran the Greek-language paper...
...It started with an idea that intoxicated a couple of excited young men...
...The publishing empire whose beginnings Robert Elson chronicles with moderate intimacy has become genuine Big Business—what with Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, a massive book division, some tv and radio stations, and an unsated appetite for a daily newspaper...
...that Fortune decided to report on American business rather than discuss problems that ought to interest the sophisticated and cultured capitalist...
...They took themselves seriously, and as a result they were taken seriously...
...the other day which called down the press of the country for extravagant statements in regard to the nation's mourning for the dead President...
...In its own recent review of the El-son book, Time said of these memos: "Luce and his associates wrote a great many of these—indeed it seems remarkable that they had any time left to get out the magazines...
...In the flat, forthright style that has become the current hallmark of both Time and Life, he begins with Luce and Had-den coming out of Hotchkiss and Yale and, after brief stints on daily papers, raising some money to start their magazine...
...It was perhaps significant that one of the first men to write a testimonial for Time in 1923 was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said: "I particularly like the occasional disguised editorial, such as that one...
...Luce was ambivalent about the term "group journalism...
...They began to make news themselves, culminating in Henry Luce's 1941 decision that the rest of the 1900s had to be "the American Century...
...embarked on their crusade for "the American Century...
Vol. 51 • December 1968 • No. 23
