A Dream That Failed
HECKSCHER, AUGUST
A Dream That Failed_ Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century By Robert E. Herzstein Scribners. 521 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by August Heckscher Director...
...The author's justification is found in his choice of a subtitle...
...Its oversized pages quickly developed into an advertising stage where products of the new consumerism gleamed and dazzled in color, and brilliant picture stories attracted a huge audience...
...I regret having to appear to cavil, for what we actually get down to is a solid, fair-minded account of the glory days when Luce was putting together his empire and reaching out toward new frontiers...
...The expense of arms and men called for by the Nazi challenge was to be justified in the end by the establishment of a benign and enlightened American hegemony, a worldwide pax similar to Rome's in ancient times and Great Britain's in the modern epoch...
...Time became a widely respected news source, its freewheeling correspondents reined in by powerful editors who brought their dispatches within the scope of Henry Luce's generally humanitarian, Protestant, Republican, and capitalistic faith...
...Hadden died tragically in 1929, a year before Fortune was unveiled...
...The rise of the Fascists and Nazis did not immediately impress or alarm Luce...
...The empire Luce built was never the same after the demise of the original Life magazine in 1972...
...what remained was transmuted into a phantasmagoria of information and entertainment where he would not have felt at home...
...and the United States would have to hold fast to its Protestant roots, its dedication to free enterprise, its Puritan ethic...
...Fortune celebrated American business in a format more lush than had ever been offered by an American publication...
...Great sacrifices would be necessary...
...The publisher's second wife, Clare Boothe Luce, had the tongue of an adder and the wit of an accomplished Broadway playwright...
...Rather, it is of "the man who created the American Century"??a curious claim...
...As the '30s advanced Luce alone would ride his three chargers, harnessed in a perfected team...
...His eccentric deviations are carefully delineated by Herzstein...
...Roosevelt devoted hours that could have been better spent to plotting his exact form of revenge...
...Relations between him and the home office soured, until Teddy returned after the War to write his successful books on American politics...
...Her hard-won standing eventually warranted her being treated seriously by the Luce scribes...
...He responded like a prophet...
...who were not always as enthusiastically partisan as her admiring husband, nor as ready to accommodate themselves to her often idiosyncratic views...
...He sees his book as "a political portrait"??whatever that is...
...Playing against these hopes was mounting evidence of the massive Soviet betrayals and the growing military strength of Communism...
...Still more surprising, the narrative stops short some 20 years before Luce's death in 1967...
...His publications, plus the influential March of Time newsreels now appearing weekly on America's movie screens, began a steady drumbeat for military preparation, aid to Britain, and the ultimate facing up to war...
...Luce was then in partnership with the bright, mercurial Briton Hadden...
...But gradually a rift appeared between White and his publisher...
...Clare went on to prove herself a courageous war correspondent in China...
...It had been preceded by a resounding article in theJune 5, 1939, Life commissioned from Walter Lippmann, "The American Destiny...
...publication...
...Luce was serious, lacking in charm and small talk, but possessed a seer's driving ambition...
...Teddy was "the Jewish boy from Boston" whom Luce befriended, trusted and gave the crucial assignment of correspondent in Chungking, seat of the Chinese forces and their leader Chiang Kai-shek...
...In 1937 Life came along...
...The ideology behind that concerted drive was summed up in the famous Luce editorial "The American Century" in the February 17, 1941, issue of Life...
...But by 1937, too, ominous clouds were darkening the international horizon and a new note would shortly begin to sound throughout Lucedom...
...The feud was fueled by Time's constant prodding and niggardly dispensation of praise...
...In the the end, of course, there was to be no "American Century...
...Henry Luce did not live to witness the uneasy, ambiguous place held by America as the century draws to a close...
...Reviewed by August Heckscher Director emeritus...
...Life "went to a party...
...Luce was by then torn between his dream of the USSR adjusting itself to an American Century and his latent anti-Communism...
...Luce was turning to New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey as the savior of the unlucky Republican Party...
...It was in his relations with two younger correspondents that Luce found his greatest inspiration and also the most subtle obstacles...
...In his own household Luce harbored a demonic force that never quite fit in with his idealistic push toward an American Century...
...Volume 1, Number 1 of Time was dated March 3, 1923...
...He was a missionary's son, far from being a militarist, yet he discerned the danger a Nazi victory would pose for the Western Hemisphere...
...Full of energy and ambition, Teddy provided insights for Time available to no other U.S...
...Theodore White and John Hersey play a large role in these pages...
...learned quickly the limits of its power in today's infinitely complex world...
...As to how Henry Luce in his private life adjusted to this brilliant, difficult woman, the book says little...
...Increasingly, Teddy's dispatches were ignored or distorted...
...Hersey's reports from Russia tantalized Luce, who saw in them a reflection of his better, but naive, hopes...
...The magazine's conception and emergence make especially fascinating reading...
...John returned from Russia, confronted Luce, and submitted his resignation...
...Only as the military threat defined itself were Luce's energies galvanized and his vision sharpened...
...his style of living and intimate relations are merely hinted at...
...To say he created such a century, though, is to exaggerate the power of even the most formidable editor...
...For a brief moment under John F. Kennedy the old rhetoric sounded, but Nikita S. Khrushchev cut that short at Vienna...
...It presented the news in a style that Hadden invented and burnished, and had almost no regard for the eminence of its targets...
...author, "Woodrow Wilson'' TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS after his death, Henry Luce stands as a shadowy figure ??arguably the most gifted publisher and editor of the century, yet without an image that speaks to the present generation...
...Important elements of Luce's life are barely mentioned: His youth is glossed over...
...Teddy perceived the corruption within his regime, the failure to effect land reform, the dictatorial tendencies...
...In 1940 Luce thought Roosevelt could be defeated in his bid for a third term...
...Roosevelt fully reciprocated...
...I should note at the outset that this book is peculiar in its form and limitations...
...Nonetheless, the tale of what he fashioned and led dynamically is an arresting one, and Robert E. Herzstein tells it well...
...FDR's one comparable act was his withdrawing the coveted rank of brigadier general from Fiorello La Guardia...
...Each gave his unique genius to the founding era...
...Although exemplary in his support of human and civil rights, he did not (then or later) fully portray the horrors of anti-Semitism...
...And the portrait is not of a man in the round, or of a great publisher...
...The Cold War created a bipolar world...
...Elected to Congress in 1942, she tested Luce's editors...
...after La Guardia had already purchased his uniform and had it fitted...
...Wendell L. Willkie, Hoosier lawyer and utility chief, appeared to offer the way, and Luce devoted to his candidacy an amount of missionary zeal, backed by journalistic hype, that seriously damaged Time's reputation for truth and objectivity in reporting...
...In the first place, Luce hated Franklin D. Roosevelt??hated him in peace and in war...
...Luce never lost his blind faith in Chiang...
...On the way to this promised land Luce entered strange byways and made use of fallible instruments...
...But the U.S...
...By 1944 Willkie had become an embarrassment to Time, a man who talked too much and too loudly about vague international concepts...
...Again briefly, following the fall of Communism in 1991, it seemed the United States might extend its humanitarian and political ideals as global peacekeeper...
...Luce did coin and popularize the phrase "American Century...
...John Hersey was, like Luce, the son of a missionary and a Yale graduate...
...The American Century, Luce felt, would never be fully realized except under a rejuvenated and liberalized Republican party...
...Something of anewcomer to American society because he was brought up in China, he had little journalistic experience beyond what he had garnered on the Yale Daily News...
...Their firstborn was far more concerned about being provocative and breezy than tackling deep policy issues...
...Twentieth Century Fund...
...When he died in 1967, however, the time for his own dream already had passed...
...Hadden was unpredictable and full of quips...
...But in 14 fabulous years he established the three pillars of his fame: Time, Life and Fortune...
...It is not, as the publisher would have us believe, a biography...
...Hersey resorted to writing innocuous cultural dispatches from Moscow that Chambers (himself a cultural critic of distinction) could not slash...
...The blow he chose, a ban on Luce's returning in wartime to his beloved China, was as insidious as it was brutal...
...Luce saw Chiang as capable of no shortcoming...
...His own high feelings went back to the early days of his Presidency, for alone among American publications, Time did not hesitate to refer to FDR's health and even used the word "cripple...
...Perhaps it is not surprising, after all, that this "portrait" concludes abruptly with Yalta...
...Of unyielding and somewhat prickly integrity, John fell from grace not because of his war reporting in the Far East, but in his less well-known role as Moscow correspondent at the War's end...
...To make matters worse, Time's foreign editor at that time was a brooding, fanatical ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers...
...Life found every excuse to display "cheesecake...
...Roosevelt won overwhelmingly...
Vol. 77 • June 1994 • No. 6
