For Evangeline

CONTENTS

Preface

In May 1966 ="5eHenry R. Luce—cofounder of what became the largest and most influential magazine empire in America—agreed to participate in an exclusive television interview for the first time in his life. Luce was then sixty-eight years old and had retired as editor in chief of Time Inc. two years earlier. But he remained a figure of fascination to many Americans—all the more so because he was so seldom seen by the many people who were influenced, fascinated, and sometimes outraged by the contents of his magazines.

His interviewer was Eric Goldman, a Princeton historian who had recently worked in the Johnson White House and who now hosted an austere NBC program called Open Mind. Goldman was a courteous and respectful interviewer but not a tame one, and he pressed Luce on a number of controversial issues that had swirled around him through much of his life. Were the magazines Luce had launched—Time, Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated—“Republican magazines”? Was there an inherent “conservative outlook” in them? Did his “own attitudes and convictions shape the contents” of his magazines? Had he “stepped over the line” in promoting Republican candidates he had particularly admired and openly supported—Wendell Willkie, Dwight Eisenhower? And most of all, did Luce’s many interventions in the debate over America’s international policies represent “a kind of modern-day American imperialism”?

Luce sat slouched in his chair through most of the hour, his clothes slightly rumpled, his tie askew, his pants pulled up over his crossed legs. He looked gaunt, and he had an alert, slightly restless demeanor. He rambled in conversation, often stopping in midsentence and starting over again, circling around questions before actually answering them, sometimes speaking so fast that he seemed to be trying to outrace the stammer that had troubled him in childhood and that occasionally revived in moments of stress. But he responded to Goldman’s prodding without rancor. “One gets the feeling,” Goldman said, “that you have a view of a kind of American mission in the world … to go out and to bring these nations into a type of civilization much like our own.” Luce—whose famous 1941 essay “The American Century” had said exactly that—noted that his 1941 views had been shaped by the circumstances of World War II. But he did not refute Goldman’s claim. Europe “would not be able to lead the world in the sense it had for a couple of centuries,” he said. “The burden of leadership would fall more and more on the United States … and this burden of leadership necessarily would want to be in the direction of those ideals which we presume to acknowledge.”

One could have imagined a very different interview with Henry Luce—one that would have focused on the extraordinary success of his magazines, the great power he had wielded as a result, the ideas for which he fought, the enormous wealth he had accumulated, the remarkable network of powerful people who hade re become part of his world, even his marriage to one of the most famous women in America. For decades he had been among the most influential men in America—courted by presidents, feared by rivals, capable of raising some people to prominence and pulling others down. It must have been frustrating to him that his first (and only) television interview was dominated by the criticisms he had heard through much of his career. For as he neared the end of his life, what meant most to him was his effort to make a difference in history—to embrace a mission that would somehow justify his work and his life.