"I Present to You ..."

From the dais at the anniversary dinner, Editor in Chief Luce introduced a group of cover subjects with personal citations. Among them: A liberal statesman, one of TIME'S first employees, our first Washington reporter at $10 a week, the Honorable Henry Cabot Lodge. For many years our badly unpaid adviser on religion, the Rev. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, distinguished president of Union Theological Seminary. A brilliant, alltime-great district attorney, one of the very great governors of the state of New York, a tough fellow in a fight, and a good loser, Thomas E. Dewey. The only man who got honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale and Princeton in one week, Eugene R. Black, who made the World Bank one of the pillars of our world. Billy Phelps taught generations of Yale-men that the test of a great play was whether or not it sent tingles up your spine. One name which does that to me is that great American hero, Douglas Mac-Arthur. We proudly boast that TIME was the first publication to call international attention to a name now honored throughout the world, Adlai Stevenson. If he can give us the tax system which we can live with, he will be the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton: Douglas Dillon. There are perhaps only a dozen original subscribers to TIME in this room tonight. One of them was a humble priest in Worcester, Mass. In our second or third year, in a moment of youthful folly, we offered for $60 a perpetual subscription to TIME to a man and his heirs forever. We quickly withdrew the offer, but not before that same humble priest had taken us up on it. A faithful reader and an unfailing friend, His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman. Grandson of an immortal of industry, he has made the name greater than ever--in business, philanthropy, international affairs : Henry Ford II. A Yaleman bows to the president of the premier university, President of Harvard Nathan Pusey. A great virologist who is helping to keep all of us alive, John Enders. In youth or age, in Washington or in South Carolina, an ever effective statesman, Senator, assistant President, Justice of the Supreme Court, Secretary of State, Governor Jimmy Byrnes. Someone said, "The American Century"; he said, "No, the Century of the Common Man"--perhaps both were partly right. Famous as Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President of the United States, Henry Wallace. Irrepressible and insidious, he keeps telling me that I really agree with him; can't help liking that man, a leader of the Senate, Hubert Humphrey. She teaches girls to be women and inspires our sons to deserve such ladies: President of Radcliffe Dr. Mary I. Bunting. He has kept the flame of Christian hope alive for his people under two tyrannies, Naziism and Communism: Bishop Otto Dibelius. Compact car with a 500-horsepower engine, the Governor of Michigan, George Romney. Beauty is her business, and every woman here and every man knows it: Elizabeth Arden. In painting, I know what I like. I enormously like Edward Hopper. A novelist, wonderful, obsessed with America, John Dos Passos. His faith and wisdom sustained the public philosophy: Rabbi Louis Finkelstein. True journalist daughter of a great journalist whose husband, Harry Guggenheim, also made the cover on his own, Alicia Patterson. A man who knows what he believes and does well by his belief, the United States Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. He has written his name all across the sky. We salute a great scientist, James Van Allen. There are quite a few people in this room who ought to have been on the cover of TIME and haven't been for various reasons. I should like now to pay my respects to all of them by saluting one of them, one who has not been on the cover for a unique but very poor reason: she married the editor in chief. I present to you with great respect and all my love, Clare Boothe Luce.

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