He Ran the Course

At last, after a year of preparations and frustrations, the first issue of TIME, dated March 3, 1923, was going to press. Soon after midnight, with Briton Hadden in command, almost the entire editorial staff was transported in three taxis from East 40th Street to the Williams Press at 36th Street and Eleventh Avenue, New York. There, until dawn, we stood around the "stones" (tables) of the composing room. Under Hadden's direction we wrote new copy to fill holes, we rewrote to cut and to fit, and everyone tried his hand at captions. It was daylight when I got home and went to sleep. That afternoon, I found an uncut copy of the little magazine in my room. I picked it up and began to turn through its meager 32 pages (including cover). Half an hour later, I woke up to a surprise: what I had been reading wasn't bad at all. In fact, it was quite good. Somehow, it all held together, it made sense, it was interesting.

That description of TIME's birth was the last piece Harry Luce wrote for publication.* And his matter-of-fact summary of what he found in the first issue was what might be said about his own life: it held together, it made sense, it was interesting.

Luce's life was marked by an extraordinary inner consistency. His profound curiosity seems to have been with him from the start. His intellectual style, the way he arrived at ideas and put them into practice--a process often awesome in its intensity--hardly changed over a career that spanned 45 years. Even what he wrote in college rang no note of dissonance with the utterances of his later life. His deeply felt views about religion, country, freedom and society, though they broadened and became more complex, seemed to be present in microcosm during his childhood.

The son of Presbyterian missionaries, the Rev. Henry Winters Luce and Elizabeth Root Luce, he was born and spent the first 14 years of his life in Shantung, the home province of Confucius. From his parents, he absorbed the Calvinist faith and the love of his homeland that were to influence his whole life. Before he was six, he stood on a stool in the mission compound and preached a sermon to the assembled amahs and their children. He later said that he could never remember a time when he did not know all about the U.S. Constitution.

He first saw the U.S. at the age of seven, when his parents came home on furlough. At 15, after several months' wandering around Europe, he returned to attend Hotchkiss. He was one of the most traveled but shiest boys of his age.

Rolling-Eyed Greeks. At Hotchkiss, Luce met Briton Hadden, a fiercely competitive boy from Brooklyn. Hadden became editor of the school paper; Luce (he tried to shake off the nickname "Chink") took charge of the literary magazine. Both excelled in Greek, and Hadden's fondness for such Homeric epithets as "rolling-eyed Greeks" and "far-darting Apollo" prefigured his later introduction of such double adjectives into the young TIME. The two boys did not become close friends until they reached Yale, where Hadden became chairman of the Yale Daily News in his sophomore year, an unusual honor prompted by the call of war for his seniors. Luce joined the News' board. But the war intervened, and both were shipped off to Camp Jackson, S.C. as student officer instructors to the draftees then flooding into the ranks.

It was at Camp Jackson that the idea for TIME was born. There Hadden and Luce, emerging from the sheltered and privileged enclaves of Hotchkiss and Yale, met the rank and file of America for the first time and discovered the huge gap between those who kept up with events and those who did not. That set them to thinking about getting news and knowledge to a wide variety of people. One night they took a long walk through the drill ground and the piny woods beyond, talking about "the paper" that they might some day found. As Luce later said: "I think it was in that walk that TIME began. On that night there was formed an organization. Two boys decided to work together."

To their disgust, the war ended before either could get into action, and they returned to Yale. Hadden took up again as chairman of the Daily News; Luce became its managing editor as well as a contributor of poetry to the literary magazine. "I came to the conclusion," Luce later said, "that I was never going to be a really good poet, so the hell with it." He and Hadden reorganized the Daily News, then determined to go into newspaper work because of their experience there. The "paper" that they had discussed at Camp Jackson still remained a vague and undefined objective. Luce sailed for England to study history at Oxford; Hadden went to work for the New York World.

A year later, Luce returned from Europe with a mustache, a cane, a pair of spats and two dimes in his pocket. He managed to land a job on the Chicago Daily News as an assistant to Ben Hecht. Hecht was a raffish columnist (and later a playwright) who used Luce as a legman to supply suggestions and information about such people as snake charmers and blind violinists. Among the paper's reporters and editors, Luce was considered something of a dandy and a dilettante. Dressed to meet his girl, he ran into the managing editor in the elevator one day. The M.E. looked him over head to toe, then said with withering scorn: "Ah, Luce, a journalist, I see." Luce later said: "I have sometimes said to myself that the one thing I was determined to do was to make 'journalist' a good word. And today it, is a good word."

What Money Cannot Buy. Luce and Hadden got together again as reporters for the Baltimore News, but their stay did not last long. They began talking again about "the paper" and finally decided to act. Both 23, they took off for New York with some crude, typewritten dummy sheets for a newsmagazine. Setting up shop in an old remodeled house on East 17th Street, they began to write a prospectus. Luce later recalled that going home one night on the subway "my half-glazed stare fell on an advertisement with the headline, TIME TO RETIRE, Or TIME FOR A CHANGE. I remember the name 'Time' occurring to me. It stayed with me overnight, and when I went in next morning, I suggested it to Hadden and he accepted it immediately."

"People are uninformed because no publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend on simply keeping informed," said TIME's prospectus. "TIME is interested not in how much it includes between its covers but in how much it gets off its pages into the minds of its readers. To keep men well-informed--that, first and last, is the only ax this magazine has to grind." Even so, declared Hadden and Luce, "the editors recognize that complete neutrality on public questions and important news is probably as undesirable as it is impossible, and are therefore ready to acknowledge certain prejudices." Among them: "Faith in the things which money cannot buy; a respect for the old, particularly in manners; an interest in the new, particularly in ideas."

Luce and Hadden decided that they needed $100,000 to start TIME, but after a grueling year of canvassing friends and relatives, they could raise only $86,000. They went ahead anyway and somehow, with a small but aggressive staff of writers, turned out the magazine's first issue. An extraordinary number of prominent men plunked down the $5-per-year price to receive TIME, including Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Walter Lippmann, Herbert Bayard Swope, Edward W. Bok, the Catholic Archbishop of Baltimore, and half a dozen college presidents.

Eel-Hipped Runagade. TIME was full of innovations in journalism. It was the first national weekly that tried to be both comprehensive and systematic in its coverage. It packaged the news of the week into departments, hired researchers to provide background, and soon began to develop what came to be known as TIMEstyle. This was a fresh, sassy and sometimes impudent way of writing marked by double adjectives, alliteration, inverted sentences and frequent neologisms. Hadden was the chief inventor of TIMEstyle, and he peppered the young magazine with it. TIME called George Bernard Shaw "mocking, mordant, misanthropic," and Erich von Ludendorff "flagitious, inscrutable, unrelenting." It coined "Mussoliniland" for Italy and called drugstores "omnivenderous." When Red Grange appeared on TIME's cover, he was described as an "eel-hipped runagade" and G. K. Chesterton became "a paradoxhund."

TIME's first months were rough, but circulation gradually rose until, in 1926, it had reached 118,661. In 1925, TIME moved briefly to Cleveland, where it first used color on the cover and adopted the red border. Hadden did not like Cleveland, and the magazine was back in New York a little more than two years later. Hadden and Luce agreed to alternate as editor and business manager, each doing his job for a year. Then, on March 11, 1929, the partnership ended in tragedy. Hadden died, at 31, of a strep infection. TIME was just six years old.

Banana Peel. Editing TIME during 1928, Luce, who had an early bias in favor of the activist and the entrepreneur, became especially engrossed in American business. Feeling that the press covered the field inadequately, he assigned a staff to explore the idea of a business magazine. Five months later, he decided the time was opportune. Among the names considered were Power and FORTUNE. Luce picked the latter because it appealed to his wife, the former Lila Ross Hotz of Chicago. They had married in 1923 and had two sons: Henry III, a Time Inc. vice president and the head of the London Bureau, and Peter Paul, a management consultant on Long Island.

Luce believed that "America's great achievement has been business"--and he charged a new magazine, FORTUNE, to report business not in dull statistics but through drama, personalities and technology. After a year of careful preparation, FORTUNE'S first issue, an elegant and handsome magazine with a black and bronze cover, appeared in February 1930. Luce later said that it was difficult to imagine a magazine less likely to survive: FORTUNE had walked in on the Great Depression. As a later FORTUNE managing editor, Eric Hodgins, put it: "Almost on the eve of FORTUNE's publication, the whole of the economy of the U.S. clapped a hand over its heart, uttered a piercing scream, and slipped on the largest banana peel since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations." Yet, surprisingly, the magazine prospered in that dramatically inopportune time. Even at $1 a copy--then an unheard-of price for a magazine--businessmen bought FORTUNE with amazing regularity.

In its first years, FORTUNE was more or less a journal of discovery, but the length of the Depression (TIME's editors had felt that "it may last as long as a year") prompted it to begin a study of the stricken economy. As Franklin Roosevelt was elected and power ebbed from Wall Street to Washington, the magazine's editors made Government as much as business the object of editorial scrutiny. In so doing, FORTUNE in the early '30s came down very much on the side of the New Deal, reflecting Luce's general approval of the early reforms of the Roosevelt Administration as well as the personal sympathies of FORTUNE's writers and researchers.

Smashing Success. In early 1931, Time Inc. launched a new project that had an extraordinary impact on radio broadcasting and later on movie news reporting: THE MARCH OF TIME. Put together by Roy Larsen, TIME's vice president (now chairman of the Time Inc. executive committee), THE MARCH OF TIME could fairly claim to have been the precursor of the TV documentary. Under the aegis of Larsen and Producer Louis de Rochemont, it produced hundreds of provocative films for 15 years before being phased out in the face of TV in 1951. In addition to its value to the art of cinema documentary, it heightened Luce's already considerable interest in the place of pictures in journalism. "Pictures cannot tell all," Luce wrote in launching THE MARCH OF TIME. "But what pictures can tell (with the help of a word or two), they tell with a force, an explicitness, an overwhelmingness which reportorial words can rarely equal." Recognizing that photojournalism was not merely a sideline of journalism but an independent branch of the craft, Luce decided to start a picture magazine.

The field was wide open in the U.S. Luce promised that the new magazine's purpose would be "to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed." As this language suggests, Luce himself chose the name LIFE and bought out a humor magazine of that name for his own use.

LIFE promised to scour the world for the best pictures, to edit them with feeling for history and drama, and to publish them on fine paper--a feat made possible by the recent development of fast-drying inks, the engineering of heating units on presses to dry them immediately, and the manufacture of coated paper in rolls.

LIFE was such a smashing success that it nearly smashed Time Inc. Its first run, Nov. 23, 1936, was 466,000 copies--but that was far from enough to meet demand. Succeeding issues of higher runs were similarly grabbed up. LIFE's advertising rates had been set for the first year with the expectation of a small and slowly growing circulation. When the demand for it went beyond the capacity of the presses to print, advertisers swarmed aboard for a free ride, while the bills for paper and ink alone swallowed up the magazine's revenues--and then some. Before launching LIFE, Luce had declared: "It can be safely assumed that $1,000,000 will see LIFE safely through to a break-even 500,000 circulation or to an honorable grave." Yet Time Inc. spent $5,000,000 to keep LIFE from dying of success before the magazine finally turned the profit corner in 1939, when its circulation had reached more than 2,000,000. LIFE, which hardly needed extra attention, nevertheless got it when it published a frank and explicit (for that day) photographic account of the birth of a baby. Roy Larsen, who had moved to LIFE, submitted to arrest to test a ban, was acquitted in court.

Fun & Profit. In the first 15 years of Time Inc., Henry Luce was publisher as well as editor, involved in the planning of major circulation drives, advertising promotion and company investments. His business and administrative ability was as decisive a factor in the company's success as his editorial and news judgment. For many months, he concentrated on getting LIFE going, leaving his other magazines--Time Inc. had also acquired ARCHITECTURAL FORUM --pretty much to themselves. While LIFE was growing strong enough to walk on its own, Luce reorganized management by announcing that henceforth every magazine would have its own publisher as well as an editor. At the same time, he would become editorial director of TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE.

He had had "plenty of fun (and profit) as an entrepreneur," he said, but from now on he wanted to be a journalist. For the next quarter of a century, he turned his attention primarily to the editorial content of his magazines and the affairs of the nation and the world.

TIME's growth--its circulation in 1938 had reached 822,670--had its effects on both the magazine and the country. From more or less a pastepot operation in which its writers clipped from newspapers and magazines to sift and organize the news, TIME developed its own news service (its first Washington stringer: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.), began to be served by the press associations, built up a morgue and reference library, and increasingly depended on its writers' own knowledge for special information and judgments. It also lost some of its early brashness--though not its freshness--as the times became more serious and its influence grew.

The Luce-Hadden invention exerted a great influence on the nation's newspapers, which borrowed (in return for their clippings) some of TIME's style and mode of presentation; the news review section, now a common feature, began to proliferate. A whole generation of young newspaper reporters rebelled against city-room shibboleths, experimenting outside the routine who-what-when-where-why.

"Les Allemands!" Luce himself had become, before the age of 40, one of the most successful journalists of his century. After a divorce from his first wife, he married Clare Boothe Brokaw, playwright and former editor of Vanity Fair, and they became leading figures in New York social and intellectual life.

Having spent most of his ideas and energies up to now within the confines of his own magazines, he also became a public figure who spoke out on public issues. Luce broke publicly with Roosevelt and the New Deal in 1937. In a speech to a group of Ohio bankers, he declared that the Depression was continuing because of a lack of business confidence--and that that lack of confidence had been caused by Roosevelt's basing "his political popularity on the implication that business is antisocial, unpatriotic, vulgar and corruptive."

At a time when the overwhelming sentiment in the U.S. was isolationist, Luce was an interventionist. His magazines sought to awaken the American people to external danger and their new world responsibility. TIME in the later '30s made clear that it thought Hitler and the Nazis a menace. When the Germans attacked Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, it came forth with a new section called "World War," and boldly led it off with the flat statement: "World War II began last week." Readers protested that it was no such thing, but TIME stuck by its new phrase; the phrase stuck, too. FORTUNE allowed Wendell Willkie to articulate his philosophy in its pages, thus helped bring him into the national arena and win the 1940 G.O.P. nomination. When the Germans attacked Belgium in May of that year, the Luces were staying at the American embassy in Brussels. They were awakened by a maid rushing in shouting "Les Allemands!" and reached the window just in time to see a bomb fall on a house across the square below.

In February of 1941--well before Pearl Harbor--Luce published his famous article on The American Century, urging full entry into the war. He prophesied that the U.S. would enter the war eventually, win it, and thereafter assume worldwide responsibilities, including the supplying of vast quantities of food to millions of hungry people around the world. When the U.S. was forced to go to war only a few months later, Time Inc. sent correspondents to the battlefields. TIME got a new dimension from the original war reporting of such men as Robert Sherrod, Charles Wertenbaker, Theodore H. White, Noel Busch and John Hersey. Both TIME and LIFE began following U.S. troops and civilians abroad with a number of special lightweight "pony" airmail editions.

Eye on the Future. Luce made several trips abroad, visited the war fronts as often as he was permitted to. On one such trip, as he later described it, "I was standing in front of a fireplace with Winston Churchill. Earlier we had seen a movie, Custer's Last Stand, which put the old man in a good mood, and I got him to treat me to a personal account of the Battle of Omdurman. When Omdurman was done, I veered to the question of 'postwar planning.' The next thing I felt was a hearty slap on the back and Churchill saying: 'Never mind about all that, Luce. Just win the war--and then all will be well.' "

Nonetheless, Luce and his publications kept their eye on the future as the battles were being waged. Time Inc. formed a War Committee to decide what it would do journalistically after the war and how to prepare for it. In several prescient statements, Luce advocated "the end of imperialism throughout the world" and suggested the formation of a United States of Europe. He told his editors in a memo: "The interrelationship between Asia and the West is the greatest new factor in human life." Well before the war ended, both TIME and LIFE were warning their readers that the Russians were not to be trusted.

In the years during and after the war, Luce played an active part in the editorial direction of the magazines, sitting in frequently as managing editor of TIME. Time Inc. emerged from the war with a team of correspondents who eventually became the TIME-LIFE News Service, the world's largest magazine news-gathering operation. It set up a TIME-LIFE International division to publish both magazines abroad.

Painful Decision. Luce's greatest postwar sorrow was the fall of China to the Communists in 1949. A staunch supporter and friend of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, Luce had nonetheless seen the Red handwriting on the wall. In 1946 he visited Nanking while the mission of General George Marshall was trying to effect a peace between the Kuomintang and the Communists. There, he went to see Chou Enlai, who was then the head of the Chinese Communist mission. Over steaming cups of tea, Chou professed to be weary of the negotiations, said that he would like to visit the U.S. "to study your impressive techniques of modern production." Wrote Luce later: "I must record the utter confidence as well as the good humor with which Chou En-lai spoke to me. While he didn't say so in so many words, I had the chilling feeling that he expected soon to be in control of all China. At the end of my stay, I figured he was right. I knew the Marshall mission had failed." Just before his death, Luce was attempting to get into Red China to try to interview Chou again.

In 1952, Luce--who had supported Republican Thomas E. Dewey for President in 1944 and 1948--was for Dwight Eisenhower both before and after the Republican Convention. Both TIME and LIFE supported Ike's candidacy. Luce went to Paris to look Ike over before the general came back to seek the nomination, and was impressed. "As for myself," Luce wrote later, "I had to make a decision which was personally painful. I respected Taft --as who did not? But I decided I must go for Eisenhower. I thought it was of paramount importance that the American people should have the experience of being under a Republican Administration so that they would not forever associate Republicanism with Depression or with isolationism. I was sure that Eisenhower could win. I was not sure that Taft could."

Works, Plays & Prays. With Eisenhower in the White House and his own company in a highly healthy shape (1953 was a year of record revenues of $170.5 million), Harry Luce looked around for another challenge. In 1954, he and the company decided on a daring venture: a sports magazine that would chronicle "the wonderful world of sport" (Luce's phrase) without the cant and cliches that marked most sport reporting. As he reasoned: "It is a safe premise that there would not be a tremendous interest and participation if sport did not correspond to some important elements--something deeply inherent--in the human spirit. Man is an animal that works, plays and prays. No important aspect of human life should be devalued." The result was SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, which had the largest initial circulation (450,000) in magazine history and has since climbed to 1,250,000 circulation.

During the middle 1950s, Luce spent much of his time in Rome with his wife Clare, who had been appointed Ambassador to Italy by President Eisenhower in 1953. The Italian government gave him an honorary rank, as the ambassador's consort, immediately behind ministers plenipotentiary. But Luce kept discreetly out of the limelight, proudly leaving it to Clare. He studied Italian, roamed through Rome (he liked to show visitors the zoo, where he usually fed the animals), and set up a separate office of his own overlooking the Borghese Gardens. From there, he sent a steady flow of memos and suggestions back to New York, including a critique of the issues of his magazines as he read them.

His retiring stance as the ambassador's husband did not suggest that he ever had any reluctance to challenge the top figures of government. On his way to interview the Emperor of Japan, he asked his companions to help him frame an unusual question: How would you ask the Emperor how it felt to be a mortal and no longer revered as a god? He himself then proceeded to frame the question, simply and in a dignified manner that robbed it of any impertinence. He was a frequent visitor at the White House, particularly during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and he never lost a certain awe of the office of the presidency.

Into the Streets. His habit of constant questioning--combined with a cub reporter's curious eye--made Luce a formidable practicing journalist. His questions about President Kennedy's reading speed, asked of the President himself and his relatives, produced the article in LIFE that revealed that the President liked to read Ian Fleming, and thus launched the James Bond boom in the U.S. He also traveled out of his way some years ago to hear and talk with an obscure young North Carolina preacher named Billy Graham, then gave him his first national exposure in LIFE. Present in Cairo when the Naguib regime was under siege by Nasser, Luce rushed out into the streets full of surging crowds and, using a terrified interpreter, filled a notebook with color, quotes and impressions that he filed off to New York.

Luce was interested in the young and what they thought. Only a few days before his death, on a visit to San Francisco, he insisted on being taken to the Haight-Ashbury beatnik district to observe how today's far-out young play. Whatever was new fascinated him; he could sense development and innovation. Recently, discussing the supersonic transport with one of his reporters, he asked: "When will I be able to fly in it?" He was also interested in the Rule of Law, which became practically a crusade with him as he persuaded Presidents and Prime Ministers to push the cause of international law.

But if there is one thing that most typified Harry Luce, it was his deep and abiding interest in religion. Luce was a religious man in the best sense of that word, without a trace of pietism or holier-than-thouism. A Presbyterian, he served on the board of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and was active in a campaign to raise $50 million for the church. He also served as a director of the Union Theological Seminary, where he endowed a chair. But his interest in religion was not primarily institutional. Well versed in theology, he was comfortable with the works and ideas of Teilhard de Chardin, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Kung and Tillich. One of his closest friends was Jesuit John Courtney Murray, and he frequently attended Mass, where he was fascinated by the changes in the liturgy and delighted to find Martin Luther's A Mighty Fortress Is Our God in the Catholic hymnal. He liked good singing and good preaching.

Luce was interested in the quest for the historical Jesus. To him, God was a phenomenon to be prodded and investigated as well as prayed to, and nothing fascinated him more than theological speculation and debate. A woman seated next to him at a dinner was once startled when Luce turned and inquired: "What do you think of the resurrection of the body?" His deep interest in religion early gave TIME's Religion section a theological dimension when most of the press was concerned about Saturday church notices.

Not as Great. Luce resigned his title of Editor in Chief in 1964 and became Editorial Chairman. He spent more time at his home in Phoenix, maintained a less hectic schedule, traveled more. But he continued to send a stream of letters, memos and clippings to New York. He made several speeches a year (he always wrote his own), continued to help the Presbyterian drive, and accompanied a group of business leaders on a TIME-sponsored trip to Eastern Europe last fall.

Some years ago, when asked about the cultural shock of adjusting to the U.S. after 14 years in China, Luce said: "I was never disillusioned with or by America, but I was from my earliest manhood dissatisfied with America.

America was not being as great and as good as I knew she could be, as I believed with every nerve and fiber God himself had intended her to be." It was largely his desire to see his country as great as it should be that drove Harry Luce, by his rights, to want to explain it to itself and to others. Perhaps he succeeded a little.

When his good friend John Foster Dulles died, Luce went to Arlington Cemetery and watched as the coffin was lowered. "Then," he later wrote, "people started home, walking in the sunlight and gentle breeze of a May day. The hours had been hours of reverence--and serenity. The last enemy is Death, but Death seems tangibly serene when it can be said of a man: he ran the course, he kept the faith." So, whatever his triumphs and failures, did Henry Robinson Luce.

* It is part of the introduction to a soon-to-be-published paperback series based on year-to-year excerpts from TIME.

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