The Middle Years

By John Jessup

THE WORLD OF TIME INC., THE INTIMATE HISTORY OF A PUBLISHING ENTERPRISE 1941-1960

by ROBERT T. ELSON

505 pages. Atheneum. $10.

Three years before his death in 1967, Henry R. Luce, co-founder of Time Inc., commissioned a history of the company. He opened his private files and corporate files and instructed Historian Robert T. Elson "to be candid, truthful and to suppress nothing relevant." Elson, a veteran correspondent and editor for TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE, followed orders. In 1968 he produced the lively and candid Time Inc., The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923-1941. Elson's second volume, The World of Time Inc., carries the story through the company's more expansive years from Pearl Harbor to the early '60s.

One of Elson's major themes is the interaction between Luce and the talented and often difficult men and women who staffed the Time Inc. magazines. Most editorial positions were arrived at through incessant rounds of discussion and debate. A complex man, Luce was both opinionated and open-minded; giving orders went against his grain. Persuasion was the art he preferred, and indeed he emerges from Elson's pages as perhaps too easy a boss. He sometimes took stands without following them through and wrote waspish memos that repose in his files marked "Not sent."

Luce nevertheless accepted personal responsibility for what the magazines said. Sometimes what they did not say was also personal. For example, there was the perennial question of how to handle Clare Boothe Luce, the editor in chief's wife, who also happened to be a Congresswoman. Both Luce and Mrs. Luce felt that the editors, particularly at TIME, were negligent or unfair. For a while, at Clare Luce's own request, the rule was not to mention her in the magazines at all. But in a 1944 confidential memo to his editors, Luce said that his wife was suffering politically from a lack of TIME coverage. "It is, I think you will agree, a bit tough on her," he wrote. Clare was surprised when Elson told her of the existence of this memo years later. "What a rough thing it all was on him too. Vis-`a-vis me, he always defended the editors. When I wasn't around, he defended me to his editors."

Luce constantly worried that leaning too far to be fair or kind to a subject infringed on what he considered "our contract with our readers to tell them the truth." The political truth, as Luce saw it, lay in Bull-Moose Republicanism. The extent to which TIME should reflect that view in its reporting was a sore issue between Luce and some of his editors. The tug of war was fiercest in 1952, when Luce became personally involved in backing Dwight Eisenhower's nomination for President.

The then editor of TIME, T.S. Matthews, a friend and Princeton classmate of Adlai Stevenson, saw things differently. Matthews revised a staunchly Republican writer's first draft of a Stevenson cover story. The revision, says Elson, was "not very good and obviously battle-scarred." It was also inconsistent with an earlier and friendlier Stevenson cover, on the question of the Governor's relations with the Cook County machine. Luce told Matthews to stand aside from the editing of an Eisenhower cover story, at which point, says Elson, Matthews decided to resign. He did so the following year.

TIME's columns were less partisan in the 1956 campaign and approximately neutral in 1960. Although Luce was on close terms with the son of his old friend Joe Kennedy, LIFE's editorial page gave a narrow endorsement to Nixon. When Luce suggested that, as a Democrat, J.F.K. would naturally adopt a liberal domestic policy, the elder Kennedy seemed surprised. "Harry," he erupted, "you know goddam well no son of mine could ever be a goddam liberal."

Life assessed the Eisenhower years favorably, though concluding that Ike "had rather reigned than ruled." This elicited an extraordinary letter from Ike to Luce, in which the President explained why he had been "too easy a boss." One reason: "The government of the U.S. has become too big, too complex ... for one individual to pretend to direct [its] details." Luce had learned a similar lesson about Time Inc.

Luce has often been criticized as a leader of the China Lobby. Elson shows that his support of Chiang Kai-shek was actually quite ambiguous. Luce felt that Chiang, as the official wartime ally of the U.S., deserved at least as much postwar support as De Gaulle. But he gave a hearing and ample space to his anti-Chiang correspondent in China, Teddy White. Luce even tried to "get off the hook with Chiang" after he refused to accept General Marshall's proposals to face the realities of Nationalist China. From then on, Luce continued to lobby personally for aid to Chiang, but no longer bet on him as a journalist. Luce seldom overstayed a losing crusade.

No Profits. Elson also describes the courtship that landed Winston Churchill's memoirs in LIFE (and the New York Times). It began with the purchase of some Churchill paintings as well as his secret wartime speeches to Parliament (which Luce found boring). Getting rights to the great man's memoirs cost LIFE $750,000, not to mention picking up the check for Churchill's frequent vacations in Marrakech. Was it worth it? LIFE's circulation department found that the memoirs had a "devastating effect" on newsstand sales. But, says Elson, "Luce took a more elevated view. At a time when checkbook journalism was running strong and competition for the war leaders was fierce, LIFE landed the first one and, by all measurements, the finest."

During the postwar years LIFE grossed more advertising dollars annually than any other magazine. Yet high production costs always kept its profit margin narrow. In the end, rising costs left no profits at all. After sustaining $30 million in losses in three years, LIFE ceased publication on Dec. 29, 1972.

But even as LIFE lay dying SPORTS ILLUSTRATED was moving into its most prosperous years. Elson recounts the birth pangs of the magazine, the last one Luce had a direct hand in founding. Despite the fact that he knew little about sports, Luce maintained his enthusiasm and support for SI, even though the magazine lost $6,000,000 in its first year and took more than five years to get into the black.

Autonomy. Magazines, like human beings, go through demanding phases. But the Time Inc. publications, Elson says, were constantly rethinking their roles. The end of World War II was a particularly thoughtful period for FORTUNE. During the war, industrial advertising had caused the magazine to "bulge like a lady carrying twins," as one former publisher put it. Those ads dried up by 1946, putting the magazine into the red. But after 1948 FORTUNE became more profitable and functional with pertinent features and such regular departments as Law and Labor.

The late '40s and '50s also meant new challenges for Time Inc.'s corporate officers. In addition to magazines, the company produced paper products and launched ventures in book publishing, records, films and cable TV.

In 1952 the American Institute of Management put Time Inc. on its list of the ten best-managed corporations.

As Vice President Eric Hodgins recalled, this compliment "caused even those among management to utter harsh, humorless laughter." The management structure was altered to give the publishers more autonomy, but it remained "a benevolent and indulgent monarchy," since Luce retained the final say in all major decisions. That began to change in 1960 when, in a reorganization, the founding executives made way for a new president and board chairman. In 1964, Luce himself solved the problem of editorial succession by picking Hedley Donovan to be editor in chief of all Time Inc. publications. It was Donovan, not Luce, who decided that LIFE should endorse its first Democratic presidential candidate in 1964. "The vote of Time Inc.," said Donovan at that time, "should never be considered to be in the pocket of any particular political leader or party."

The times had changed--and so had Time Inc. Elson skillfully develops the contrast between the innocent gusto with which its magazines threw themselves into the war effort after Pearl Harbor, and the gradually chastening complexities of postwar and cold-war politics. In his last years, Luce, the author of The American Century, worked hard to alter the more simplistic aspects of his patriotism. The result was a more universal theme for his last crusade: the American support and promotion of international law. It was the natural extension of his editorial conscience.

--John Jessup

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