On Time

RIGHT PLACES, RIGHT TIMES

by Hedley Donovan

Henry Holt; 463 pages; $27.95

Three decades after Henry Luce slated him as heir apparent, Hedley Donovan still professes uncertainty as to what virtues the Time Inc. founder saw in deciding he would become (as he did from 1964 to 1979) the company's editor in chief. But readers of Donovan's urbane, frequently self-chiding memoir will be able to guess. He blended a heartland bourgeois regard for American values with a worldly disdain for puffery. He took pride in being able to change his mind -- notably, on Viet Nam and Richard Nixon. In chronicling his life from the rectitude of a Minnesota boyhood to a Rhodes scholarship in Hitler- threatened Europe, formative days at the Washington Post and in Navy intelligence, writing at FORTUNE and editorial stewardship of Luce's empire, Donovan displays a skill at casting ethical and political debate in human terms and a gift for precision in portraying colleagues. On some topics -- the long decline of the weekly LIFE, endless jockeying in middle management, assorted ideas for new magazines that failed or were never tried -- the tale bogs down. But Donovan gives readers a candid sense of how decisions were made, complete with glimpses of pressure being applied (and resisted) by half a dozen Presidents and countless tycoons.