WHEN HARRY MET TEDDY

By RICHARD REEVES RICHARD REEVES IS THE AUTHOR OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY: PROFILE OF POWER.

It was a few months before Pearl Harbor, and Henry R. Luce, the 43-year-old founder and editor of TIME, wanted to pay a visit to his hometown of Tengchow, China. He also wanted to check out personally the country's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, a man he had largely created, at least as far as most Americans were concerned. Traveling with his wife, the formidable Clare Boothe Luce, "Harry," as he was called, decided to bring home a souvenir, a talented bundle of energy named Theodore H. White. They are the Harry & Teddy (Random House; 340 pages; $24) of this smart little guide to big-time journalism by Thomas Griffith, a former foreign editor of TIME and editor of LIFE.

"A prize catch," writes Griffith of the 26-year-old Harvard graduate who had gone to China as a flack for Chiang in his battles against both the Japanese army and the communist legions, led by Mao Zedong. Both those struggles were holy wars for Luce, the son of Presbyterian missionaries in China. White was indeed a prize who would go on to become perhaps the greatest journalist of his time, chronicling (mostly in books written after his tenure at TIME, from 1941 to 1946) the wars and corruptions of Chiang and Mao, the postwar rebuilding of Europe and the making of American Presidents, beginning with John F. Kennedy.

Harry & Teddy is a primer on those times and that TIME, which Kennedy, for one, believed was the most important force in American journalism until TV became a national medium. TIME in its dominance was a magazine with an attitude, summed up in Luce's phrase "the American century"-an era he trusted would be as Christian and Republican and triumphant as he was. White put it this way in his 1978 autobiography, In Search of History: "Freedom of the press, [Luce] held, ran two ways: His reporters were free to report what they wished; but he was free to reject what they report-ed, or have it rewritten as he wished."

White quit or was fired in 1946, after complaining of distortions of his copy from China -- much of it by his New York editor, the former communist turned zealous communist hater Whittaker Chambers. White had also given the wrong answer to Luce's question, Will you accept any assignment I choose to give you? To Harry, Teddy had become "an impossible combination of a born organization man and born malcontent."

The heart of the book, and of most relationships between great correspondents and great editor-masters, is White's ambivalent (sometimes adolescent) struggle to use his talent as coin to buy his freedom while keeping Luce's patronage. As White wrote of himself in the third person much later: "He believed he could have it both ways-that he could say what he wanted to say, and yet enjoy the comfort and benefits of the parent organization that disagreed."

"Both were skilled at infighting when crossed," writes Griffith of the editor and his star. "The crucial difference was that one was the boss and the other not." The battles still occur, but nowadays instead of great causes and a kind of male war-love, they involve lawyers and corporations, bottom lines and movie rights.