Time At 40: may 10, 1963

SCIENCE AND INVENTION,” said the original prospectus for TIME, written 40 years ago, “will contain a special column on ‘Radio’ in which the latest activities and developments in that branch of science will be chronicled by a radio expert in terms that a novice can understand.”

That is a reminder of how long ago it was, and how much has happened on earth and in space since then.

But then there was another part of the prospectus, in which the two young men who were daring to launch this experiment ­considered brash and unrealistic by most journalists and businessmen who heard about it­listed some of the things that “WE VIEW WITH ALARM.” One of them: “The tendency of the Russian Soviet delegation to start rows at Genoa.”

And that suggests what a short time ago it was, and how so many things are the same.

This is the kind of thoughts we are having at TIME this week as we publish what we have designated as our 40th Anniversary Issue*­how much different, and how much the same, we are today from what Founders Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden planned four decades ago.

They held the opinion that the people of America were for the most part poorly informed “because no publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend on simply keeping informed,” and they decided to invent that publication. To serve their high purpose, they had to sell their invention and make it an operating success. It was not easy. “In order to start TIME, we had to peddle stock to our friends and our friends’ friends,” Harry Luce recalled last week in the McKinsey Foundation Lecture at Columbia University. “We sold them­when we did, and our sales were agonizingly few and far between­on a sporting chance. We honestly believed, not without some evidence, that TIME would succeed. But of course the chance was one in ten, so they were putting their money on a ten-to-one shot.”

One prospect who did not want to take so long a shot wrote recently about our anniversary. “It is hard for me to realize that 40 years have passed since the first little issue of TIME appeared,” said John Cowles, president of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. “My judgment has never been worse than when Roy Larsen told me about the concept of TIME and said he was leaving the New York Trust Company to become its circulation manager, and I told him that TIME didn’t have a chance of succeeding, and that if he wanted to get into publishing he ought to join me on the Des Moines Register and Tribune! He tried to persuade me to buy a few thousand dollars worth of stock, and I turned him down!”

As it turned out, the proposition was quite a bit better than ten to one. Started with capital of $86,000, TIME became Time Inc., spread to include LIFE, FORTUNE, ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, HOUSE & HOME, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, and other enterprises, with total assets of $262 million and gross revenues last year of $326 million. That is how much TIME has changed financially.

AND how has TIME changed editorially since the first issue? In its basic formula, TIME is still much the same. But through the years­of depression and war and victory and breathtaking change­the approach to stories, the breadth of coverage, the visual appearance evolved gradually but greatly with history. Thus “Radio” found its way out of SCIENCE AND INVENTION into Radio & Television, and in 1958 moved into Show Business. The evolution throughout the magazine has been steady, never shattering.

In TIME’S early years, its new style of prose became a conversation piece inside and outside the journalism fraternity, and was widely copied and sometimes parodied. TIMEstyle became one word in the language. Like the rest of the magazine, that style has changed with the years. Most of what was fresh and persuasive about it­and some of what was provocative and sometimes impudent about it­has remained. There is now no conscious infusion of a precise style of writing, but there is an abiding interest in style as an important part of our job. Other facets of our style have changed too. Our covers have advanced to include a wide variety of treatments by the best portraitists in the world. Our illustration has broadened, with greater use of color pages to make editorial points and wider freedom in the size, shape and display of black-and-white pictures. And our style of operation­our timing­has accelerated to make us flexible to move fast and deep with the course of the news.

For all these changes, the basic aim to keep busy people informed remains, and is greatly intensified after these 40 years in which the things to be informed about and the complications surrounding them have grown virtually with each day. It is a sobering and at the same time exciting realization for us that week after week more ideas and opinions are circulated across the U.S. and around the world by TIME than by any other magazine—or any other means of communication. The ideas range from those of the highest magnitude (the mystique of Charles de Gaulle, the theology of Paul Tillich) to those of personal motivation (the trials of Richard Burton, the hopes of Cassius Marcellus Clay) to those of highest practicality (how better cars are built, better farms are run, or better dresses are designed). While TIME does not believe in bannering its exclusives, almost every story can fairly be said to contain facts and insights that the reader recognizes as information that he has not seen and does not get anywhere else. And wherever it is fitting, humor works its way in, even on the biggest issues, because of our belief that solemnity is no guarantee of the truth. Each issue of TIME contains thousands of facts and hundreds of judgments —an adult education course, a compendium of knowledge inviting readers each week into the company of educated men.

One of the newest and boldest concepts announced by TIME 40 years ago was on this point of judgment—that judgments should be set forth in stories right along with facts. “The editors recognize that complete neutrality on public questions and important news is probably as undesirable as it is impossible,” said the prospectus. It promised that TIME would “clearly indicate the side it believes to have the stronger position,” to tell along with the news what the news meant. Forty years later, TIME believes more than ever that in a world where facts and figures have multiplied beyond the limit of man’s imagination and comprehension, the journalist’s most serious responsibility is to separate true from false, probable from unlikely, new from old, advocate’s evidence from pitchman’s plea, meaning from noise, show from substance. To hand a man or woman a computer tape, or a signal from a satellite, or a cardiogram, or a statistical table on the average rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere is not to inform him. To give the reader “just the facts” about almost any other event in this complicated age is not enough. Journalistic responsibility in today’s world requires that the press take on the burdens of evaluation and interpretation. In that belief, the editors of TIME make value judgments, in almost every story, on all the fields of endeavor and all categories of human aspirations and speculations.

IT is no coincidence that for this anniversary issue we chose to have a cover story on the individual in America, and to put on the cover the greatest, the classic, the archetypical individual in the American imagination: Abraham Lincoln. The individual has from the start been at the center of TIME’S interest. In an era when the news was told largely in terms of events and issues, TIME set out to tell it in terms of people. “It is important to know what they drink,” said the prospectus of personalities in the news. “It is more important to know to what gods they pray and what kinds of fights they love. The personalities of politics make public affairs live. Who are they and why? TIME will tell.”

Through these 2,096 issues, TIME has been telling, not only in cover stories but throughout the magazine, of politicians and generals, comedians and athletes, musicians, scientists, architects, educators, editors and theologians, businessmen, and people in all other forms of human endeavor—even rascals. Having followed the course of the individual in society these 40 years, TIME in 1963 disagrees with the conventional stereotype that modern society is dehumanized, and holds to the conviction that the individual has not only survived but has also fought his way toward new and noble achievements.

And what about the individual at TIME?

Almost every story in the magazine is the product of many minds—researchers, correspondents, writer and editors. Some of our colleagues in journalism question whether all this collaboration can work.

It works—in the same way that a college faculty comes to a collective decision or the State Department resolves a series of position papers. TIME believes in the reporter on the spot, and has more men on more spots than any other publication, filing some 700,000 words a week to the editors in New York. But it is a rare story today on which one man, on one spot, can report all that it is necessary to know. That’s why we gather information from many spots and employ many minds to try to arrive at the truth. All of these individuals make a vital contribution to the result on their own individual terms.

The man with the overall authority in the process of reaching the consensus is the managing editor, who reads every line before it is set in type. The editor-in-chief, constantly in close touch, does not try to impose his will from the top, but engages in the process of reaching the consensus. Putting it somewhat wryly, he said on that Columbia lecture platform: “I will confess that there are times when I think people ought to pay more attention to what I say. I just don’t seem to be able to give orders effectively. But everybody is very nice to me. One thing people at Time Inc. seem to know is how to handle the top bosses.”

It is true that one of the most important parts of TIME’S editorial process is the discussion, the argument that often is heated. Certainly everybody who works for TIME (and who reads TIME) does not agree with all the views in all the stories. “But I believe,” says Editor-in-Chief Luce, “that every journalist who works for us feels more individual freedom and responsibility because he knows basically where we stand. He knows where he agrees or disagrees. He is free to do his own job in our organization, knowing that all are working, in a broad consensus of conviction, for definable goals.”

LOOKING toward the future, it will take even greater effort and skill and imagination to attain those goals. For perhaps the great reality that faces us is that there is so much to be done in the world, in so many fields of human activity. Year by year the world’s unfinished business seems to grow greater. We want to send men to the moon, to nourish the underfed billions on our productive planet, to war against insects and disease, to unsnarl the tangled traffic in and around our cities, to draw fresh water from the sea and energy from the sun, to improve the human condition for all, and finally to establish both at home and abroad a more rational economic and political order.

To inform, and indeed to lead, an intelligent readership while that great reality unfolds is TIME’S aim for the years to come.

*To coincide with this week’s dinner honoring some 300 TIME cover subjects. Exact anniversary: March 3.