Nation: HENRY R. LUCE: End of a Pilgrimage

“As a journalist,” he once said, “I am — in command of a small sector in the very front trenches of this battle for freedom.” For Henry Robinson Luce, the battle ended last week. On the 44th anniversary of TIME’s first issue, America’s greatest maker of magazines died in Phoenix of a coronary occlusion. He was 68.

Between the founding of TIME and the day that its 2,295th issue appeared on the newsstands, Henry Luce built the world’s largest, most influential publishing enterprise.* “The magazines that bear his stamp,” said Lyndon Johnson last week, “are an authentic part of life in America.” As hundreds of tributes from the U.S. and foreign countries attested, the publications that Luce created and nurtured have also become a valued and trusted voice of America throughout the free world.

A significant part of Henry Luce’s genius was his ability to bring together talented people of widely varying backgrounds and points of view to work in concert. Though he was a courtly and compassionate man, Luce also had the magisterial presence of a Koussevitzky. Tall, erect, with clear blue eyes that could rake a room like a laser beam—or twinkle as merrily as Mr. Pickwick’s —he talked with a staccato concentration of word and thought that one associate described as “jammed machinegun” style. And, as his pastor, Dr. David H. C. Read, noted last week, “he listened too—with an intensity you could almost hear.”

Whether listening or questioning—usually the latter—Luce, a classical scholar at Yale, had a Socratic approach to ideas and issues. He was one of the most quotable men of his era (see boxes on following pages) but, perhaps because of the nature of his position, was seldom quoted. Though he was often condemned by the unknowing as dogmatic and opinionated—which he could be—his was generally the most open and inquiring of minds. Good journalists, he said, are “vessels of truth.” He tended on the whole to take an optimistic view of history. Quoting Disraeli’s proposition, “Is man an ape or an angel?”, he plumped, with Disraeli, for the angels’ side.

Streams of Memos. Luce formally retired as Editor in Chief of Time Inc. in 1964. Nonetheless, he had neither the temperament nor the inclination to abandon his lifelong interest in the affairs of America, the world—and his magazines. On frequent trips around the U.S. and abroad, he eagerly quizzed TIME correspondents about the stories they were working on, made frequent speeches, questioned statesmen and cab drivers with equal pertinacity, meanwhile keeping up a steady flow of memos to his editors in New York—the last of which arrived a few hours after his death.

After accompanying his wife on a busy two-day visit to San Francisco, where Clare Boothe Luce gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club, Harry Luce spent a normal Saturday at their home in Phoenix. He played nine holes of golf, read the papers, attended to some business, and entertained friends at lunch and cocktails before joining a dinner party at the Arizona Biltmore.

On Sunday morning at 9:30, Luce rang the cook from his bedroom-office and ordered breakfast—orange juice, French toast, two slices of bacon, coffee. Ten minutes later he called back and asked the cook to remove the tray. He apologized to her for leaving his breakfast untouched, explaining: “It isn’t that the food isn’t good. I just don’t feel well.” After he had spent the morning in bed, Clare Luce called their family doctor in Phoenix, Dr. Hayes Caldwell. Luce insisted that he was well, and Dr. Caldwell examined him and found his pulse and blood pressure normal.

When he seemed no better on Monday, the doctor persuaded Luce to go to St. Joseph’s Hospital. The patient insisted on walking out to the ambulance, carrying his shoes and a clutch of books, including a paperback Perry Mason. That night he admitted: “I seem to be unusually sleepy.” He slept only fitfully, and got up several times to pace around the room. At 3 a.m. his nurse heard him fall heavily on the bathroom floor. She summoned a hospital resuscitation team, which tried in vain to revive the patient with shock treatment and cardiac massage.

Henry Luce died at 3:15 a.m.

Resounding Paean. During memorial services at Manhattan’s Madison Ave nue Presbyterian Church, where he had worshiped for 43 years, a springlike sun blazed through the stained-glass windows and, refracting from the banks of flowers that he had always loved in profusion, played like stage lighting across the illustrious throng gathered in the five-story nave. The congregation, linked by a private hookup to two other gatherings in the New York Time-Life Building, sang three old standbys: Samuel Wesley’s The Church’s One Foundation, Faith of our Fathers and Praise, My Soul, The King of Heaven, adapted from the 103rd Psalm.

In a graceful, perceptive memorial address, Dr. Read described his parishioner as “a man of unlimited imagination who reveled in hard facts; one who could be gruff with the mighty and relaxed with little children; a thinker who could see all sides of a question and yet make a quick and implacable decision. To talk with him was to shift the mind into high gear, for his was never in neutral.”

Luce was one of the few contemporary intellectuals who were not only well versed in theology but who also cherished his father’s faith. “Thus,” said the minister, “while he enjoyed the dissection of sermons and theological debate, he also liked to be told—told of the mercy of God, told of the duties of the Christian faith.” Evoking a memorable 1962 speech by Luce in which he depicted the nation’s past and questing future as the American Pilgrimage, Dr. Read concluded his address with John Bunyan’s resounding paean:

Who would true valour see, Let him come hither; One here will constant be, Come wind, come weather; There’s no discouragement Shall make him once relent His first avowed intent To be a pilgrim . . .

Ahead of the People. By coincidence, Bunyan’s hymn was sung in St. Paul’s Cathedral two years ago when the world mourned Winston Churchill’s death. Indeed, in their wholly different worlds, the two men had much in common. Like Churchill, a longtime friend, Henry Luce had a profound sense of history that enabled him to foresee the great events of the age: World War II, the cold war, the decline of empire, the American Century, the civil rights revolution, the Great Society (a phrase used by Luce in 1939), the rise of socialism in Britain, the economics of abundance in the U.S.

Both men were endowed with immense physical energy, tenacious intellect, a dazzling range of knowledge—and vast self-confidence. Luce was widely damned for his forthright expression of views that more often than not eventually proved right. As he observed, “It is sometimes said that the people are ahead of the politicians; it can also be said that journalism ought to be ahead of the people. Otherwise, the people are ill-served.”

Luce was often, and unfairly, called a chauvinist. Certainly his proudest boast was: civis Americanus sum. He had infinite idealism about his country and the conviction that in time its people would create in America “the first modern, technological, prosperous, humane and reverent civilization.” Nonetheless, in prophesying the American Century or analyzing the American Proposition, Luce was by no means advocating a narrow nationalism. He believed, on the contrary, that democracy is not a political system alone but a moral and spiritual undertaking based on universal principles and relevant to all mankind. “If men are not equal everywhere,” he wrote recently, “there is no special magic which makes them equal in America.”

Idea of Excellence. Henry Luce spoke not of America’s manifest destiny but of its “manifest duty.” Almost a year before Pearl Harbor, he foresaw the day when the U.S. would be “the Good Samaritan of the entire world,” sending its food, its technicians and its educators to every corner of the earth “as a free gift.” “We have thought,” he said in 1963, “and we think, that there is a world of meaning still to be realized from the principles which gave this country birth. A world of meaning for us and, equally, a wealth of meaning for the world.”

In the pages of his magazines and in his own life, Luce relished the material benefits of American prosperity. Yet he always expected more of his country. America, he declared in a searing speech in 1942, must not be “a mere use and convenience for our appetites.” A Bull Moose Republican, he nevertheless foreshadowed the New Frontier and the Great Society. He demanded in 1959: “Do you want a cheap, shallow, provincial America? Or do you want an America where the ideal of excellence is at home?”

Personally and publicly, Luce extolled the Roman ideal of virtue as dedication to social and civic duty. “The American daydream,” he noted, “has ended—or at least we are seeing the end of the American lead-pipe cinch.” In 1962, he exhorted a Chicago audience: “Everything we know, from the atom to the stars, calls us to leave our comfortable habitations which no longer comfort us, and to strike forth on a pilgrimage to a new civilization.”

Epic & Titillating. If conscience and commitment led Henry Luce into journalism in the first place, his Yankee ancestry drove him hard to do well at it.* “The bitch goddess,” he said, “sat in the outer office.” With his Yalemate and co-founder of TIME Briton Hadden, Luce realized after World War I that Americans as a nation were more aware than ever of world problems—”but that their knowledge didn’t equal their interest.” Luce recalled his father’s dictum: “The purpose of education is to make a man feel at home in his universe.” That, to him, became the reason for and the aim of his publications.

When TIME was founded, the nation’s technology and communications had far outstripped its daily newspapers, which remained local, parochial and, for the most part, ineffably stodgy; the few magazines of comment were not widely circulated. “I do not know any problem in journalism,” Luce said later, “which can be usefully isolated from the profoundest questions of man’s fate.” Yet, he allowed mischievously: “I am all for titillating trivialities. I am all for the epic touch. I could almost say that everything in TIME should be either titillating or epic or starkly, supercurtly factual.”

TIME’s blend of the epic and the titillating, its telling of news in terms of people, its belief that medicine, art, business, religion, education and many other aspects of everyday life that were largely ignored by the daily press were all newsworthy in themselves, made the magazine a success almost from the start. Most important of all was its founders’ guiding concept that the newspaperman’s sacrosanct “objectivity” was a myth. Asked once why TIME did not present “two sides to a story,” Luce replied: “Are there not more likely to be three sides or 30 sides?”

Lucepapers Without Luce. Few journalists in his time labored harder to examine all three or 30 sides of an argument, or strove more conscientiously to see that the facts were presented fairly. TIME made judgments, about both issues and men. Looking back on his career, Luce once noted with satisfaction that “all our publications, all our activities, are successful. They are successful not only at the box office, but they are successful also in the opinion of a large part of mankind. This is a considerable consolation for our efforts over the years.”

Like any wise general, Harry Luce made sure that there would be no slackeningof that effort in the event of his death. “I want everyone,” he said, “to get used to the idea of what they call the Lucepapers without Luce.” In 1960, corporate control of Time Inc.—in which he then held 17% of the outstanding stock—was transferred to Board Chairman Andrew Heiskell and President James A. Linen. When he retired as Editor in Chief,Luce appointed Hedley Donovan, former managing editor of FORTUNE,who for five years had been Editorial Director of Time Inc., as his successor.

After his withdrawal from Time Inc., Luce’s pastor, Dr. Read, noted “a strange peace and completeness at this point in his dynamic and turbulent career.” Neither unconditioned peace nor unequivocal completeness would ever be signal qualities of his magazines, and that, perhaps, was Harry Luce’s best legacy to journalism.

* Presses around the world last week turned out 14,331,458 copies of Time Inc.’s four major magazines—TIME, LIFE, FORTUNE and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED—and their international editions.* Newspaper obituaries parroted a quote from an unnamed “friend” of Luce:”He is a dreamer, with a keen sense of double-entry bookkeeping.” In fact,the remark was used by Harpo Marx to describe Alexander Woollcott.