A History: To See And Know Everything

Through most of an eventful and extraordinarily successful life, Henry Luce–the co-founder of TIME and its undisputed leader for nearly 40 years–was not a wholly contented man. He was unsuccessful in his marriages; intermittently estranged from members of his family; frequently dismayed by the directions in which his nation, and the world, were moving. But what most concerned him was the gap he always saw between his own actions and the high purposes against which he measured them. He achieved great power, wealth and fame, and he was by any measure one of the most influential figures in the nation. But Luce was not satisfied with conventional success of whatever magnitude. He had higher, perhaps unattainable, aims that he had absorbed in his youth and retained until his death.

Luce was born in 1898 in Tengchow (now P’eng-lai), China, where his father–a Presbyterian minister and missionary–headed a small college for Chinese converts to Christianity. Harry spent his entire childhood in China, except for one or two trips to visit relatives in the U.S. Like most missionary families, the Luces lived not among the Chinese but inside walled compounds, alongside other American and English clergy. The contrast between the ordered world of the missionary community and the harsh social and physical landscape outside it reinforced the assumptions driving the missionary project in China: the unquestioned belief in the moral superiority of Christianity and the cultural superiority of America; and the commitment to show the way not just to the love of Christ but also to a modern, scientific social order. The image of America that Luce had as a child was the idealized one his father and other missionaries created to justify their work. It was an image Luce never wholly abandoned.

Luce emerged from his youth with a deep sense of moral certainty matched by his unquenchable ambition and limitless curiosity. At an early age he began to crave books of all kinds. And he developed an almost obsessive attraction to travel. In 1913, at 15, he journeyed alone through Europe for four months before returning to the U.S. for prep school. He was, he said, “a fanatical sightseer,” and he visited cities, museums and other sites with a relentless and methodical efficiency. That thirst for knowledge and experience–at times, it seemed, an almost undifferentiated thirst, a quest to see and know about everything, large and small, important and arcane–helped determine the direction of his career.

Luce spent the next seven years ensconced in all-male, all-white, overwhelmingly Protestant institutions of the American upper class: first Hotchkiss, then Yale (where he joined that bastion of the Establishment, Skull and Bones). Luce was active in student journalism in both schools–and in the process formed an intimate relationship with Briton Hadden, the classmate, friend and frequent rival with whom he would found TIME. Having encountered America first as an abstraction, Luce encountered it after 1913 as a member of a self-proclaimed enlightened elite, among boys and young men trained from an early age to think of themselves as natural social leaders.

Such men did not often choose journalism as a career. To most of them, it remained a slightly disreputable profession, attractive to people of less elevated backgrounds–what the press critic A.J. Liebling once called “a refuge for the vaguely talented.” But when Luce and Hadden set out in 1923, three years out of Yale, to create a journalistic institution of their own–a new weekly newsmagazine that they had begun envisioning while still undergraduates–they did so not to break from the norms of the world they had known at Hotchkiss and Yale; they did so to bring those norms into journalism. They would not simply report the news; they would interpret it for those who did not have the time, the energy or the knowledge to interpret it for themselves. And Luce especially had a sense of what would become the century’s scarcest commodity. He named his magazine after it: TIME, and designed it to be digested in less than an hour.

Brit Hadden, who had grown up in Brooklyn and was, much more than Luce, a true product of middle-class America, wanted TIME to be the witty, sophisticated, even cynical voice of his generation–something like a newsman’s version of H.L. Mencken’s popular magazine The Smart Set. But to Luce, TIME had a different purpose. It was to be a vehicle of moral and political instruction, a point of connection between the world of elite ideas and opinion and middle-class people in the “true” America hungry for knowledge.

In 1929 Hadden died unexpectedly of a blood infection. Luce, though stunned, took the magazine in his strong hands. From then on, Time Inc. was his company and reflected his view of its mission–a view that intersected, much more successfully than Hadden’s probably would have, with the character of the age. So prosperous did the company become that even during the Depression, it could successfully launch two expensive new magazines–FORTUNE in 1930 and LIFE, the most popular magazine in American history, in 1936. By the end of World War II, Time Inc. was one of the largest and wealthiest publishing enterprises in the world.

The success fanned Luce’s idealistic passions. His journalistic judgment could be clouded at times by his own commitments. On the issues and people he cared most about–China, American foreign policy, the Republican Party, Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill, Wendell Willkie–he personally directed coverage at critical times with a feverish and occasionally suffocating intensity. And on those subjects his magazines could be startlingly biased, even polemical. On most issues, however, Luce was relatively open-minded, deferential to his editors, receptive to many conflicting views, eager to attract the talents of gifted writers whatever their ideologies. His own politics were, on the whole, only mildly and fairly flexibly conservative.

His personal life was far more difficult to balance. Luce had grown up in a kind of genteel poverty–a scholarship student working at menial jobs and pinching pennies among boys and young men of great wealth. Once he had a fortune, he lived in high style. He bought or built great houses, collected art, stayed only in the best suites in the best hotels. In 1935 he divorced his wife of 12 years (and the mother of his two sons) to marry one of the most glamorous women in America–the already acclaimed editor and playwright, later Congresswoman and ambassador, Clare Boothe. Their marriage was a troubled one from the start, a union of two ambitious, image-conscious people who did not always like each other very much and who were often apart. But they played their public roles as a dazzling and powerful couple to the hilt–entertaining lavishly (and deadly seriously), moving easily among the great and powerful, achieving celebrity and influence of a sort few publishers or journalists had ever known. To Harry, living an opulent and glamorous life was never satisfying in itself. At times, he confided to close friends, he considered it almost sinful.

As he neared the end of his career in the mid-1960s and began restlessly preparing for retirement, the great achievements of his life–of which he was deeply proud–still seemed not wholly to satisfy him. He spent his last years in a search for the spiritual and emotional fulfillment he felt he had never fully achieved–a search so intense that he and Clare reportedly experimented occasionally with LSD, on the advice of friends who described it as a vehicle of awakening. At the end, in February 1967, when he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 68, he remained above all a missionary’s son, still seeking the mission that would somehow fulfill and justify his rich, full, successful but never quite complete life.