The Publisher

The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, by Alan Brinkley, Knopf RRP$35, 560 pages

Balding, brush-browed Henry Robinson Luce dined with dictators, preached to presidents and wrought the richest, most influential magazine empire ever known. Not one lightly to suffer fools, communists or Democrats was he.

That, at least, is how Luce’s Time magazine might have described him in its early prose style, a wine-dark sea of Homeric hyphenated adjectives and exuberant alliteration. Luce died in 1967 and his fame has faded, along with Time’s linguistic inventiveness. But the house that Luce built still stands, and he remains perhaps the 20th century’s most fascinating press baron. Hearst, Pulitzer, Beaverbrook – none could match Luce’s global reach, ideological fervour or relentless curiosity.

It helped, writes historian Alan Brinkley in this elegant new biography, that Luce was an American in an era when the US was rising to dominance. Brinkley asserts that Luce’s widely read 1941 essay “The American Century” defined the country’s self-image and set the course of its foreign policy for decades. Wrote Luce of his fellow Americans: “We are the inheritors of all the great principles of western civilisation – above all justice, the love of truth, the ideal of charity. It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world.” Luce and his magazines campaigned for US aid to embattled outposts of those ideals, from Britain in the 1930s to South Vietnam in the 1960s.

Luce came by his evangelistic streak in China, where he was born to missionary parents in 1898. He did not see America until he was a teenager. At a US boarding school and then at Yale, he studied the classics – whence Time’s Homeric style – alongside Briton Hadden, with whom he founded the news magazine when both were only 24. It was a swift success. Luce went on to launch the picture weekly Life, the business journal Fortune and other popular titles.

By the 1950s, Luce’s publications were offering visions of American prosperity to a substantial part of humankind (Life alone sold 7m copies worldwide), and their proprietor prowled the planet lecturing kings and chancellors.

He rarely seemed to enjoy it. Stiff, humourless and bereft of small talk, Luce harassed his editors with endless queries and suggestions. Tortured by guilt over divorcing his first wife, a Chicago socialite, he suffered until his death under a second, Clare Boothe Luce, a talented editor, playwright, ambassador to Italy and rightwing drama queen. Luce generally shared her politics, and his magazines shilled shamelessly for the Republican party and Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalists. But he also favoured racial equality, women’s rights and international law, tolerated leftists on his staff and opened his pages to such free spirits as Archibald MacLeish, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill, whose memoirs Luce commissioned.

Brinkley deftly captures the mid-century glamour of the Luce empire, when reporters travelled first class and Time-Life buildings dotted the globe. Television and the internet put an end to all that. Time and Fortune survive, but Life staggers on as a website. The parent company, Time Warner, thrives on ventures launched or acquired after Luce’s passing. The “American century” was finished off by the Iraq war and the global financial crisis. Today everyone talks of China.

That might not displease Luce, who was born there and long espoused the kind of robust capitalism China now embodies. Though the US may no longer be imparting values, the world’s long march toward prosperity is pretty much what Luce thought providence had ordained. Brinkley quotes a rival magazine’s 1934 parody of Time which, assessing the young publisher’s vaulting ambition, concluded, “Where it all will end, knows God!”

Donald Morrison is a former editor of Time magazine