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Private citizen?

Luce insisted on the United States’ unique role in spreading democracy. He wrote “The American Century” to urge Roosevelt to enter the war, but it was seen by critics as a blueprint for American imperialism. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, his influence on public opinion, and especially on foreign policy, grew, as did his anti-Communist zeal, especially with regard to Asia. “As a journalist, I am in command of a small sector in the very front trenches of this battle for freedom,” Luce once said. He supported civil rights and opposed McCarthy. He called the Republican Party his “second church.” His magazines’ endorsement of Eisenhower helped carry the man from Abilene into office. Abroad, Luce was treated like a statesman. No private citizen should wield such power. Why anyone ever craves it can be hard to comprehend. Liberals who admired his magazines could not forgive him his support for American involvement in Vietnam. He died in 1967. Brinkley’s Luce is crusading and ambitious, ardent and awkward, and, although it might be said that Luce went astray when his ambition became his crusade, Brinkley takes him as he finds him. At the helm of the largest media empire in the world, Henry Luce piloted the American middle class through a century of tumult and change by giving his magazines, American journalism, and even American culture a distinctive voice: his own. That’s just what bugged the hell out of Harold Ross.

Ross was born in a prospector’s cabin, in 1892; Luce was born in 1898, in a missionary compound. Ross never finished high school; Luce went to Yale, like his father before him. A person could be forgiven for expecting Ross to have been the one to start the magazine edited for the old lady in Dubuque and Luce to have started the one that wasn’t. That just the reverse came to pass explains some of the waywardness between them. In 1917, Ross enlisted; Luce joined R.O.T.C., along with his friend Briton Hadden (they’d been inseparable since Hotchkiss and ran the Yale Daily News together). Luce and Hadden went to boot camp in South Carolina, where they trained troops. In France, Ross was tapped for Officer Training School, but flunked the test out of cussedness. Later in life, Ross liked to tell the story of how, on hearing that the Army was about to start publishing a paper, he deserted his regiment and walked a hundred and fifty miles to Paris, to the offices of the Stars & Stripes, where he stayed for the duration of the war, as a reporter and editor. One piece of enduring Luce lore has it that Time began because, while at Camp Jackson, Luce was struck by how little the enlisted men knew about the war they were being sent to fight. Brinkley suspects this boot-camp business is hooey, and I take the same view of Ross’s hoofing it all the way to Paris. What’s interesting, though, is that even their just-so stories run in different directions: Ross strapping his typewriter to his back and making for the metropolis, Luce pledging himself to bringing news of the world to every last Joe.