The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  Well, we didn’t … get a divorce. Partly perhaps because we both saw it was not the right thing morally, spiritually, ethically—or even practically. But also a little—a wonderful little—because we both saw no real chance for happiness or growth for the other in divorce. If love is a concern for the well being of the other, there was that much love—when the smoke of battle blew away anyway.11

  Sometime in 1960 Clare wrote a long, introspective memorandum, addressed to Harry but evidently never delivered to him, about what she called “diminishments.” To Clare the diminishments were her loss of a serious career, her loss with age of much of her beauty, her loss of sexual fulfillment, and most of all—in this time of despair—her “loss of hope.” Harry was never one to record his own feelings honestly. He rarely spoke openly about his own “diminishments,” but he was certainly aware of them. Although he was only in his early sixties, he looked like a much older man—the result of many years of intense work, travel, and anxiety, and of a lifetime of heavy smoking. He was suffering from heart and prostate troubles. Perhaps most of all he was aware of his failure to grasp his last chance for true romantic love, a failure that he himself had decided to absorb.

  Nor did he often have the comfort of family. His reconciliation with Clare was successful as far as it went. They learned to avoid rancor and to create a familiar and usually comfortable companionship, but they continued to spend much of their time apart. He remained close to Beth Moore, but he saw little of his other siblings (his sister Emmavail, who still lived in Philadelphia and who seldom saw Harry; and his much younger brother, Sheldon, who—after a brief career in Time Inc.—moved on to new business efforts far from New York). Harry had somewhat more contact with his two sons, Henry III (Hank) and Peter. He was closer to Hank, who aspired to follow in his father’s journalistic footsteps. Hank worked for a time at the Cleveland News and later joined Time Inc., where he spent much of his professional life although never rising to a position of great prominence. Harry expressed pride in Hank’s achievements, but also worried that he was too dependent on his father’s support. (Hank later became the longtime president of the Henry Luce Foundation, which Harry established before his death and to which he left the largest portion of his estate.) After attending MIT Peter joined the air force and then moved to the West to work in aviation. He saw his father relatively infrequently. Harry wrote letters occasionally to both his sons, letters that were meant to be affectionate but that revealed little intimacy. They sometimes read like essays on the state of the world. (“A wonderful old philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, … was one of the first to point out that in the twentieth century, for the first time in human history, conditions of human life changed radically in one generation,” he wrote Peter on his twenty-first birthday.) Harry ensured that both his sons were financially secure, and in the late 1950s and 1960s he began to spend more time with Hank in particular. But after decades of only occasional attention to his sons, whom he had left behind in 1935 to marry Clare when both boys were under ten, the relationship always remained somewhat distant. Harry did develop a special interest in his grandchildren, and particularly in Christopher (known as Kit), Hank’s son. Kit traveled with his grandfather occasionally, visited him and Clare periodically in Phoenix and Connecticut, and saw him more often than most of Harry’s other relatives did. Kit had a relationship with Harry that few others did—one of uncomplicated affection.12

  As often in times of stress and uncertainty, Harry turned to religion. He was a regular congregant of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church when he was in New York, and developed a close relationship with his pastor, David H. C. Read. Beginning in the late 1950s he spent an inordinate amount of time helping to plan and raise funds for a National Presbyterian Church, which would be built in Washington and would help Presbyterianism to have a more prominent role in the nation’s capital. Eisenhower, himself a convert to Presbyterianism, supported the effort, which made Luce all the more eager to help. After many false starts and frustrations the new church finally opened—two years after Luce’s death. During those same years Luce funded and built a Presbyterian chapel at a university in Taiwan, in memory of his father.13

  But despite Luce’s institutional loyalty to the Presbyterian Church, his private religious life was in fact restless, complicated, and at times despairing. The simple unquestioned faith of his youth was long gone, replaced by a much more intellectual, and almost academic, interest in religion. He began searching for what he called a “New Religion, the search for God, without Christianity,” although he could never articulate what such a religion would mean, except to describe it as part of “the great liberal tradition.” He was fascinated by Christianity in the same way he was fascinated by politics, business, culture, and many other areas of life. He spurred his editors to pay more attention to religion as a significant force in society, worth examining, and his magazines did cover religion more consistently than most other major press organizations. He developed intellectual relationships with major theologians: Reinhold Niebuhr, Henry Sloane Coffin, Henry Van Dusen, Paul Tillich, and many others; and he argued with them, in letters and in print, not usually about matters of theology but about the connection between faith and politics. At the same time he developed a strong curiosity about evangelical Christianity. In part that was because he considered its followers primarily “less well-educated” people and hoped he might learn something about their faith. Characteristically he reached out to the most prominent (and respectable) figure in the evangelical community, Billy Graham, whom he often invited to write for Life, and with whom he met occasionally. They maintained a regular correspondence. Luce was attracted to Graham in part because of his “old-fashioned religion” and his “extremely conservative politics,” which he saw as an antidote to what he called the “agnostic materialism” of the New Deal and the British Labour Party.14

  In the early 1950s, after Clare’s conversion, he had developed a strong interest in the Catholic Church and in 1952 even signed a “Declaration of Intent,” in which he promised to convert to Catholicism if John Courtney Murray were ever assigned to “an area of China including Shantung Province.” The unlikelihood of that event suggests that he was not entirely serious, but his flirtation with—and defense of—the Catholic Church continued for years, as his long relationship with Murray made clear.15

  Mostly, however, Luce wrestled not with denominationalism but with the meaning of faith—and the difficulties of sustaining it. “We urgently need a ‘restatement’ of Christian faith,” he wrote, “in terms of the new kind of universe which science has been revealing and which even the common man apprehends as reality.” How, he asked, could science and religion coexist? Luce read widely on this subject, discussed it with Hocking and other religiously oriented philosophers, and came to agree with the liberal French theologian-scientist Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, who wrote that “men are ‘Collaborators with God in charge of evolution.’” In conversations with Murray he became interested in “natural law and/or the moral law,” which he saw as a primarily Catholic concept that was disappearing from Protestantism. “In a sense,” he wrote approvingly, Murray “worships the goddess of reason.” At the same time he began to express contempt for what he called the “shallowly pietistic attitudes of much of ‘official’ Protestantism,” and for the difficulty Protestants had in accepting the tough military challenges of the Cold War. What Luce called “the eggheads” of the Protestant and Catholic communities often derided his attempts to popularize theology in his magazines. But Luce rarely responded to criticisms of his religious views, in part because he himself was constantly questioning them—so seriously that at times he confessed that he was suffering from “a loss of faith or belief in God.” As early as 1955 he worried that “theology is failing us badly … [and] has not got anywhere near to real coping with the real new human situation.” In 1959 he went even further: “What a man says to God is less important than that he should say something, an actual person to an Actu
al Person…. The doubt tyrannizing over all doubts of our time is whether any dialogue is possible.”16

  As during earlier personal crises, Luce turned to his company and his magazines as a refuge from the storms raging around him. But by now the distance between him and his editors had grown so great that he began considering other, noneditorial plans for the company.

  By the early 1960s Time Inc. had grown considerably even from its formidable size in the early 1950s. Sports Illustrated was expanding rapidly. Its staff had grown significantly. As a result the company’s headquarters in one of the original Rockefeller Center buildings had become inadequate. Sports Illustrated and Fortune were already mainly housed in other buildings, a development Luce disliked because it made it harder for him to stay in touch with his editors. Even the staffs of Time and Life were feeling crowded. And so a search began for new quarters.17

  Luce had begun thinking about moving as early as 1945, and in 1951 he dabbled with the idea of moving the entire company to a twenty-seven-acre plot in Westchester County. Plans were secretly under way for a “$5,000,000 ‘campus type’ building.” The move, Billings noted, was “partly dictated by the threat of A-bomb destruction in mid-Manhattan,” a reflection of the anxiety that the Korean War and the deterioration of American-Soviet relations had created. But a more important consideration for Luce was “the decentralization trend of the times.” Reader’s Digest, the only magazine with a larger circulation than Life, had been very successful on a large suburban campus, and Luce was briefly attracted to that example. But the staff rebelled. Billings noted that “The country is no place … to do a good high-pressure news job. You vegetate. You end up smoking a pipe.” When Eero Saarinen, the renowned architect Luce had chosen for the project, reported that the site was inappropriate for its proposed purpose, the idea quietly died.18

  Luce then, implausibly, began to look for a large area in Manhattan where he could build something like a campus in the city, with parks and a swimming pool and tennis courts and with low buildings scattered across the site. “The ideal headquarters,” he argued, “cannot be in any skyscraper slab.” He identified a space near the United Nations building on the East Side of Manhattan, but the plan proved to be much too expensive. Once again Luce began to look outside New York, to a small town in Pennsylvania midway between Philadelphia and Wilmington. Billings called it a “fool idea,” and the opposition of the staff killed this plan as well.19

  In the end Luce decided to move the company only a block away from its current site—an area just west of Sixth Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets where Rockefeller Center, Inc., had decided to expand. He reached an agreement with the Rockefellers to jointly build and own the building. Although he was disappointed that his more visionary proposals had failed, he was resigned to erecting a conventional office building and was pleased that it would at least meet the need for additional space. Despite his distaste for large “office slabs,” he insisted that the new headquarters should be functional and efficient and not excessively expensive. He conceded that what the company “was not buying was a building of which we can be especially proud.” Eventually Luce did express pride in the new headquarters, but his first reaction was closer to the truth. The building, designed by the modernist architect Wallace Harrison, was large, efficient, and undistinguished. The company moved into it in 1960.20

  By the time of the company’s transition into the new building, Luce was planning a transition of his own. Early in 1959, only months after his recovery from his heart attack, Luce invited Hedley Donovan, then the managing editor of Fortune, to his home and told him that he was considering retirement. As Donovan later recalled the conversation: “He said in a somewhat apologetic way that he had to bring up something ‘rather personal.’ He wondered if I would be interested, ‘not right away, in a few years or so,’ in being the next Editor-in-Chief of Time Incorporated.” Donovan was a tall, handsome, sandy-haired Minnesotan, a Rhodes scholar, and a mildly conservative man who shared most of Luce’s political views but little of his intensity. He was a nineteen-year veteran of Time Inc., and was forty-five at the time of their meeting. There was no announcement of the transition, and Donovan was left uncertain when or even whether it would occur, perhaps with good reason. (Shortly after his heart attack Luce had told his longtime assistant that “I’ll never retire. I’ll die at my desk.”) But not long after the meeting with Donovan, Luce announced a sweeping reorganization of the senior staff, followed several months later with Donovan’s elevation to editorial director of all the magazines, the position Billings had occupied in his last years with the company until his retirement in 1955. (Had Billings not left, Luce once confided to Mary Bancroft, he, not Donovan, would have been Luce’s successor—something he had never told Billings, who retired still believing that Luce had little interest in or respect for him.)21

  Although Luce made no public announcement of his retirement until almost five years after he told Donovan of his plans, he began preparing for his departure well before he left. One way he did so was to organize a lavish celebration of Time’s (and thus of Time Inc.’s) fortieth anniversary in 1963. (Clare asked him why a fortieth anniversary party and not a fiftieth; he answered that he did not expect to “be around” ten years later.) After months of preparation that cost several hundred thousand dollars and occupied the time of dozens of Time Inc. employees for weeks, eighteen hundred people gathered in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom. The New York Times wittily (and slightly acidly) described the audience as “tycoons, pundits, cinemactresses and political sachems.” It was indeed a great event for people watching. Among the guests were Lyndon Johnson, Walter Reuther, John Dos Passos, Douglas MacArthur, Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Gina Lollobrigida, Rosalind Russell, Bob Hope, Henry Ford, Norman Thomas, Henry Wallace, Everett Dirksen, Adlai Stevenson, Francis Cardinal Spellman, Dean Rusk, and Paul Tillich—who gave a keynote address that proved a bit too serious for some members of the audience. Most of the guests were people who had appeared on the roughly two thousand covers of Time since 1923. Luce explained the event, and the guest list, as a reflection of Time’s history, which “has told its story in terms of people, whereas 40 or 50 years ago the journalistic emphasis was on social or economic forces.”22

  The glamorous celebration of the fortieth anniversary coincided with the first signs of serious erosion of Time Inc.’s profitability. Life, the great revenue driver of the company for two decades, was in trouble. In 1959 the magazine recorded its first deficit, the beginning of a long and rarely uninterrupted financial deterioriation. The problem was not circulation, which was approaching seven million, its all-time high. The problem was advertising. Life charged the highest advertising rates of any magazine of its kind, and many advertisers now found that they could reach larger audiences for not much more money by promoting their products on television. Life showed profits in only a few years after 1959. Luce watched this decline with concern but also, as always, with confidence that the answer lay in raising the quality of Life’s contents. Once again he set out to write a new prospectus for the magazine that he had helped create in 1936 and that had rewarded him so richly. “So what would be the purpose of Life in the Sixties?” he asked. “My answer: Life is and shall be designed to be the magazine of national purpose. In his first statement as President-Elect, Jack Kennedy called for ‘A Supreme National effort.’ Amen.” More specifically Luce listed the issues he thought Life should address: “win the Cold War,” “create a better America,” help to “bring about a great humane civilization.” The production of Life would be “magazine-making at its highest and most skill-demanding level.”23

  The declining profitability of Life after 1959 put pressure on the company to find new generators of revenue. Time continued to prosper, but it could not alone sustain the aspirations of the company. Fortune was healthy too, but had never produced large profits. Sports Illustrated was still running deficits and would not show a profit until the mid-1960s. Luce, who h
ad never been very enthusiastic about diversifying the company’s investments, was now ready to consider new ventures. But he did not stray far from Time Inc.’s traditional mission.

  For years the magazines had published occasional books. Fortune produced anthologies of notable articles. Life published “picture histories” of great events such as World War II and turned the magazine’s excerpts of Churchill’s memoirs into a book. Time created Three Hundred Years of American Painting, and Sports Illustrated tried to market books on golf and bridge. None of these efforts was particularly successful until the company decided to create a book-club-like system for marketing the company’s publications. It started as the Life World Library but early in 1961 became an independent department of the company: Time-Life Books. Luce was somewhat skeptical of the project, complaining occasionally that “these books are going out with my name on them, and I won’t have time to read them.” But the new unit proved profitable enough to banish his doubts. By 1964 it was producing profits of more than six million dollars a year.24