Henry R. Luce

Laying the cornerstone for his company’s nearly completed headquarters in June 1959, Time Inc.

editor in chief Henry R. Luce spoke less of the tower itself than what he saw it spawning. “It certainly will be heard from, across the nation and around the globe. And so, the Time & Life Building . . . will hatch new adventures in the permanent revolution which is the American dream, and the promise of freedom.” As the China-born child of a Presbyterian missionary from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and cofounder at 23 of a magazine publisher that grew to be the world’s largest, Luce knew a lot about revolutions as well as the American dream. At 15, he arrived in New York

en route to boarding school in Connecticut, where he quickly established himself as a star pupil, an editor of the school paper, and a close friend of Brooklyn-born Briton Hadden, with whom his fate would be inter-

twined for nearly 15 years. Both men moved on to Yale, where Luce served as managing editor of the college paper to Hadden’s chairman. In 1918, they agreed to someday launch their own magazine. In 1923, they quit their day jobs at the Baltimore News and debuted a 27-page issue of Time, with Hadden as editor in chief and Luce as business manager. In an unusual move, they agreed to switch roles annually. By the end of the following year, buoyed by the magazine’s combination of brevity, tight focus, and energetic writing, circulation hit 70,000 copies, the company stood toe-deep in black ink, and Luce was still business manager. On February 27, 1929, Time’s sixth anniversary, Hadden died at the age of 31 after a lengthy decline, amid a growing rift with his longtime collaborator. Thus began Luce’s decades as the company’s undisputed leader. In one of his first moves as a solo act, Luce fulfilled a long-held dream in 1930 by launching a business magazine and vowing to deliver stories that would help his readers find success. Now, as a budding media mogul able to charge a princely $1 per copy for each Fortune issue, Luce upped the ante. He signed on Margaret Bourke-White as the company’s first full-time photographer, commissioned covers by famous artists including Diego Rivera, and lured top-drawer writers such as Archibald MacLeish and James Agee. In the early '30s, Luce went multimedia, producing a weekly radio show on CBS in which actors read the parts, and later targeting moviegoers with his March of Time newsreels, shown in thousands of theaters.

In 1935, Luce married his second wife, playwright and journalist Clare Boothe. Two years later, Time Inc. launched Life, a photocentric magazine like one Boothe had once advocated for as a managing editor of Vanity Fair. Instead of the usual Luce-ian well-defined readership, Life embraced everybody—a mass audience hungry for the magazine’s trove of more than 200

HENRY R. LUCE and Briton Hadden in a detail from a photo of the Yale News board, 1920 (opposite top left).

TIME, VOL. 1, No. 1, March 3, 1923 (opposite top right)

HENRY AND CLARE Luce, Fairfield, Connecticut, 1936 (opposite left)

THE CONFIDENTIAL PROSPECTUS for Life describes the mission of the new publication as “to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed” (top left). MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE’S MONUMENTAL photo of the Fort Peck Dam is the arresting cover shot on the first issue of Life (top right).

HENRY R. LUCE in a photo review with executives John S. Billings (left) and Daniel Longwell (right) at a Life meeting, 1936 (above). images each week. In Life’s prospectus, Luce had promised “the biggest and best package of pictures for a dime.” Within a year, circulation topped 1.5 million. At its peak, it would exceed 8 million. A man of strong opinions, a staunch Republican, and a true believer in America’s destiny to dominate, Luce lambasted President Franklin D. Roosevelt for

everything from the New Deal’s manhandling of private enterprise to FDR’s reluctance to take up arms against the Nazis. After the war, as a staunch anti-Communist,

especially in a Chinese context, Luce savaged Harry Truman for sacking General Douglas MacArthur in 1951, at the height of the Korean War. Luce went on to vigorously support the presidential candidacy of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later named Clare Boothe Luce America’s ambassador to Italy. In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy came to the Time & Life Building for an audience with Luce and his staff. Crowds gathered to greet him. Unmoved, Luce endorsed Republican Richard Nixon, but still managed to earn a seat in the president’s box at Kennedy’s inauguration. On February 28, 1967, three years after announcing his retirement—and one day after the 38th anniversary of Briton Hadden’s death—Henry R. Luce died of a heart attack.

Part III

TOWER REBORN