The Publisher (61 page)

Shortly before the end of World War II, Harry sent Clare a long, sprawling, handwritten letter outlining his hopes for his own future. He wrote of a vague hope to be secretary of state, but dismissed it as unrealistic. Instead “I would like to be and be recognized as a great and good Editor,” and “I would like to achieve that degree of personal integrity which I believe it is possible for me to achieve, but which to date I am far from having achieved.” He said almost nothing in his letter about his relationship with his wife, but the specter of his failed marriages certainly loomed large in his sense that he had not yet achieved a position of real integrity. “I have too much fragmentation in my life. I am not all in one place—or, as it seems all in one piece.” Since childhood he had dreamed of being both a great man and a good man. Now, and not for the first time, he was questioning both. Was his publishing empire helping to better the world as much as he had hoped? Was he conducting his personal life with the integrity and honesty he expected of himself? The answer to both questions, he feared, was no. The magazines, he believed, had yet to reach the importance and influence that Luce believed they could. They had not yet focused clearly enough on the great “human questions” that would define the next generation. And his personal life was, by almost any standard, in ruins: without love, without real friends, without the ability to experience what he called “enjoyment”—a lonely man whose only solace was work, but a man struggling still with the missionary fervor that had shaped his life. Unlike Clare however he could live stoically with his disappointments. His life was not what he had imagined it would be, but it had rewards enough—his
fame, his power, and most of all his company and his magazines, always his indispensable refuge from other, less controllable, aspects of his life. “I
am
happy,” he wrote Clare during a vacation in New Hampshire, “… because of all that life has given me,” and perhaps most of all because of what he considered the opportunity to “be of service to the world,” to help shape “the first global era in history.”
²⁰

The magazines, and the company that contained them, had always been his first priority, more important to him than anything else in his adult life, including his marriages. When he began to tire of his life with Lila, he compensated by spending more time at the office. When things were going badly with Clare, which was much of the time, he often became especially engaged in his work. This was nowhere more true than in the dark days of his crisis with Clare and his thwarted romance. The end of the war was, for him, not a period of triumph but a call to new goals. Even before Japan’s surrender in August 1945, Luce was launching what he called a “rethinking” of his magazines—all of them. For Luce, whose day-to-day connection with the magazines had long been intermittent, a major editorial rethinking was a way to reacquaint himself with his publications. To his editors, who were frantically working to publish their magazines every week or month, it was a considerable additional burden—but one they had no choice but to shoulder. As always when Luce tried to reassert his control, he kept everyone busy. He called frequent meetings, sometimes over dinner at his home or in restaurants, sometimes during working hours in the office, and sometimes through telephone calls at any time of the day or night. But most of all, as always, he wrote memos—long, rambling meditations that, as one of his editors later recalled, “landed on the desk with an unwelcome thud.”
²¹

T. S. Matthews, the managing editor of
Time
, responded to Luce’s invitation to rethink by claiming that the magazine was becoming stale, was running too smoothly, was losing some of its best writers, and was in short “not as good as it should be … [not] as dull as the N.Y.
Times;
but … dull in a way all its own.” He proposed making the magazine smaller, consolidating its sections, streamlining the staff, and ridding the magazine of “our flinty, our malicious but not altogether insane tone.” Luce, even while pushing the rethinking, was at the same time defensive, especially of
Time
. “TIME
is
good enough!” he wrote in response to Matthews. It “needed no deep changes, just some polishing.” Uninterested in Matthews’s large, structural suggestions, he offered instead a list of small tweaks—better headlines, more coverage of Congress and the
Supreme Court, and more attention to religion and business. (He also hotly denied that
Time’s
prose was still “flinty” or “malicious.”) Matthews pointed to the many criticisms of
Time
as “opinion disguised as fact.” But Luce dismissed such comments. He considered them attacks on the whole “newsmagazine idea.”
Time
was supposed to be opinionated, he always insisted.
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Even so the self-criticisms continued. Henry A. Grunwald, then a rising editor on the magazine (and years later editor in chief), also wrote a long memo in 1949 on “the things that disturb me about TIME.” They included “the magazine’s weekly sameness,” “signs of threatening shallowness,” “morale (its weakness) and enthusiasm (its lack).” But Luce still continued to defend
Time
, even three years after he had launched the “rethinking” project, while at the same time pushing (and thus confusing) his editors to make it “more interesting.” Just as Luce had rejected the suggestions of his editors, the editors strongly resisted many of his proposed changes. At one point he suggested a new section to be called “Punditry & Prophesy,” an idea that Billings considered “pretty trashy” and that Luce soon abandoned. Mostly he simply evaluated the existing departments and nudged them to be “better.” His work on
Time
after the war was, in short, less an effort truly to reshape the magazine than to assert his continued authority, which he often felt he was losing. At one point he wrote Matthews a snide memo about the leftist labor leader Harry Bridges, who Luce insisted was planning

Billings reproached him for his “wild exaggeration” and “bitter sarcasm,” and Luce grudgingly apologized to Matthews. But he remained aggrieved and irritable, continued to argue with Matthews, and finally ordered him to take a year’s leave to think about how to improve the
magazine—the penultimate step in Matthews’s movement out of the job, and the company. Matthews was a victim of his assertion of independence, not of poor editing.
²³

Luce was less happy with, and far less protective of,
Fortune
in the late 1940s. That was in part because
Fortune
was, for the first time in years, losing money. He spent months conferring quietly with a few senior colleagues on
Fortune’s
finances and on what could be done to strengthen them, and he pressured its managing editor, Ralph Paine, to explain why things were going so poorly. Luce dispatched Billings to investigate, and Billings came back with a blunt report, which he summarized: “the edit budget $10,000 over; Paine’s memo on why he needs 25 writers; 17 people in art dept … the high-priced writers, my doubts as to the value of the Survey, a lack of ‘liveliness’ which may be due to sound but aging and unlively writers and editors.” Planning for the future was, Billings noted after a meeting with Luce, “pretty discouraging because the editorial people were so mediocre…. [Luce] held his head in his hands in deep despair…. ‘What’s the use of my giving orders for a new
Fortune
if there isn’t anybody to carry them out?’”
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But despite his discouragement, Luce announced in February 1948 that he was “‘rethinking FORTUNE’ … ‘radical thinking’ … that takes little for granted, re-examines suppositions and habits.” A month later he produced a twenty-five-page memo describing the “new”
Fortune
—a memo hastily written and only slightly affected by the many suggestions he received from Billings and others. (“An irritating document,” Billings wrote in his diary after sneaking a look at a late draft, “philosophically involved, dark and murky, as Luce groped for new ideas. Why does he have to overcomplicate everything?”)
Fortune
, Luce grandiosely announced, would become “a magazine with a mission. That mission is to assist in the successful development of American Business Enterprise at home and abroad.” Although
Fortune
had long ago abandoned its reputation as a magazine that wrote from many different political and ideological perspectives, it had never openly committed itself to taking the side of business as an editorial policy. What Luce was proposing was a magazine devoted to highlighting the success stories of American capitalism—“great stories” providing “wonderful accounts of vitally interesting segments of the whole business scene.”
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At the center of the “new
Fortune”
would be a long report in each issue on “Thirty Days of American Business Enterprise … a story full of active verbs … written by a super-journalist.” Despite Luce’s ebullience about his proposed innovations, the message to
Fortune
was at bottom a harsh and censorious one.
“Fortune
[would] no longer [be]
concerned, uniquely, with Civilization-as-a-whole…. Fortune will not be making itself responsible for everything everywhere.” (Or as Billings put it in his own recommendations to Luce, “El Greco ain’t business.”) Instead
Fortune
would focus almost entirely and almost always positively on “American Business Enterprise,” aided by advisory boards composed of prominent business leaders. (Paine opposed the advisory-board proposal and threatened to resign until Luce backed away from it.) An unstated but critical part of this plan was that the new
Fortune
would have a smaller and less expensive staff. It was, Billings wrote, “a notice of dismissal” for most of the
Fortune
writers and editors.
²⁶

Within a year
Fortune
was a fundamentally different magazine—narrower in focus, more strongly committed ideologically to what some called the “March of Business,” much reduced in personnel, and considerably more successful in attracting advertising and new subscribers from the business world. But despite Luce’s directives, it did not become a business mouthpiece, in part because his eagerness to attract talent and celebrity to his magazines was as strong as his desire to promote his own views. Over the next decade
Fortune
welcomed serious and not always affirmative commentary on capitalism from major intellectuals: Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lawrence Lessing, William H. Whyte, and other eminent social scientists with academic backgrounds and, in some cases, academic futures. They continued to publish articles in
Fortune
that represented some of the most challenging and often contrarian views of capitalism to be found in journalism.
²⁷

The overhaul of
Fortune
was the most radical change to come out of the “rethinking” project, but to Luce the most important target was
Life
. He had many concerns. The magazine was still immensely profitable, but there were signs of softening in both circulation and advertising. The most obvious explanation for these problems was the unstable economy of the postwar years. But Luce chose to blame the content of the magazine itself—and not entirely without reason. Daniel Longwell, the pioneering creative force behind the founding of
Life
, had at long last succeeded Billings as editor of the magazine. Longwell himself had insisted long ago that he would not be a good managing editor, and his actual job performance proved him right. More than once he told Luce he felt he should step down. For all his talent, he was weak and insecure as a leader and frightened of almost everyone. His always-visible tendency to stammer and mutter became much more frequent once he was promoted. Luce, despite his own history of stammering, ungenerously called it “the way a deaf man does to avoid unpleasant topics.”
²⁸

But Luce was not just concerned about Longwell, or even about the
quality of the editing. He had a larger goal in mind. He wanted
Life
to become less a picture magazine and more a vehicle for confronting what he considered the great challenges facing the world.
Life
had often contained serious material in the past, both textual and visual, especially during the war; but it had always considered itself at least as much entertainment as journalism. That was one of the secrets of its great success, even though Luce never conceded that point, and his colleagues rarely dared to raise it. Just as
Fortune
was now to be the voice of American business,
Life
was to be the voice of the new postwar world—and to a large degree, the postwar world as Luce hoped the United States would reshape it. “My mind is literally overpowered, paralyzed, by the nightmare of a tidal wave of knowledge by which, it seems,
Life
can and will engulf me,” Luce wrote in 1948. But he did not wish to turn back that tide. Instead he intruded more and more into the editing of the magazine to ensure that readers were exposed to the great ideas that Luce believed they must absorb. Robert Elson, a long-serving Time Inc. editor, wrote in his in-house history of the company (after Luce’s death) that “what had once been a young, ebullient, free-wheeling staff seemed bowed down by responsibility for the education of its vast audience while too frequently forgetting that
Life
was also supposed to be entertaining.”
²⁹