The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  5. New York Times, March 1, 1967.

  6. Andrew Kopkind, “Serving Time,” New York Review of Books, September 12, 1968.

  7. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s, November 1964, pp. 77–86; Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966); Theodor W. Adorno, Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991); T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality, ed. Max Horkheimer and Samuel Flowerman (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950).

  8. New York Times, March 1, 1967.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe more than usual thanks to the many people who helped me during my prolonged work on this book. I begin with my editor and friend of thirty years, Ash Green. Our long and happy relationship has meant a great deal to me, as has his help on all my books—not least on this one. I am grateful as well to the many people at Knopf who have helped this project through production—among them Sarah Sherbill, Andrew Carlson, and Soonyoung Kwon. My agent, Peter Matson, has provided support, advice, and friendship for many years.

  I was fortunate to receive support in the early stages of my work from the Media Studies Center at Columbia University and the Russell Sage Foundation, and I want to thank their directors, Ev Dennis and Eric Wanner, as well as the colleagues I met at both institutions.

  I have been particularly fortunate in the assistance I have received from talented research assistants, many of them graduate students at Columbia. They include, among others, Dustin Abnet, Chris Cappozola, David Ekbladh, Robert Fleegler, Charles Forcey, Lisa Jarvinen, David Kaden, Jon Kasparek, Robert Lifset, Kevin Murphy, Sharon Musher, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Kevin Powers, Russell Rickford, Elizabeth Robeson, Jesse Salazar, Moshik Temkin, Benjamin Waterhouse, and Tim White. I am deeply grateful to them all. I thank as well Bill Hooper and the rest of the staff of the Time Inc. Archives, the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. Martin Baldessari was of great help in identifying and acquiring photographs.

  I am grateful to Henry Luce III and Jason McManus for their help in gaining me access to the Time Inc. Archives; and Peter Luce, who provided me with material privately held by the family. I am also grateful to the many people who generously shared with me their memories of Henry R. Luce: among them his sons Peter Luce and Henry Luce III; his sister, Elisabeth Luce Moore; his brother-in-law Leslie Severinghaus; his first wife, Lila Luce Tyng; his grandson Christopher Luce; his Time Inc. colleagues Andrew Heiskell, Richard Clurman, Thomas Griffith, Robert Manning, and Henry Grunwald; his pastor David H. Read; and Jeanne Campbell, Sander Vanocur, and Henry Graff. David Halberstam provided me with his own memories of reporting in Vietnam and the experience of Time Inc. correspondents there. Arthur Schlesinger was, as always, a generous friend and was enormously helpful in guiding me to people who could be helpful to me.

  I owe a very special debt to the friends and colleagues who read and commented on the manuscript: among them Eric Foner, Nicholas Lemann, David Nasaw, and Frank Rich. I was able to present parts of my work to many people over the years, and the responses of those who attended these events helped me immeasurably: in the United States, the Twentieth-Century Politics and Society Workshop at Columbia (with special thanks to Ira Katznelson and Bob Shapiro), the Russell Sage Foundation, Vassar College, Columbia Journalism School, New York University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder; in Britain, the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, the Work in Progress Seminar of the Oxford History Faculty, Nuffield College, Oxford, the University of Reading, Cambridge University, the University of Essex, University College, London, and King’s College, London; in Paris, L’École des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociale and Sciences Po; and in Italy, the University of Florence and the University of Torino. Most of all, I am grateful to Columbia University and to my friends and colleagues in the Columbia Department of History from whom I have learned so much.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Evangeline Morphos, for her constant interest in this project, for her invaluable help with it, and for her love and support. This is also for my daughter, Elly, the light of both our lives.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University. His previous books include Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, which won the National Book Award for History; The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War; and Liberalism and Its Discontents. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The American Historical Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Republic, among other publications. He lives in New York City.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2010 by Alan Brinkley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  A portion of this work originally appeared in Vanity Fair.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brinkley, Alan.

  The publisher : Henry Luce and his American century / by Alan Brinkley.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59291-0

  1. Luce, Henry Robinson, 1898–1967. 2. Journalists—United States—

  Biography. 3. Publishers and publishing—United States—Biography.

  4. Periodicals—Publishing—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

  PN4874.L76B75 2010

  070.5092—dc22

  [B] 2009038834

  v3.0