Word: elson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Profits. Elson also describes the courtship that landed Winston Churchill's memoirs in LIFE (and the New York Times). It began with the purchase of some Churchill paintings as well as his secret wartime speeches to Parliament (which Luce found boring). Getting rights to the great man's memoirs cost LIFE $750,000, not to mention picking up the check for Churchill's frequent vacations in Marrakech. Was it worth it? LIFE's circulation department found that the memoirs had a "devastating effect" on newsstand sales. But, says Elson, "Luce took a more elevated view...
...then editor of TIME, T.S. Matthews, a friend and Princeton classmate of Adlai Stevenson, saw things differently. Matthews revised a staunchly Republican writer's first draft of a Stevenson cover story. The revision, says Elson, was "not very good and obviously battle-scarred." It was also inconsistent with an earlier and friendlier Stevenson cover, on the question of the Governor's relations with the Cook County machine. Luce told Matthews to stand aside from the editing of an Eisenhower cover story, at which point, says Elson, Matthews decided to resign. He did so the following year...
Luce has often been criticized as a leader of the China Lobby. Elson shows that his support of Chiang Kai-shek was actually quite ambiguous. Luce felt that Chiang, as the official wartime ally of the U.S., deserved at least as much postwar support as De Gaulle. But he gave a hearing and ample space to his anti-Chiang correspondent in China, Teddy White. Luce even tried to "get off the hook with Chiang" after he refused to accept General Marshall's proposals to face the realities of Nationalist China. From then on, Luce continued to lobby personally...
...even as LIFE lay dying SPORTS ILLUSTRATED was moving into its most prosperous years. Elson recounts the birth pangs of the magazine, the last one Luce had a direct hand in founding. Despite the fact that he knew little about sports, Luce maintained his enthusiasm and support for SI, even though the magazine lost $6,000,000 in its first year and took more than five years to get into the black...
Autonomy. Magazines, like human beings, go through demanding phases. But the Time Inc. publications, Elson says, were constantly rethinking their roles. The end of World War II was a particularly thoughtful period for FORTUNE. During the war, industrial advertising had caused the magazine to "bulge like a lady carrying twins," as one former publisher put it. Those ads dried up by 1946, putting the magazine into the red. But after 1948 FORTUNE became more profitable and functional with pertinent features and such regular departments as Law and Labor...