Word: elson
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...Elson's major themes is the interaction between Luce and the talented and often difficult men and women who staffed the Time Inc. magazines. Most editorial positions were arrived at through incessant rounds of discussion and debate. A complex man, Luce was both opinionated and open-minded; giving orders went against his grain. Persuasion was the art he preferred, and indeed he emerges from Elson's pages as perhaps too easy a boss. He sometimes took stands without following them through and wrote waspish memos that repose in his files marked "Not sent...
...mention her in the magazines at all. But in a 1944 confidential memo to his editors, Luce said that his wife was suffering politically from a lack of TIME coverage. "It is, I think you will agree, a bit tough on her," he wrote. Clare was surprised when Elson told her of the existence of this memo years later. "What a rough thing it all was on him too. Vis-à-vis me, he always defended the editors. When I wasn't around, he defended me to his editors...
...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...