Word: luce
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Three years before his death in 1967, Henry R. Luce, co-founder of Time Inc., commissioned a history of the company. He opened his private files and corporate files and instructed Historian Robert T. Elson "to be candid, truthful and to suppress nothing relevant." Elson, a veteran correspondent and editor for TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE, followed orders. In 1968 he produced the lively and candid Time Inc., The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923-1941. Elson's second volume, The World of Time Inc., carries the story through the company's more expansive years from Pearl Harbor...
...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...
...Luce nevertheless accepted personal responsibility for what the magazines said. Sometimes what they did not say was also personal. For example, there was the perennial question of how to handle Clare Boothe Luce, the editor in chief's wife, who also happened to be a Congresswoman. Both Luce and Mrs. Luce felt that the editors, particularly at TIME, were negligent or unfair. For a while, at Clare Luce's own request, the rule was not to mention her in the magazines at all. But in a 1944 confidential memo to his editors, Luce said that his wife...
...Luce constantly worried that leaning too far to be fair or kind to a subject infringed on what he considered "our contract with our readers to tell them the truth." The political truth, as Luce saw it, lay in Bull-Moose Republicanism. The extent to which TIME should reflect that view in its reporting was a sore issue between Luce and some of his editors. The tug of war was fiercest in 1952, when Luce became personally involved in backing Dwight Eisenhower's nomination for President...
...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...