Word: luce
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...LUCE AND HIS EMPIRE by W.A.SWANBERG 529 pages. Scribners...
...Henry Luce, aged 47, is busy consulting with generals, visiting with correspondents, dining with his old friend Chiang Kaishek. He is full of hopes for the country where he was born, though history was soon to deal those hopes and Luce's judgment of the situation an overwhelming blow...
...Citizen Hearst; Pulitzer) handles these early chapters with only hints of polemics to come. The existence of the invading Japanese, for example, who were, after all, the first cause for American aid to China, is barely mentioned because Swanberg wants to suggest that U.S. aid to China was all Luce's fault. Still, one has a sense of Luce as a human being, of issues thoughtfully considered, and of the practical details of running a large collection of magazines. The threat of Mao and the Communist takeover is just over the horizon. Closer at hand is trouble with...
Piety. Flashbacks to a pious childhood as a missionary's son in Shantung province follow, along with some overdone conjecture about the psychological effect on Luce of the Boxer Rebellion, which forced his family to flee China temporarily when the boy was two. Then come a series of stories of Luce's rivalry at Hotchkiss and Yale with Briton Hadden, the eventual co-founder of TIME. It was Hadden who first laid on the early TIMEstyle back-to-front sentence structure and extravagant use of Homeric epithet. He also provided biographers with an indispensable, all-purpose anecdote, shouting...
Marriages, children, friends, slices of moderately high life are scattered through the book, along with references to Luce's indifference to food and small talk, and his yearning to win at tennis and golf. Once, as Luce teed off against the Rev. John Courtney Murray and Emmet John Hughes, Murray remarked to Hughes: "You are looking at the only man I know who can will a golf ball 200 yards...