After college and a brief stint at the Washington Evening Star, where he worked with columnist Mary McGrory as well as Carl Bernstein of All the President’s Men fame, Morrow joined Time in 1965. He stayed for forty years, and his new book is an apologia for that magazine’s partisan journalism in defense of capitalism, liberal democracy, anti-communism, the Republican Party, and middle-class American values. Morrow laments the loss of the social and cultural consensus of the 1940s and ’50s, an era Time’s publisher evangelically named “The American Century.” The emergence of a prosperous and seemingly homogeneous American middle class was celebrated and to some extent shaped by “Harry” Luce’s artful and wildly successful magazines, which included Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, as well as Time. (Morrow neglects to mention that Life, once the most popular magazine in America, was as much Clare Boothe Luce’s idea as Harry’s.)
Luce’s magazine empire made him a fortune, placing him at the center of cultural and political power. Time embraced a “great man” approach to journalism, exemplified by the magazine’s much-anticipated and debated “Man of the Year” issue. Luce made a point of almost always putting a person on the cover of Time. The magazine’s profiles and trend issues helped readers make sense of events as well as their own lives and aspirations. That, Morrow believes, is what good journalism should do. Journalists are unavoidably storytellers and mythmakers. “Legends endure. Legends are memorable. Everything vanishes into the country of myth,” Morrow writes.
Luce (1898–1967) was born in China, the son of American Presbyterian missionaries. In that sense he came by his evangelistic zeal, for both America and traditional values, naturally. A scholarship student at Hotchkiss and Yale, he was an epitome of the American “self-made” man. Under his hands-on editorship, Time Inc.’s properties brought an unabashed Christian perspective to issues of the day. Luce was a staunch East Coast Republican, fervently anti-communist, an opponent of FDR and the New Deal, worshipful of Churchill, obsessed with the question of “who lost China,” and an unrepentant advocate for U.S. intervention in Vietnam. “The right war in the right place at the right time,” was how Time justified that tragic blunder, a catastrophe that exposed the fallacy of thinking that America knows what’s best for everyone else. Morrow admires Luce’s sincerity and “piratical authenticity” and for the most part dismisses his legions of liberal critics as naïve or, worse, soft on the threat of communism.