Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia (review)

The lifelong ambition of Henry R. Luce, the son of China missionaries, who built a publishing empire on the foundation of Time magazine, which he co-founded in 1923, was to advance American power in Asia in the service of Christianity, democracy, and anti-communism. More than any other media magnate, Luce used his trio of mass circulation magazines—Time, Life, and Fortune—as a platform from which he advocated an ideologically driven vision of American foreign policy, particularly with respect to Asia.

Herzstein's pedestrian study contains much generic information about Luce and his times that has little to do with the book's purported focus on America's twentieth-century crusade in Asia. It offers an almost purely descriptive and disjointed narrative that, except at the most superficial level, fails to engage any of the obvious questions worth exploring from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, politics, ethics, journalism, and cultural studies. Do news journalists have a responsibility to report objectively and not twist or withhold information that contradicts their prejudices, as Luce did routinely? Was Luce a journalist or a flack for a globalist America, or both? (Herzstein's evidence suggests that Luce served as an informal U.S. Secretary of Propaganda during the Cold War.) What degree of influence did Luce and his media empire have on U.S. foreign policy? Was Luce an opinion leader who helped to shape elite views on foreign policy or a transmitter in accessible and colorful language of the dominant foreign-policy consensus to a mass readership?

On thin evidence, Herzstein asserts that Luce exerted considerable influence over several decades of U.S. policy toward Japan, China, Korea, and Vietnam. Just because Luce hobnobbed with top American officials and used his publications to play at secretary of state is no proof that his influence was as great as Herzstein—who treats Time, Inc., like a fourth branch of the government or a shadow foreign ministry—would have us believe.

The author of an earlier comprehensive biography of Luce, Herzstein is far from being an uncritical admirer of his subject, but his critique is unsystematic and episodic rather than holistic. He condemns Luce as an apologist for French colonialism in Indochina, a bellicose booster of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and a starry-eyed hero-worshipper of Chiang Kai-shek, Douglas MacArthur, Syngman Rhee, and other Cold War stalwarts, but he doesn't synthesize his critique into a comprehensive analysis. He mines the papers of Luce and his Time, Inc., associates and has consulted the scholarly literature on U.S. Asia policy during the Cold War, but he adds little to that literature. Students familiar with the subject will find no new information and few fresh insights into the career of a man who was a precursor of the neoconservative ideologues of our time.