Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 6, 1994                   TAG: 9411160006
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY GEOFF SEAMANS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HENRY LUCE AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA

To those who've known only today's world of TV networks, cable channels, CNN, videotapes, computer-target direct mail and Internet conversation clusters, the impact of Henry R. Luce and his ideas on American public life would be hard to explain.

But in an earlier era, when something resembling a national conversation still could take place, Luce spoke with a mighty voice. Co-inventor of the weekly newsmagazine, Luce via such publications as Time, Life and Fortune became a national political and cultural force. Not until well after World War II did that voice wane.

Herzstein's is indeed a political portrait, focusing not on Luce's private or business lives but on his efforts to influence the course of public events and policy. He did so not only through his magazines but also personally, by direct lobbying and via his marriage to two-term Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut.

Though not wholly uncritical, Herzstein's portrait of Luce is generally sympathetic. A staunch Republican who never got along well with Democratic presidents, Luce nevertheless comes across as a progressive thinker on such matters as race relations and foreign policy. Much of the book is devoted to Luce's efforts in the '30s to awaken Americans to the danger Hitler represented and the need to prepare for war against him and his allies. Herzstein paints Luce as an intensely curious man, whose views as a rule were well-reasoned and empirically based.

Luce's huge blind spot was China, where he was reared a Presbyterian missionary's son. Faster than most Americans, Luce recognized the communist nature of Mao Tse-Tung's revolutionary movement. But he failed to see the weakness and corruption of Chiang Kai-Chek's Nationalist government, and stubbornly discredited what people on the scene were telling him.

Herzstein acknowledges Luce's stubbornness, and its contribution to unrealistic American expectations about China's future after World War II. But he also blames President Roosevelt, who heartily detested Luce and during World War II pettily denied him authorization to travel to China to get a firsthand look. In any event, the expectations fed by Luce - and the slanted, if not downright false, reportage in his magazines - led to the "who lost China?" frenzy in America after the Nationalists fell to Mao.

Curiously, Herzstein does not carry his portrait much beyond 1950, even though Luce and his magazines continued to thrive for years after. Nor does the biographer prove that Luce "created" the American century, except in the limited sense that he coined the phrase to describe the internationally powerful America he foresaw emerging from World War II. The foresight was shrewd enough, but Luce was only one small part of the cataclysmic events that created the new order.

Geoff Seamans writes editorials for this newspaper.