Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia by Robert E. Herzstein (Cambridge University Press, 368 pp., $32) Robert Herzstein has written a powerful attack on the "Luce network," as he refers to the handful of publications (most notably Time) that Henry Luce owned and edited for having practiced "a flawed journalism [for which] . . . Luce was primarily responsible." Herzstein offers no definition of "flawed." Does it apply to misuse of facts, or publishing, say, fanatical opinions, or both? Or does it merely apply to a publication whose editorial policies you abhor?

At the risk of being accused of reductionism, I would counterpose that the author is practicing flawed history.

Here's a Herzstein passage: "In 1945-1948 the wartime Grand Alliance dissolved into the Cold War, first at Time Inc., and then in the broader society. Luce needed a culprit, and he decided that Soviet communism was to blame."

This is flawed history--indeed, left propaganda masquerading as history. Stalin, now a culprit, had taken over Eastern Europe, the purge trials had opened, the Soviet Gulag horrors were just beginning to be exposed. Mao was leading his Communist multitudes from the Long March to power in Beijing. Was "Soviet communism" some irreproachable doctrine thought up by the Central Committee of the Shakers International? What does Herzstein mean that the Grand Alliance "dissolved" into the Cold War? How did it get "dissolved"? Who and what dissolved the Grand Alliance? Was there no human intervention? Herzstein knows how the Grand Alliance got "dissolved," but to say so aloud would mean questioning what George Orwell called the "dominant orthodoxy," and thereby disqualify a professor, even one with tenure, from any status in the profession.

On the other hand, it is always possible that Herzstein doesn't know how and when the Grand Alliance was dissolved. I will refresh his recollection.

Not long after World War II, a Soviet leader, Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin's closest associates, expounded the "two camp" theory of international relations and thereby "dissolved" the Grand Alliance--if it ever had really existed.

At the first organizational meeting of the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) held in Poland in September 1947, Zhdanov told the assembled Communist party leaders from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia: "The more the war recedes into the past, the more distinct become two major trends in postwar international policy, corresponding to the division of the political forces operating in the international arena into two major camps: the imperialist and anti-democratic camps, on the one hand, and the anti-imperialist and democratic camp, on the other. The principal driving force of the imperialist camp is the USA. . . . The anti-imperialist and anti-fascist forces comprise the second camp. This camp is based on the USSR and the new democracies."

How can one take an academic seriously when he targets Luce as needing a "culprit"? When the AFL's George Meany and the CIO's Walter Reuther decided, in 1949, to oppose Soviet subversion of the international labor movement, were they looking for a "culprit"? When Americans for Democratic Action organized intellectuals to fight communism, were they, too, looking for a "culprit" and airily deciding that Soviet communism was to blame? Looking back at Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech in 1956, and Mikhail Gorbachev's revelations some three decades later, wasn't Luce right in indicting communism when he did?

There is no doubt that Luce was an eccentric. Herzstein reveals something few knew about Luce until he himself announced it: that Luce and his wife had experimented with LSD under a physician's supervision. There are more interesting chapters, especially about Luce's relationship with Theodore H. White when the young, not-yet-famous correspondent and chronicler of presidential campaigns was disagreeing with Luce, his own boss, about China and Mao Zedong, the genocidist-to-be. Interesting reading, as much of this book is, but to be read with care.

  • Arnold Beichman