Henry Luce's Way

In Time, Life, and Fortune, Henry Luce invented three entirely new forms of journalism. They changed our country, largely for the better, and made Luce a very wealthy man. But his patriotic zeal and his obsessions with China, Communism, and Republican Party politics led him to ignore and distort inconvenient facts to make his case, irreparably tarnishing his legacy. His stunning successes, and his self-inflicted wounds, hold lessons for every leader.

He invented the modern news magazine and named it Time, revolutionized the coverage of business with a publication he called Fortune, captured the world in pictures and christened it Life. His publications were read by fully a quarter of the U.S. population, and his ideas about journalism and the significance of American values left an indelible imprint on the history of the United States and the world. He was Henry Robinson Luce.

Luce was America’s most powerful mass communicator for more than 40 years. Yet, he was an odd, contradictory man with few real friends and talents that were both more and less than they seemed. His private life was largely a failure, and his missionary zeal was never quite realized.

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