cover image Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia

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

Robert Edwin Herzstein. Cambridge University Press, $38.99 (364pp) ISBN 978-0-521-83577-0

In an informative but narrow analysis, Herzstein, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, explores the role mid-century media mogul Henry Luce (Time, Fortune, Life) played in the Asian political theater following World War II. For much of the book, the author recounts China's slide toward Communism, splicing in Luce's quixotic attempts to save the country, both politically and spiritually, through U.S. intervention. Throughout, Luce is painted as a detached, arrogant, closed-minded, well-to-do, hypocritical, spin-doctoring bore, and yet his obsession with China, where he was born to missionary parents, comes across as genuine. In Luce's view, the United States had a post-war responsibility to ""teach the ignorant, feed the hungry, and bring the blessing of liberty"" to the world. That he was grossly negligent in how he advocated those ideals, blatantly distorting the news to satisfy his myopic world view, becomes the crux on which Herzstein's book teeters. Repeatedly, Time correspondents-first in China, later in Vietnam-reported on the situations unfolding before their eyes, only to have their informed dispatches sugar-coated by New York editors working under Luce's ideology. On that subject, Herzstein demonstrates how one man's whims shaped the information distributed to millions of people. The book, however, is not a study of journalistic power-mongering, nor is it a Luce biography; it is a historical examination of U.S. failures in Asia as anguished over by one powerful but, ultimately, ineffectual man. For many readers, what might have worked as part of a more general book could wear thin on its own.