With the dedication of a true scholar, Professor Robert E. Herzstein of the University of South Carolina has produced an account of Henry Luce which is even more turgid than W. A. Swanberg's standard Life. Not that this is a biography, though it is billed as such. It is a ponderous treatise on the early political opinions of the founder of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. These opinions are not entirely without interest. Yet "Luce Thinking" was always rather a joke, since the publisher was an ideologue, not a man of ideas. To study Luce the intellectual is rather like studying Hitler the water-colorist: it misses the point.

Unhappily, Herzstein would have difficulty in expressing the point even if he had grasped it, for he writes like a computer programmer whose work has been roughly translated from the Lithuanian. He garbles words, mixes metaphors, and tortures syntax. He is resolutely pedagogic, drumming home the obvious as though his readers were dim undergraduates. Like Luce himself, Herzstein says everything twice. SomeTimes he slides into Timestyle, using gratuitous epithets like "pundit Lippmann" or "dictator Stalin." Mercifully, he avoids the inversions parodied by Wolcott Gibbs in his celebrated New Yorker sketch. But though his sentences run forward, the mind still reels

So can we dismiss this as another book about a journalist who couldn't think by an academic who can't write? Not quite. Herzstein has done a prodigious amount of research. He takes pains to be accurate. He sheds new light on the creator of what was the first U.S. national press. And he tells the story, in more detail than ever before, of Luce's attempt to get America to fulfill his version of her manifest destiny. What this was he spelled out in a famous, if unoriginal, article in Life. It was published on February 17, 1941, and called "The American Century" - hence Herzstein's misleading subtitle.

In this piece Luce uttered a plea, both Timely yet fraught with future peril, that the United States should abandon isolationism and embrace imperialism. America's mission was not just to fight for democracy against Nazism but also to spread her culture, technology, and ideals across the face of the earth. Americans should be the "Good Samaritans of the World." This was a secular version of the gospel Luce's father had preached at his mission school in China, where Henry was born. Luce, indeed, always regarded journalism at its best as a kind of lay evangelism. He had a natural bent for the missionary position.

The trouble was, as Herzstein demonstrates at inordinate length, Luce's beliefs were often at odds with reality. This was notoriously the case with China. Luce took a proprietorial interest in the country and on trips there he sucked up information so fast that Time's correspondent, Theodore White, felt as if he was talking to a vacuum cleaner. Yet Luce (notwithstanding his gut conviction that Maoist communism equalled Red fascism) never understood China. He refused to recognize that the regime of his hero, Chiang Kai-shek, was dictatorial, corrupt, and detested. Time, Luce declared, was nonpartisan but supported Chiang. So sometimes Luce censored or distorted the reports of White and his colleagues. sometimes he used their material selectively to build what White called a "brick shithouse." Luce argued that their ephemeral observations should yield to his moral certainties. As he later told Time's Washington bureau chief, "the function of enlightened journalism is to lead, to put in what ought to be."

In short, like the godless communists whom he abhorred, Luce thought that a useful lie was better than a harmful truth. Mendacity in a just cause was a higher form of veracity. Luce believed that he had a hot line to the deity - he insisted on riding alone in the Time building elevator, apparently in order to say his prayers. So, as one commentator remarked, "any slanting or twisting of journalism was for God and Yale."

Sharper critics, like David Halberstam, have blamed Luce for the emergence of the China lobby, which in turn led to Korea, McCarthyism, and Vietnam. Herzstein does not think he was that influential, though Luce described himself as "skipper" of the "Ship of Public Opinion." No doubt Herzstein is right. But, inexplicably, his book stops in 1945. Thus the issue is hardly discussed and the last twenty-two years of Luce's Life are scarcely dealt with. Of course, Herzstein is entitled to write the book he has written, but these years would have provided him with the logical conclusion to his argument. During Eisenhower's presidency Luce at last got a secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who crusaded against communism in the spirit of his "American Century" article. As James Baughman has said in his recent biography of Luce, the 1950s "proved to be Luce's decade."

So Herzstein's Luce consists of two vast and trunkless legs of stone. Luce was, admittedly, rather an inhuman being. But in these pages we see only the monumental Babbitt, devoid of the quirks which animated previous accounts. We do not meet the "barking boss" who treated his staff like "dogs." Or the crass inquisitor who asked Hirohito how it felt to be mortal after having been a god for so long. Or the compulsive talker who ate a meal of green beans and chocolate cake without noticing it. Or the humorless hustler who complained while being kept waiting in the Vatican, "God damn it ... where the hell's the pope?" In Herzstein's portrait," Luce does not come alive.

More importantly, Luce's real significance is obscured. True, Herzstein concludes with various tributes which are apposite, if somewhat inflated. He quotes Carl Sandburg, for example, who said that Luce was the "greatest journalist of all time." But in pursuing his political/philosophical hare, Herzstein loses sight of Luce's towering achievements. With his livelier partner, Briton Hadden, Luce turned a scrappy rewrite sheet into a major organ of news and opinion during the 1920s. After Time he went on to Fortune, a brazen herald of capitalism in the midst of the Depression. Then there was Life, the most successful essay in pictorial journalism ever printed. Almost incidentally Luce acquired radio, film, and publishing interests, making himself the controller of a media conglomerate.

Herzstein also fails to show how Luce crucially betrayed his trust. This was not because he favored "politically incorrect" causes. Herzstein seems shocked by Time's early anti-Semitism, male chauvinism, and racism. But although Luce's magazines used terms like "wop" and "blackamoron," Time was actually quite liberal on social issues by the odious standards of the day. Moreover, Time's approval of Mussolini was simply the received wisdom on Main Street until the mid-1930s, when il Duce was no longer admired by il Luce (as Time wits called their leader). No, the main charge against Luce is not that he wielded a reactionary influence or even that he made the news reflect his views. It is that his very journalistic techniques debased the currency of truth.

At Time, style determined content. Brevity killed complexity. Hectic prose deformed prosaic facts. Novelistic contrivances turned everyday situations into melodrama. Life too imitated art, though it added spice - articles like "How to Undress in Front of Your Husband." Furthermore, as Dwight Macdonald has pointed out, it vulgarized high culture by putting Impressionist painting on a par with features about horses on roller skates.

Worst of all were the radio and newsreel versions of The March of Time. They intercut genuine interviews and authentic footage with recreated events and staged scenes, employing actors to play key parts. Thus an office boy donned a false beard and impersonated Haile Selassie. Many people were deceived by such masquerades. Luce defended the use of "fakery in allegiance to the truth." He might just as well have advocated forgery to promote sound money. As a news impresario Luce encouraged the operation of that journalistic Gresham's Law whereby bad reportage drives out good.

In Herzstein's book narrow pedantry has driven out comprehensive understanding. This is a pity, for Luce was an important figure and a paradoxical personality. His opinions may have been banal but he was an outstanding creator of organs of opinion, like a great composer with a tin ear. He deserves what he has not so far received - a just assessment.

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