Henry
Luce, the son of a missionary, was born in Tengchow, China, on 3rd
April, 1898. After being educated in China and England, Luce moved
to the United States and graduated from Yale
University in 1920.
In April, 1923, Luce and Briton Hadden, began publishing Time
magazine. The magazine, with its short articles summarizing important
events and issues, was a great success and by 1927 was selling over
175,000 copies a week. Hadden was editor of the magazine until his
early death in 1929.
With the success of Time,
Luce decided to expand his publishing interests. In 1929 he brought
out the business magazine Fortune.
In
November, 1935, Henry married
Clare Booth Luce,
the former managing editor of Vanity
Fair.
The followed year he began publishing the picture magazine, Life.
Luce also produced The
March of Time
for radio (1931) and for the cinema (1935). Other new magazines published by Luce included House & Home (1952) and Sports Illustrated (1954).
After the Second World War Luce developed right-wing political opinions and became a strong supporter of the Republican Party.
Luce was a strong opponent of Fidel Castro and his revolutionary government in Cuba. This included the funding of Alpha 66. In 1962 and 1963 Alpha 66 launched several raids on Cuba. This included attacks on port installations and foreign shipping.
Luce's media empire was used against John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy was assassinated, Luce's Life Magazine purchased the Zapruder Film. Soon after the assassination they also successfully negotiated with Marina Oswald the exclusive rights to her story. This story never appeared in print. Luce published individual frames of Zapruder's film but did not allow the film to be screened in its entirety.
Luce, who remained editor-in-chief of
all his publications until 1964, was an influential member of the
Republican Party. Henry
Luce
died in
Phoenix, Arizona, on 28th February, 1967.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Forum Debate: Life Magazine and the Assassination of JFK
Namebase: Henry Luce
Forum Debate on Watergate
(1) David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (1979)
Luce's politics hardened in the postwar years and Time had become increasingly Republican in its tone. He had been stunned by Truman's defeat of Dewey in 1948. Then in the fall of 1949 China had fallen, the Democratic administration had failed to save Chiang, and that was too much; Truman, and even more Acheson, would have to pay the price. Time was now committed and politicized, an almost totally partisan instrument. The smell of blood was in the air. There was a hunger now in Luce to put a Republican back in power. It was as if Luce, between elections, stood as the leader of the opposition, a kingmaker who had failed to produce a king. The fall of China and the rise of a post-war anti-Communist mood had produced the essential issue to use against the Democrats: softness on Communism. If the Democrats for almost two decades had exploited the Great Depression as their essential issue-all Republicans wore top hats and forced all laboring men into breadlinesnow Republicans, with Luce at their forefront, were fixing on foreign affairs as the Democrats' Achilles' heel. It was a brutal time; serious foreign policy issues with emotional overtones were made more emotional by Luce; his magazine encouraged a kind of political primitivism. Time tried to convince its readers that the disaster in Asia had been caused by bad and unworthy Democrats at the State Department. It also encouraged them to think that a Republican administration would deal more forthrightly and more morally with the Communists, roll them back a little. Ttime's heroes during the late forties and early fifties were men like Foster Dulles and Douglas MacArthur, who talked of bringing moral standards to foreign affairs. Of MacArthur, Time was particularly worshipful, writing in that period when he was the Consul General of Japan: "Inside the Dai Ichi building, once the heart of a Japanese insurance empire, bleary-eyed staff officers looked up from stacks of papers, whispered proudly, 'God, the man is great.' General Almond, his chief of staff, said straight out, 'he's the greatest man alive.' And reverent Air Force General George E. Stratemeyer put it as strongly as it could be put. ..'he's the greatest man in history."' Acheson was the villain, savaged by Luce in those years. Clearly Acheson was not a patch on MacArthur: "What people thought of Dean Gooderham Acheson ranged from the proposition that he was a fellow traveller, or a wool-brained sower of `seeds of jackassery,' or an abysmally uncomprehending man, or a warmonger who was taking the U.S. into a world war, to the warm if not so audible defense that he was a great Secretary of State." Clearly the lines were being drawn. Luce had once told Felix Belair that Belair did not understand what being a Republican really meant, that it was like being part of a family.
(2) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993)
One of the first leads Schweiker asked me to check came from a source he considered impeccable: Clare Boothe Luce. One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Clare Boothe Luce was the last person in the world Schweiker would have suspected of leading him on a wild goose chase.
Yet the chase began almost immediately. Right after Schweiker announced the formation of his Kennedy assassination Subcommittee, he was visited by Vera Glaser, a syndicated Washington columnist. Glaser told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce and that Luce had given her some information relating to the assassination. Schweiker immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed the story she had told Glaser.
Luce said that some time after the Bay of Pigs she received a call from her "great friend" William Pawley, who lived in Miami. A man of immense wealth-he had made his millions in oil-during World War II Pawley had gained fame setting up the Flying Tigers with General Claire Chennault. Pawley had also owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana's bus, trolley and gas systems and he was close to both pre-Castro Cuban rulers, President Carlos Prio and General Fulgencio Batista. (Pawley was one of the dispossessed American investors in Cuba who early tried to convince Eisenhower that Castro was a Communist and urged him to arm the exiles in Miami.)
Luce said that Pawley had gotten the idea of putting together a fleet of speedboats-sea-going "Flying Tigers" as it were-which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on "intelligence gathering" missions. He asked her to sponsor one of these boats and she agreed. As a result of her sponsorship, Luce got to know the three-man crew of the boat "fairly well," as she said. She called them "my boys" and said they visited her a few times in her New York townhouse. It was one of these boat crews, Luce said, that originally brought back the news of Russian missiles in Cuba. Because Kennedy didn't react to it, she said she helped feed it to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public. She then wrote an article for Life magazine predicting the missile crisis. "Well, then came the nuclear showdown and the President made his deal with Khrushchev and I never saw my young Cubans again," she said. The boat operations were stopped, she said, shortly afterwards when Pawley was notified that the U.S. was invoking the Neutrality Act and would prevent any further exile missions into Cuba.
Luce said she hadn't thought about her boat crew until the day that President Kennedy was killed. That evening she received a telephone call from one of the crew members. She told Schweiker his name was "something like" Julio Fernandez, and he said he was calling her from New Orleans. Julio Fernandez told her that he and the other crew members had been forced out of Miami after the Cuban missile crisis and that they had started a "Free Cuba" cell in New Orleans. Luce said that Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached his group and offered his services as a potential Castro assassin. He said his group didn't believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist, and they eventually penetrated his "cell" and tape-recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone because he was "the greatest shot in the world with a telescopic lens." Fernandez said that Oswald then suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas. According to Luce, Fernandez also told her that his group had photographs of Oswald and copies of handbills Oswald had been distributing on the streets of New Orleans. Fernandez asked Luce what he should do with this information and material.
(3) Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (1999)
The situation meanwhile among the anti-Castro exiles in south Florida was taking on the character of an undeclared rebellion against the official cease-and-desist policy of the Kennedy administration. On March 18, Alpha 66, with the guidance of the CIA's David Phillips, launched an attack on the island of Isabela de Sagua, wounding twelve Soviet soldiers and damaging the Russian freighter Lvov. Later that month, exiled Cuban fighters in Commandos L group blew up and sank the Russian merchantman Baku off the coast of Cuba. The Soviet Union delivered an angry protest to the United States. Washington assured Moscow it would control the raids. In a press conference, the president noted that such sorties could renew hostilities between the superpowers if they were not stopped.
His exasperation was not shared by others in Washington. By this time the cause of liberating Cuba from Castro had become the grail of the Republican right. Life magazine editorially adopted the cause of the exiles as its own, with photo essays on the raids. Clare Booth Luce, the powerful wife of Life publisher Henry R Luce and, herself a former congresswoman and United States ambassador, helped finance an anti-Castro platoon - an action that years later pulled her into the investigation of the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.
Life's full-throttle opposition to Kennedy "appeasement" was a problem for the administration. Along with Time, also published by Luce, it was one of the two or three most influential magazines in the country. In April, the president had invited the publisher and his very political wife to lunch at the White House. The Kennedy , charm did nothing to deter or otherwise disarm them. The Luces walked out of the lunch to protest the president's warning to cool it on Cuba.
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