American dreamer 1. At 14, though not later in life, Henry Robinson Luce was a great supporter of a revolution, the Chinese revolution of 1912. He wrote to a friend who was visiting Luce's missionary parents in China, welcoming him to "a great land, peopled by a great nation, endowed with a great past, overshadowed by a greater future ." It was, he added, "the greatest and most stupendous Reformation in all history." 2. Luce achieved much in his life. By sheer effort he won the glittering prizes at Yale, where he, a poor scholarship boy and undistinguished at games, made Skull and Bones, the secret society that was the nursery of the American establishment . He was helped through university by the wealthy widow of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the combine harvester, who had been persuaded by father Luce to stump up for his China mission. 3. With his more flashily gifted Yale chum, Brit Hadden, he founded Time magazine. After Hadden's early death Luce went on to become the autocratic and fabulously wealthy boss of Time Inc, publisher of Time , Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated . He persuaded President Eisenhower that Mrs Clare Boothe Luce, his talented, neurotic wife, should be posted to Rome as the American ambassador. (He made, they both said, "an extraordinarily good ambassador's wife".) 4. Luce tried, with little success, to play kingmaker in presidential politics. In 1940 Time editors winced as he turned the magazine into a campaign puff for Wendell Willkie, and in 1948 Time was “ as wrong as everyone else" in its confidence that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman, whom Luce called "a vulgar little Babbitt". He hated Roosevelt. 5. Where Luce was not wrong was in his famous essay, published in February 1941, that this would be "an American Century". His point was not imperial, but idealistic, even chiliastic . It was America's time, he wrote, "to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels." 6. Luce soon forgot the few words of Mandarin he learned from his amah or nanny, but never did he forget his beloved China, the country he had seen through the eyes of a missionary's child in an impoverished province. He worshiped Chiang Kai-shek, corrupt dictator and historic loser. To an imaginary China, he dedicated his life. 7. In this superb biography Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian, has told the curiously depressing story of a brilliant man who got everything wrong, including so many of the things that mattered most to him. Mr Brinkley has an eye for both the telling detail and the broad sweep of Luce's role as the man who saw the need for a national news magazine and foresaw the American century. 8. Time style, with its heroic epithets and inverted sentences (memorably parodied in a New Yorker profile by Wolcott Gibbs, with its famous last line, "where it all will end, knows God") was the legacy of Luce's and Hadden's classical education at Yale. Luce tried to use his magazines to convert Americans to his ideas. He was largely frustrated by his editors, who ignored his political directives. Like Lord Beaverbrook (with whose granddaughter, Jeanne Campbell, Luce had the last serious love affair of his life), he liked left-wing writers, among them Archibald MacLeish.Dwight Macdonald and Daniel Bell, who despised his conservatism. 9. Mr Brinkley pleads that Luce was less "fevered" than other cold warriors, his attitude to domestic communism "more nuanced". He did call for "the liberation of China" and a "rollback of the Iron Curtain with tactical atomic weapons", and once speculated about "plastering Russia with 500 (or 1,000) A bombs", He was a passionate believer in the superior material culture and the "national purpose" of America. He died of a massive heart attack in 1967, just as his crusade against communism in Asia was stumbling towards its own death in Vietnam. From The Economist