Harry and Teddy: The Turbulent Friendship of Press: Lord Henry R. Luce and His Favorite Reporter, Theodore H. White

In chronicling the unlikely friendship between Henry R. Luce, founder of Time magazine, and Theodore H. White, one of the great journalists of our day, Griffith notes: ``Superficially, they had little in common: Luce was tall, Teddy short; Luce was rich, Teddy poor.'' A love of China was their bond. Luce, the son of missionaries, had grown up there; White, raised in a Boston Jewish ghetto, had studied Chinese at Harvard. Luce hired White to be his China correspondent on the eve of WWII, then frequently altered White's dispatches to reflect his own political biases. They argued over their individual Chinese heroes: White's were Gen. Joe Stilwell and Chou En-lai; Luce's was singular--Chiang Kai-shek. In his dispatches, White sided with Stilwell and Chou against Chiang, which eventually caused Luce to fire him. Then follows a riveting picture of Time magazine in the post-WWII period. While White became famous with Thunder Out of China, Time became staunchly Republican, slanting the news to help insure Eisenhower's presidential election in 1952. The McCarthy era found Time censuring the senator to bring about a rapprochement between Luce and White. White went on to write his series of books on The Making of the President, and Luce became more journalistically impartial in all his magazines. Perhaps the most intriguing character in the book, curiously, is Whitaker Chambers, Time's ``brilliant and unbalanced'' foreign editor, whom Griffith presents as Luce's alter ego. Griffith, a former senior editor at Time, has written a compelling volume that captures not only the essences of Luce and White, but also the excitement of a particularly tempestuous American era. Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)