Harry and Teddy:The Turbulent Friendship of Press: Lord Henry R. Luce and His Favorite Reporter, Theodore H. White
by By Griffith, Thomas
Category: Biography & Autobiography , General

In the depression year of 1938, a boy from Boston's Jewish ghetto graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with an itch to see China and a traveling fellowship to get him there. In China, Teddy White was hired by the young John Hersey to work for Time magazine and quickly established himself as a brilliant correspondent. Hersey was a "mishkid" - a child born of missionaries in China - and so was his boss, Henry Luce, the press lord who ran Time and Life magazines. Luce, always wary of friendships, was entranced by White when they met. A love of China and an admiration for its ruler, Chiang Kai-shek, bonded them in a turbulent friendship that lasted for decades.Yet this bond was quickly severed when Teddy turned against Chiang Kai-shek, having discovered and reported the truth about a terrible famine in the north of China that no one - including Chiang - would admit was happening. Soon Teddy could not get his reporting published in Time. It was blocked by a new Luce favorite, the arrogantly polemical Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist who had become the magazine's foreign editor. Before long both Teddy and Hersey - Luce's proteges - had lost their jobs. The turmoil at Luce's magazines mirrored the schisms and confrontations that raged in America in the forties over Communism and McCarthy and the fate of Asia.White exiled himself in Europe during the McCarthy years. On his return to the United States he launched a new career with his Making of the President books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series that revolutionized the reporting of presidential campaigns. And he and Luce renewed their friendship, which proved stronger than their earlier ideological quarrels.Harry and Teddy is the inside story of America's most successful magazine-publishing empire and the controversial and colorful characters who created it. In addition to White and Luce, the story features a cast that includes not only Whittaker Chambers but Vinegar Joe Stilwell, Chou En-lai, T. S. Matthews, and William F. Buckley, Jr.