Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now, welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
I've had occasion to talk about this before, how a good chunk of the totality of my grade school education happened between the hours of 3:00 and 6:00 PM on Tuesday afternoons. That marked the span of time from when I retrieved the latest copy of Time Magazine from my parents' mailbox and started reading the letter from the publisher to the moment where I devoured the essay, somewhere north of page 80 at the end of the book, and my mom called my brother and me in for a meatloaf supper. My dad, you see, was sort of the town pediatrician in Newton, Massachusetts. All of the moms flocked their kids to his magazine-strewn waiting room. Considering the viral marketing power of that exalted position, Dad got a comped courtesy subscription to Time sent to our home. Now, in the missionary calculus of Time's founder and publisher, Henry R. Luce, it just seemed an effective investment in spreading the gospel.
National news magazine, meet your willing student. The special 1776 issue, published on July 4th, 1776, is how I absorbed the birth of the nation, brought home excitedly by the cover illustration of Thomas Jefferson by illustrator Louis Glanzman. In his editor's letter, Henry A. Grunwald quoted John Adams asking, "Who shall write the story of the American Revolution?" Answers, the writers of Luce's Time Magazine.
11 years later, in the July 6th, 1987 issue, Time was how I familiarized myself with the US Constitution on the 200th anniversary of its ratification, when then-publisher Robert L. Miller wrote about the staff's efforts to portray the charter not as a dry historical relic, but a vital part of American life. Part of that assignment went to Time senior writer Lance Morrow and photographers Ted Thai and my old friends Steve List, David Hume Kennerly, PF Bentley, and Diana Walker, among many others, picturing people, places, and ideas where the Constitution came to life, such as in Ted's photo of a family in Gillette, Wyoming, their rifles in hand, bearing witness to the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms.
Another core idea in the Constitution is the separation of church and state, and that's always been operative, sort of, at Time Magazine since its founding in 1923 by Mr. Luce and his Yale classmate Briton Hadden, and next month, when the magazine, or the hybrid business that it is now, marks its own centennial within the fabric of American life by ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange. The church was the journalism expressed by legends of the craft such as Morrow and Otto Friedrich and Roger Rosenblatt and legions of others. The state was the blockbuster business that Luce created, the endless ads from Marlboro cigarettes, Seagram whiskeys, General Motors cars, and IBM computers, and so many others. Major American firms listed here on the exchange that read themselves for Dr. King's patients and hundreds of millions of others in the weekly pages of the book.
Time Inc. itself was listed on the NYSE on April 29th, 1964 under the ticker symbol TL, for Time and Life, then merged with Warner Communications in 1989 under the ticker symbol TWX, followed by the mother of all mergers, when Steve Case and Gerald Levin stood on stage to announce the combination of AOL and Time Warner. To call that deal ill-fated was an understatement. Time Inc was spun off in 2014, eventually run by my old friend Rich Battista before being acquired by Meredith Corporation, which is NYSE ticket symbol MDP, in 2017. As Time's business and journalism arrives at its 100th birthday, it's now held by Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, NYSE ticker symbol CRM. God and mammon, church and state. In a minute, we'll wander back through Time, listening once more to the noise of typewriters with the legendary Lance Morrow, who, unbeknownst to him, taught me how to read, how to write, and how to learn. That's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Our guest today, Lance Morrow, is the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He's an American essayist winner of the National Magazine Award, whose endless bylines can be discovered in the vault of Time Magazine, where he worked for 40 years, or now found in the pages The Wall Street Journal and City Journal or in his 10 books, the most recent of which is just out, The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism, published by Encounter Books. Lance Morrow, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Lance Morrow:
Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
Josh King:
What was it like to put together that special issue on the Constitution? Do you remember it?
Lance Morrow:
I remember it sort of. It was long time ago. It was a lot of hard work, a lot of research. Henry Grunwald, who was the managing editor at that time, had, like Henry Luce, an appetite and an instinct for these rather grand, comprehensive, and very successful projects. One of the great advantages of working there was I loved being a journalist. And being a journalist there, quite often I loved it because you were constantly being paid to learn things and to write about things that were essential and interesting. It was a terrific education in its own way. It was grueling sometimes, as working on deadline is.
Josh King:
How conscious were you of the kind of education that you were giving young people like me back in the '70s and '80s?
Lance Morrow:
When you worked for Time in those days, you were very much aware, I was very much aware, of the readership, of the connection to the readership. And I could feel it. And you could see it in the letters that came in. To answer your question, I wasn't specifically thinking of younger people and educating younger people. That wasn't quite on my mind. I'm, of course, very pleased to hear what you say about your absorbing stuff that we're writing. Of course, mind you, there were an awful lot of people who couldn't stand Time Magazine and thought it was the devil's work and thought Henry Luce was a monster. Of course, Luce was gone when I started work there, but there were a lot of people, including my own mother, who hated Time and thought that Luce was a reactionary and all of that.
But one of the things that one always had to remember about Luce was that he was a missionary son, and he was a teacher, and he regarded himself as a teacher as well as a journalist. And he thought that there was no subject... And this was a tremendous contribution to journalism... that there was no subject that could not be reported on and explained so that the readers could make up their mind. And I think that was a very admirable contribution.
Josh King:
I've heard you say, and you write in the book, that no one remembers Henry Luce. As someone, like Caro, who turned every page, I remember seeing his name and Briton Hadden's name on the masthead every week. Now, the life of William Randolph Hearst, who you talk about some in the book, was chronicled in The Chief by David Nasaw in 2001 and Gay Talese wrote The Kingdom and the Power about The New York Times, I think, in 2007. Why hasn't Luce had his due?
Lance Morrow:
There was a very good sort of official corporate biography of several volumes that was written by a man named Elson, who had been one of the correspondents, and by a couple of other people, but that did not have a wide circulation at all. Then, in 1972, a biographer named William A. Swanberg wrote a book called Luce and His Empire, and it was extremely hostile, very, very negative. Swanberg really hated Luce and was explicit in saying so. In 2010, Professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia did a very good biography of Luce. I don't think he was very enthusiastic about Luce, and I had the impression that he wrote the book only reluctantly. And he read everything, but I think he shared some of the prejudice against Luce. In any case, I don't think that Luce has gotten his due. I don't think he's been appreciated for the impact that he had in America in the middle decades of the 20th century. He was a very important figure.
Josh King:
He's a through line in The Noise of Typewriters, and yet you say you glimpsed him only once, in sort of a hallucination, you called him. He was nearly dead before you joined his magazine in 1965. Did your work here start out as a Luce biography? How did The Noise of Typewriters end up in the form that it took?
Lance Morrow:
I tried to do a biography of him some years ago, and I couldn't quite work it out. I'm an essayist rather than a biographer. I felt that I hadn't really the patience. This book, The Noise of Typewriters, is really an essay or a series of essays, and Luce figures in it prominently. This was my way, in my kind of writing, to try to get at him because I started out not particularly liking him, for all the standard reasons that many people didn't like him. Eventually I came to admire him and to appreciate his real genius. He was an extraordinary genius in the making of magazines, and he was also a kind of business genius. He did these things seemingly effortlessly, even though he worked very hard. He's a very interesting figure.
Josh King:
Your friend Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee got their 15 years of fame in All the President's Men. And the same was true for Marty Baron and Walter Robinson in Spotlight, about the sexual abuse of children by the Roman Catholic Church. Let's hear Jason Robards as Bradlee and Dustin Hoffman as your friend Carl.
Speaker 5:
... know he was talking to a reporter?
Speaker 6:
Yeah, but I think I woke him up.
Speaker 5:
You had good notes?
Speaker 6:
Verbatim.
Speaker 5:
He really said that about Mrs. Graham. Well, I'll cut the words "her tit" and print it.
Speaker 6:
Why?
Speaker 5:
This is a family newspaper.
Josh King:
How good was Carl's verbatim note-taking, and why wasn't there ever a movie about you and Otto Friedrich in Gus Daniels' office, tearing up the yellows on a Saturday night and breaking a big story for Time?
Lance Morrow:
Henry Luce used to regret that businessmen were never made the heroes of novels, or rarely were. He thought they weren't. There was a certain hostility, of particularly intellectuals, through the '30s, '40s, '50s and so on, a hostility to Henry Luce and his magazines. Intellectuals, in the first place, thought that Luce was too Republican, too capitalist, too religious... He was a Christian, Presbyterian... and a little too patriotic, as a patriotic American, that side of him. So there wasn't a lot of goodwill toward Henry Luce. Luce had a lot of enemies. I mean, just as a sidelight on that, you remember the movie called The Philadelphia Story-
Josh King:
Sure.
Lance Morrow:
... that starred Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and James Stewart. And James Stewart was a reporter for Spy Magazine, which was going to cover Tracy Lord's wedding in Philadelphia for that magazine. The publisher of Spy Magazine was named Sydney Kidd, and that was Henry Luce. And he is portrayed in that movie as a really bad guy, as a sort of a slimy type. Luce showed up very much in a villain in a novel that Pearl S. Buck wrote, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Good Earth and other books. She had grown up in China... also the child of a China missionary, but a very different experience of China... and she couldn't stand Luce. She put him in a book called God's Men, a novel in which she portrayed him in the most insulting terms. I mean, it was kind of funny. I mean, she gave him short little fingers on his hands, where, in fact, he had perfectly normal, rather elegant-looking hands if you.
Josh King:
It's a good-looking guy when I looked at all the pictures of him.
Lance Morrow:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was. He had a lot of enemies and a lot of people who disliked him intensely, so I am not at all surprised that he was not made the hero of the movie, and it wasn't Cary Grant playing Henry Luce.
Josh King:
And it's naturally different in the mission of the news magazine to break new news or to have major scoops. Was it? I mean you were sort of more analytical of the week's events than you were sort of exposing us to something that really blew our socks off.
Lance Morrow:
Well, you have to figure the timing. People in the 21st century don't really understand the ecology of information back then. They don't understand that, for example, magazines had a huge importance in forming the country and getting information to the country. But a magazine like Time, which was published weekly, could not give the deadline news in the way that say the New York Daily News could do, where in an hour or so they could pump out a hot scoop on a murder or something like that. So the news magazines had to find their role reporting the news, analyzing the news. Now, mind you, if something very big broke, we would do a special edition, if Kennedy was assassinated or on 9/11 they ginned up a very good but small special edition that closed that night. I did the essay on the back page, and Jim Nachtwey, who's a wonderful photographer who worked for Time quite often, did a photo essay of the whole thing.
Josh King:
Speaking of ginning things up, Lance, as you note in the book, a lot has been written over time about the beverage carts and the Johnny Walker Red and the Bombay gin as the women researchers ran in and out of the editorial offices with the red changes on the copy on a Saturday. You look at any issue from the vault in those days, which I did over the last couple days, and you have a sense of all this exacting effort that went into every word of the magazine, every page of the layout, every graphic. Talk about the work that went into an issue, from the correspondents and how they operated in the bureaus to the photographers in the field, to the fact checkers in the office, to you writing your essay.
Lance Morrow:
There were many faults with it, of course. However, the process went like this. On Monday, the beginning of the week, we would sit down in New York and have story conferences, editors, writers, everybody, the whole staff. Then they would make up a tentative story list for the coming edition, decide on the stories, go back to our offices, send out queries all over the world, whatever the story was.
Then the researchers, meantime, would be rounding up a tremendous amount of research from a morgue, a library, upstairs, which was fabulous, absolutely, had clips and clips and clips and old files and so on. So then the researcher would be assembling that material while the correspondents, meantime, would be heading out to cover the story, to contact people, to call up sources and so on and so on. Then, toward midweek, the correspondents would start rattling in their files. Meantime, of course, other things would be happening in the news, so you would be adding news stories to what you already had and dropping some stories. The files would come tumbling in. The writers in New York would sit down, and they would write all night or all afternoon or as long as it took.
Thursday, Friday, the editors would be editing. The researchers would be checking. Every word had to have a dot over it, a researcher's dot, names and statistics had to have a red dot over them to make sure they were right. It was a very professional operation in most respects, and the people who did it were a really remarkable bunch of people. They were intelligent and interesting, and I have the greatest affection for the whole crew that I worked with over many, many years.
Josh King:
You write about one of those Saturday nights at the end of the long production week. It happened to fall August 11th, 1965. You're just joining the magazine at this point. It's the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Let's listen to Ed Herlihy in one of those Universal newsreels.
Speaker 7:
Six days of rioting in a Negro section of Los Angeles left behind scenes reminiscent of war-torn cities. More than a hundred square blocks were decimated by fire and looters, and few buildings were left intact. Firemen were harassed by snipers and brick-throwing hoodlums as they attempted to control the fires, many of which were left to burn themselves out. As the National Guard moved in the restore comparative calm, the losses by fire alone were put at $200 million.
Josh King:
Now, Lance, I went back and looked at all of the covers from 1965, the year I was born. Martin Luther King on the cover on March 19th. The Watts riots were on the cover on the August 20th issue, and Jim Brown was on the cover of November 26th. Beyond that, it's mostly all white men and world leaders. How did the coverage of race evolve with the magazine itself?
Lance Morrow:
Luce was very good on race all along in a limited way, in the sense that very early on he ran articles about lynching, whenever there was a lynching in the South. This was way back in the '30s and '40s. It wasn't until Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott and the rise of the civil rights movement that Time, like other mainstream media, began seriously to cover Black America and to cover its leadership and to consider it in a new way. So it evolved as the country evolved. Of course, the big things were the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, the March on Washington, all of that, and then, starting in 1965, the moment that you just highlighted, the Watts riots, and then starting with that, my first cover story for Time Magazine was about the Detroit riot in, I believe, 1967.
Josh King:
Talking about a learning process, Lance, we're currently consumed with stories about China, the shooting down of their intelligence-gathering balloons and these tense standoffs in Berlin between their foreign minister and my old friend, the secretary of state, Tony Blinken. The story of Time really does begin in China in the Shandong Province, where young Luce was born to a Presbyterian missionary. How did his birth in a far-off land shape the America that Luce was to become?
Lance Morrow:
He was conceived in the mid-Pacific on a ship taking his father, the Reverend Henry Winters Luce, and his mother, Elizabeth Root Luce, across from Scranton. So Luce, whose forebears had arrived on Martha's Vineyard in 1636, this Henry Luce was born in Shandong and spent his boyhood in China. That had an enormous consequence not only in his life, but, I believe, in the life of the country in the middle of the 20th century because growing up in China, he idealized America, as the missionaries did. They looked at America from the other side of the world, and it was a perfect kind of thing. They tended to regard it as much better than it was, in the sense that if he had grown up in Scranton or in Dallas or some other American city, he would've been less starry-eyed about America.
But he comes at the age of 13 to Hotchkiss and then to Yale, and then, at a very early age, starts Time Magazine. It's my theory that in his magazines, Luce was, in effect, reinventing America to his moral satisfaction. Presbyterians used the phrase "the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God on earth." Well, America was a way of approaching the kingdom of God on earth, of attempting to perfect it in the sense that that phrase implies. So I believe that his magazines, even though they were full of cigarette ads and liquor ads, but nevertheless, there was always that Lucian vision that was underneath it somewhere.
My point in the book is to speak of the immense impact that he had on the American middle class in the years from the '30s, and especially through the '40s and '50s and into the '60s. Then, in the Vietnam time and in the civil rights, the great turning of the lake started to occur, and Luce's version of the country became unacceptable to a lot of people. And people like Swanberg, whom I mentioned earlier, the biographer, really began to despise him and try to destroy him. Swanberg's book was a sort of character assassination, and that was his mission.
Josh King:
Lance, my favorite political science professor at Swarthmore, David Smith, once gave me back a paper with a B+ on it, which was pretty good for me at the time, I think. And I remember what he wrote in the comments. He said something like, "I appreciate your writing style. It's more like that of a news magazine than a term paper." I was thrilled with a note at the time, but I think, in retrospect, I've come to realize the compliment is a little more backhanded than I previously thought. How did your writing style evolve from watching your parents, both journalists, to your years at Harvard, to working the dictation bank at the Washington Evening Star, to honing this voice at Time, the one that I tried to copy so miserably at Swarthmore?
Lance Morrow:
If you were trying to copy mine, I appreciate it. I'm not sure it was a wise thing to do, but there evolved in the '30s, '40s, '50s, a rather standardized Time style. Then, when Henry Grunwald came in 1968, he encouraged... And this was the era of New Journalism, and Henry Grunwald encouraged more individual style. And I had just come onto the magazine, so I was very lucky, and I was able to bring to bear my own tics and mannerisms and whatever a style is. Henry started an essay section in the early '70s, and I was lucky enough to do the essays on the back of the magazine for many, many years. The essay is such a wonderful form that you can play around with it a lot. There's a lot you can do with it, stylistically and otherwise. And Roger Rosenblatt came in in the '80s and did some terrific stuff that changed the style of the magazine. So it was an evolution.
Josh King:
The journalist you hold out really as a model is John Hersey. Let's listen to President Harry Truman right after his conference at Potsdam, addressing the nation on August 6th, 1945 aboard the USS Augusta.
Speaker 8:
The president reports on the startling developments that seal Japan's fate.
Speaker 9:
We are now prepared to destroy more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake. We shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war. It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July the 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
Josh King:
William Shawn at The New Yorker sent Hersey to Hiroshima to report on the aftermath of that moment, Lance. What approach did he use to tell the story?
Lance Morrow:
He was a terrific journalist. He went to Hiroshima and published this long report one year after the bomb had fallen. He interviewed, and in great depth, a handful of people... I think it was six or seven or eight... including a German Jesuit who had lived there for years. He humanized these people, and he reported what happened to them when the bomb fell and in the aftermath of the bomb. His style of writing in this report was absolutely egoless. There was none of his ego in it at all. It was very pure, spare, absolutely clear reporting that took the reader right into the event, which was, in itself and in its details, so horrific that you needed no embellishment. So it was a very, very powerful report. It was an entire issue of The New Yorker one year after the bomb. It caused a great sensation and was in itself, I believe, a moral event in the history of the American conscience.
Many have said it is the finest piece of journalism in the 20th century. And I would put an asterisk on that. I could see that one could make that case, but I would put an asterisk on that and say that I don't think Hersey was complete or entirely adequate. The story was much larger and more complicated than that. And I go back to Nanking in late 1937 and early 1938, when the Japanese army came into Nanking, and for weeks and weeks at a time committed the most unspeakable atrocities that have ever been committed in the history of war. At Hiroshima, 100,000 people approximately died. In Nanking, 300,000, so three times as many.
My thought is this, and I'm not invalidating Hersey by any means, but I'm saying that if he had gone to Nanking in the wake of those events, and had written 46,000 words on those events and reported them in precisely the same way, I believe that the whole post-war history of the occupation of Japan and of the American attitude toward Japan would've been quite different, and world opinion would've been very powerfully affected. Eli Wiesel, who was a friend of mine, said, "Don't try to compare them. You can't compare evils." But you need, I think, to mention these things. Somehow, I felt the need to have that sort of perspective. But I grant that I admired John Hersey, and I grant that his was a very, very powerful piece of work.
Josh King:
After the break, Lance Morrow, author of The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism, and I will talk a little bit more about the Atomic Age that we are entering, as Lance was just talking about, more about his career and the magazine and the business Time Inc. that helped shape Mr. Morrow and the country and the world that he covered. That's all coming up, right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, I was talking with Lance Morrow, author of The Noise of Typewriters, about his career and the American century that he covered. So Lance, if Time was my liberal arts education over the first 20 years of my life, Fortune became my MBA program, Sports Illustrated my locker room, People my companion at the Saturday matinee. You write that around the time of the Time Life building at 1221 Avenue of the Americas was really faithfully recreated in Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. Tell me about the vast journalistic empire that was growing up around Henry Luce's original idea for Time during your time there.
Lance Morrow:
He started with Time Magazine in '23. At the end of the '20s, he got the idea of Fortune with what seemed absolutely horrible timing. He started Fortune just as the Depression was settling in. I would argue that the early years of Fortune Magazine, Fortune was the best magazine, arguably, ever published. It was an extraordinary, extraordinarily terrific magazine. Then, in '36, he comes up with Life Magazine, which was so successful it almost destroyed him because they hadn't anticipated such success, and so their ad rates were way below what they should have been to cover the costs, so they lost millions until, finally, they turned the corner. But Life was a fantastic magazine, fantastically successful. The professionalism of the people that Luce hired... And he had a very good eye for talent. Their professionalism was extraordinary, when you consider how much shabbiness there was and still is in a lot of that business. Luce really did things first class, and he was very thoughtful about what he was doing. The Time Life empire burgeoned in all these directions, and Time Life became one of the great American brands
Josh King:
You write that Luce liked heroes and adventure stories. Some part of his character remained about 14 years old. You write that Luce tried LSD in the early '60s, partly for journalistic, partly for spiritual reasons, and then took to reading Lionel Trilling's life of Matthew Arnold to come down from the high. And I think as I read that, I thought "That's pretty cool," but your old boss, Jason McManus pegged him as uncouth. Reconcile those two Luces.
Lance Morrow:
Luce retired in '64, and he died in February of '67. When I asked Jason McManus, who became one of Luce's successor, I asked him one day at lunch, I said, "How would you describe Luce?" And he said, without hesitating, "Uncouth." I know what he meant because there was a certain brusqueness in Luce and a certain directness, which some people interpreted as crudity, although his mind was not a crude mind in any way. But there set in at Time Inc. after Luce was gone a kind of embarrassment about him, about the founder. He almost affected uncouthness. He would take his guys out to an incredibly fancy French restaurant in Midtown or in Paris, and they would all order some very fancy French dish. Luce would order duck à l'orange or something but tell the waiter to bring in ketchup. And it was a reverse snobbery, you see. It was a, "I'm so rich, but I'm just folks, and I can have ketchup if I damn well want to have ketchup."
Josh King:
Talking about just folks, Lance, Luce wanted Midwestern values expressed in the magazine. Another one of my great teachers, growing up, teaching me the ways of Washington was Greenfield, Iowa's own Hugh Sidey, who was Time's White House correspondent. And you write that Lyndon Johnson would wait up in the White House in his pajamas on Sunday nights, looking for a motorcycle courier to deliver him a make-ready copy of the magazine just so he could bend Sidey's ear about its contents. How did it feel for you, often as the author of some of those words, knowing that every mayor, every governor, every senator, congressman, every justice of the Supreme Court, every CEO of the companies up here in New York, and even LBJ himself would read every word that he wrote every week and have some view that he wanted to bend Sidey's ear about?
Lance Morrow:
Well, it was pretty heady stuff. I mean, for a long time, when I was writing in the Nation section, I wasn't getting a byline, which was very troubling to any writer, but nevertheless, knowing that I was reaching an audience like that was very heady.
This is something that people today, in a totally different world journalistically and electronically and so on, don't understand, that Time Magazine had tremendous importance, and presidents like Kennedy and Johnson watched Time Magazine, very, very vigilantly. And Kennedy would get so mad that he would cancel his subscription and raise hell, and Lyndon Johnson would call up Hugh Sidey at 3:00 in the morning, and Sidey used to have a million stories like this of getting a call at 3:00 in the morning with, "Sidey. Sidey, what are you trying to do to the leadership and the leader of the free world? What you {
trying to do, you guys at Time?
Josh King:
I actually tried to look for tape recordings of a Johnson call to Sidey last night. I couldn't find any, but that's an excellent LBJ imitation.
Lance Morrow:
Sidey used to love to tell those stories because he was a real connoisseur of LBJ stuff, and God knows LBJ was a absolute treasure trove of very funny stories, some of them not tellable in public.
Josh King:
Talking about presidents, Lance, The Noise of Typewriters really ends at Radio City Music Hall in 1998, at a gala evening on the 75th anniversary of Time. The mission of the folks running the event was to invite every living person who had ever appeared on the cover, putting together maybe strange bedfellows on one hand like Leni Riefenstahl and Eli Wiesel, who you mentioned earlier, who was an honorary invitee. Let's hear from another one of those Time cover subjects, my old boss President Bill Clinton, speaking that evening.
Speaker 13:
Tonight, Time has paid tribute to the time it not only observed, but helped to create, the stunning years your founder, Henry Luce, so unforgettably called the American Century. To me, one man above all others is the personification of our American century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, that choice might have pained Henry Luce, but surely he would not be surprised.
Josh King:
Lance, paint a picture of that evening. And why would the choice of FDR pain Henry Luce?
Lance Morrow:
That evening was fascinating, and it was a lot of fun. It was very interesting. But it was also surreal. I tell a story about, we were cooped up in there for like three hours plus, listening to speeches. So naturally, everybody was rushing to the men's room. So the line outside the men's room, I was standing in line behind Mickey Rooney, Joe DiMaggio, Henry Kissinger, John Kennedy Jr., and so on. Muhammad Ali was going up to Bill Gates and asking to have his picture taken with him. There were all these legendary characters.
The history of FDR and Henry Luce was very, very interesting because at first, in 1932, '33, when FDR was running and became president, Henry Luce was very enthusiastic for Roosevelt and cheered him on and visited him at the White House. And he came out of the White House saying, "What a man, what a guy, what a terrific..." But by 1936, he had soured on Roosevelt, he decided, because he felt that Roosevelt had not delivered on his obligation to get the economy moving again. And furthermore, he felt that FDR was duplicitous. And of course, FDR was duplicitous. He admitted he was duplicitous. It was a sort of point of pride that he was duplicitous. He said, "The left hand doesn't know what my right hand is doing," and so on. He came, actually... He used the word himself. He came actually to hate Franklin Roosevelt.
And yet, as soon as Pearl Harbor happened... And by the way, Pearl Harbor was bombed on the same day that Henry Luce's father died. And Luce, had to postpone his grieving for his father in order to rush in and put out a special issue of Time. But on the day that that happened, Pearl Harbor, Luce sent a message to Roosevelt, burying all former animosity and saying, "I'm on your side a hundred percent, and my magazines are backing you a hundred percent."
When Roosevelt died in April of '45, Luce said a very complicated thing, and he said it in that kind of rueful voice of his. He said, "I guess it's my duty to go on hating him." And interestingly, when LBJ came along with his Great Society... LBJ, of course, was a protege of FDR, and LBJ undertook to create a new New Deal and make himself a new version of Franklin Roosevelt. When LBJ came out with his so-called Great Society, Luce went down to Washington and talked to him and said, "I think it's wonderful. Good for you. That's great." Luce had a lot of opinions that his enemies attempted to reduce to caricature, but it was unfair. He is much too intelligent to be reduced to caricature.
Josh King:
We mentioned your friend Carl Bernstein earlier in our conversation. His partner covering Watergate, talking about maybe the ultimate Bigfoot, Bob Woodward, including All the President's Men, Bob has authored or co-authored 21 books that have been national bestsellers, 15 of them number one bestsellers. Now, I've just finished reading, or maybe listening to, his latest one, The Trump Tapes. I want to hear Woodward talk with CBS News's John Dickerson.
Speaker 14:
I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I don't know if that's an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.
Speaker 15:
There were 16 phone calls, 20 interviews all told, eight hours of conversations, which Woodward has compiled into an audiobook, The Trump Tapes, out this week, published by Simon & Schuster, part of our parent company, Paramount Global.
Speaker 16:
In many ways, it's the missing piece of the Trump story. We've heard a lot of Trump. He's said a lot. And having the time, I could go back and ask questions again and again.
Speaker 15:
Woodward has written about the calls, but hearing Trump in his own voice, he believes, is enlightening.
Josh King:
So, Lance, if this story, if The Noise of Typewriters might begin with Carl and Bob in the Post newsroom, banging out on their Smith Corona and Ben Bradlee making sure that they're doing the right thing and getting all the facts right, and it spans from '72 and '73 now to 1923, and Bob putting out this book, in which you sort of just let the tape recorder go, package it up, and sell it for 29.99... It is a howl of a listen, but is it journalism? Is it at all unfair to the subject?
Lance Morrow:
Well, as you were talking, I was thinking of course, of the Nixon tapes. Is it journalism? I think it's an interesting thing to have available and to know. I would call it an aspect of journalism. To tell you the truth, I haven't listened to the tapes, and I haven't really thought it through. This is a warning to any politician or anybody to be very, very certain you are absolutely clear about the ground rules. I don't know whether Woodward was breaking the rules in this case or whether Trump was so careless. Trump's a sloppy guy in some ways. Whether it's legit to publish the tapes, I would have to think about that some more. I can see the value of it from an historical point of view. Take yourself 30 years down the road, and I think in 30 years, one would be grateful to be able to have access to that glimpse of Trump, because it's all part of the picture.
Josh King:
One of your last bosses at Time, Walter Isaacson, has been shadowing Elon Musk for quite a while for what will surely be a successor to his books on Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci. But all of those Isaacson subjects are dead. Is there a risk in getting too close to a living subject?
Lance Morrow:
I think Walter does a terrific job with those things. I mean, with Steve Jobs, of course, Steve Jobs was still alive when Walter did most of his research, I believe. Walter's franchise, what he does, is geniuses. There is always the danger of being seduced, of being manipulated or seduced, but Walter's very experienced and very smart. He did Henry Kissinger, his first big genius book, and no one in the world is more sensitive to what's being said about him than Kissinger. Walter said some things about Kissinger that Kissinger didn't like at all.
Josh King:
As we finish our conversation here, Lance, we talked about John Hersey before the break. He wrote another piece for The New Yorker about PT-109. The real story about Lieutenant Junior Grade Kennedy's action in the Solomon Islands during World War II diverges somewhat from the story that old Joe Kennedy had reprinted in Reader's Digest for Jack's 1946 Congressional campaign. And you make this comparison between the John Ford classic Western The Man who shot Liberty Valance, and want to just hear Jimmy Stewart's character, Ranse Stoddard, explaining himself to Maxwell Scott, editor of the Shinbone Star, in the movie. Let's take a quick listen.
Speaker 17:
Well, you know the rest of it. I went to Washington. We won statehood. I became the first governor.
Speaker 18:
Three terms as governor, two terms in the Senate, ambassador to the Court of St James, back again to the Senate, and a man who, with a snap of his fingers, could be the next vice president of the United States.
Speaker 17:
Well, you're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
Speaker 18:
No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Speaker 19:
He's right, Ranse.
Josh King:
But what did that piece of Liberty Valance conjure this struggle you had about Kennedy, and, really, Times journalism, and perhaps all of journalism, for that matter?
Lance Morrow:
That's the subject, in a way, of my whole book, which is mythmaking, and storytelling and mythmaking. Henry Luce was a genius at mythmaking. How do you tell a story? How do you handle exactly that Liberty Valance problem, or how do you handle the John Kennedy PT-109 thing? Kennedy, to go into detail about the one on PT-109, he was an idiot for having gotten his PT boat sliced in two by a Japanese destroyer that night in the Blackett Straits. But afterward, he really was pretty heroic in the way that he behaved, and he swam, and he helped save his guys and so on. It wasn't all nonsense. In the case of Liberty Valance, it was John Wayne who shot Liberty Valance. It was not the Jimmy Stewart character. But I think one always, in journalism, is aware of the narrative lines, put it that way, of the storylines.
I tell in the book about being in Israel during the First Intifada, in 1988. I'd gone over there to write a cover story about the 40th anniversary of the State of Israel. So I spent a long, long time interviewing Israelis, many, many Israelis, great length. And then I went up to Khan Yunis in Gaza and Ramallah in West Bank and interviewed many, many Palestinians. So I was absorbing two utterly opposed narratives of the same year, 1948. To the Palestinians, it was called the nachbach, the disaster, the catastrophe. To the Israelis, it was a kind of miracle. It was the beginning of Israel and so on. So that taught me a great deal.
I always left Israel to go back to New York with a terrific headache, and I felt that as soon as I took on off from Lod Airport, I would feel the headache going away, because it was so difficult to reconcile and to tell these stories, which you have to say were myths. Do you call them myths or do you call them hard facts? Well, they're certainly hard facts and myths all entangled with one another. And that's life itself. That's the way we proceed from day to day, by we all have versions of every story.
The Ukraine story now, if you look at the pro-Zelenskyy, pro-arm Ukraine story and so on, that's one narrative line. And then, if you look at Putin's story, which is not regarded as disreputable in many areas of the world... There are plenty of people who think that Putin has some justification. Modi of India, for example, is sticking with Putin and Putin's storyline, which has tinges of Peter the Great in it, and Stalin in it, and all sorts of ingredients. How do you weigh these things? And how do you report them? How, as a journalist, do you treat the Ukraine story and the American relationship and so on? It's an ongoing problem, and it is not an easy one to solve. And of course, one bears in mind always, Luce was a great entertainer. And we all know that a story is much better if it's vivid, with a storyline is full of vividness and color. And so you have to be careful about being seduced by that way of storytelling.
Josh King:
Lance, you tell us at the end of your book something that Saul Bellow wrote about keeping the wolf of insignificance from the door. And as I labored through a lot of your work from the Time vaults from 40 years ago, I marvel now at how, I think at about age 83, decades after my parents stopped doing the Times Crossword, you hold court on so many subjects, across hundreds of characters spanning two centuries, for an hour and a half with me. What's your secret for keeping sharp, and what plans do you have in the coming years to keep the wolf of insignificance from the door?
Lance Morrow:
Well, the full line from Saul Bellow, which I love, is, "We all need our memories. They help to keep the wolf of insignificance from the door." I never want to stop writing, and I want to keep writing as long as I can.
Josh King:
Do you get up early, with coffee? Do you stay up late? Do you take long walks to clear your head? I mean, you're still pumping it out, man.
Lance Morrow:
I get up at around 4:00 or 4:30, 5:00, have coffee, get at my desk, work for four or five hours. Four or five hours is a good day's writing. And I used to be able, when I was a kid, I could write for 14 or 15 hours if I had to for a cover story, something like that. But four hours is a good day's work, or five, but you just keep at it.
Josh King:
As Henry Luce would say, Salah.
Lance Morrow:
Salah. That's a biblical word that I end the book with, Salah, which occurs in the Old Testament 74 times, I think it is. And I think it means, basically, "Think about it."
Josh King:
Think about it. Well, we're thinking about it, Lance. Thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Lance Morrow:
Well, it is a great pleasure. I enjoyed it very much. Thanks a lot.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest, Lance Morrow, the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and author, most recently, of The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism, published by Encounter Books. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show or hearing from a guest like Lance Morrow, email us at [email protected] or tweet us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash, with engineering and editing from Ian Wolff. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
