Advocacy Journalism at Its Most Shameless

Abstract

In 1960, shortly before John F. Kennedy and his New Frontiersmen swept into the White House, the salty nightclub comedian Mort Sahl made an ill-advised bid for movie stardom. Sahl appeared as Corporal Crane in the Korean War drama All the Young Men, which featured Sidney Poitier as a black sergeant in command of a detachment of Marines near the 38th parallel. The film's celebration of how battlefield camaraderie could overcome racial prejudice was already shopworn as the Eisenhower era drew to a close, and audiences stayed away. One scene, however, generated some buzz: Sahl's deathbed monologue, in which he gasped, “I want to get straight with the Man Upstairs.” When Sahl, whose agnosticism comprised a major part of his public persona, was kidded about this line on the Jack Paar Show, he responded, “I was referring to Henry Luce.”1 The humorless, devout publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines would not have been amused by Sahl's wisecrack—he would have found it tasteless if not blasphemous—but Sahl had merely stated in jest what an army of historians later confirmed: for most Americans at midcentury, Henry Robinson Luce was“the Man Upstairs,” their principal source of information about world events, the propagandist who made America's competition with international communism both comprehensible and seemingly necessary. Luce, one biographer notes, “controlled access to millions of minds,” and while that may be an overstatement—Luce never managed to whip up much support for some of his more cherished projects, such as installing bomb shelters in the backyard of every American home—there is little doubt that he was the most successful mass communicator of his generation.2 No one wielded more media power in the 1940s and 1950s, and no one used his command of print, radio, and newsreel journalism more effectively to shape American public and official opinion. Assessing Luce's influence has become a cottage industry. Bestselling works of popular history by David Halberstam and W. A. Swanberg trace how Luce invented the newsmagazine and built a multimedia empire.3 More scholarly texts explore the ways in which Luce molded the attitudes Americans developed about a variety of foreign-policy initiatives, from aid to the Allies in World War II to the toppling of the Iranian government in the early years of the Cold War.4