The Press: Posthumous Portrait

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In the basement bar of the Hotel Scribe, Parisian headquarters for the Allied press corps during World War II, TIME & LIFE Correspondent Noel F. Busch met another TIME correspondent. A newcomer, hired overseas, he had never even seen his home office and he was curious about it. How, he asked Busch over a drink, had TIME ever begun, anyway?

"Well," began Correspondent Busch, "it seems that Harry Luce and Briton Hadden . . ."

"Wait," said his companion, "I've heard about Luce, but who was Briton Hadden?"

This week, in Briton Hadden: A Biography of the Co-Founder of TIME (236 pp.,Farrar, Straus, $3), Busch, a first cousin of Hadden and now a LIFE senior writer, tells what manner of man Brit Hadden was. The informal portrait, lit with humor, shows a husky, mustached young man with intense grey eyes, enormous curiosity and vitality, and a huge capacity for work, play and horseplay. In his life & time (and the extravagant, turbulent '20s were all the time he had) his impact on U.S. journalism was as forceful as any man's.

So Little Time. Almost from his birth in Brooklyn, Feb. 18, 1898, Hadden's career as an editorial prodigy progressed, according to Busch, "with the speed and directness of an arrow." As a moppet he entertained his family with such epic poems as The Mouse's Party, which ran to 142 stanzas because its author was out to outdo The Ancient Mariner. At Brooklyn's Polytechnic Prep, he put out a handwritten gossip sheet called The Daily Glonk. But he did not really want to be an editor; he yearned to be another Ty Cobb. Though an inept ballplayer, Hadden modeled his batting style and his energetic walking style after his hero, and affected a side-of-the-mouth Brooklyn accent that he thought suitable for ballplayers. Elected editor of the weekly Record at Hotchkiss School, he wistfully wrote his mother: "I'd rather get one 'H' [in baseball] than be editor of all the papers in the world."

At Hotchkiss the precocious editor found a rival to test his hotly competitive nature; in print, he was soon pummeling the writings of Henry Robinson Luce, editor of the Hotchkiss Literary Monthly. Their friendly competition turned to collaboration on the Yale Daily News, where Hadden was chairman and Luce managing editor. On graduation their classmates picked Hadden as "most likely to succeed" and Luce as "most brilliant" of their class ('20).

At Yale, and as young artillery lieutenants at Camp Jackson in World War I, they dreamed and schemed about a paper or magazine that would make the world better informed about what it was doing. "People talk too much about things they don't know," Hadden would complain. What was needed, they agreed, was a medium that would organize the chaotic flow of news so that even a man from Mars could understand it. After graduation from Yale, they went their separate ways for seasoning. Luce went to Oxford and then to a reporter's job on the Chicago Daily News, and Hadden decided to work on the old New York World for a year. When Editor Herbert Bayard Swope tried to refuse him a job, Hadden said sternly: "Mr. Swope, you're interfering with my destiny." He went to work on the World's city staff.