Nation: HENRY R. LUCE: End of a Pilgrimage

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"As a journalist," he once said, "I am — in command of a small sector in the very front trenches of this battle for freedom." For Henry Robinson Luce, the battle ended last week. On the 44th anniversary of TIME's first issue, America's greatest maker of magazines died in Phoenix of a coronary occlusion. He was 68.

Between the founding of TIME and the day that its 2,295th issue appeared on the newsstands, Henry Luce built the world's largest, most influential publishing enterprise.* "The magazines that bear his stamp," said Lyndon Johnson last week, "are an authentic part of life in America." As hundreds of tributes from the U.S. and foreign countries attested, the publications that Luce created and nurtured have also become a valued and trusted voice of America throughout the free world.

A significant part of Henry Luce's genius was his ability to bring together talented people of widely varying backgrounds and points of view to work in concert. Though he was a courtly and compassionate man, Luce also had the magisterial presence of a Koussevitzky. Tall, erect, with clear blue eyes that could rake a room like a laser beam—or twinkle as merrily as Mr. Pickwick's —he talked with a staccato concentration of word and thought that one associate described as "jammed machinegun" style. And, as his pastor, Dr. David H. C. Read, noted last week, "he listened too—with an intensity you could almost hear."

Whether listening or questioning—usually the latter—Luce, a classical scholar at Yale, had a Socratic approach to ideas and issues. He was one of the most quotable men of his era (see boxes on following pages) but, perhaps because of the nature of his position, was seldom quoted. Though he was often condemned by the unknowing as dogmatic and opinionated—which he could be—his was generally the most open and inquiring of minds. Good journalists, he said, are "vessels of truth." He tended on the whole to take an optimistic view of history. Quoting Disraeli's proposition, "Is man an ape or an angel?", he plumped, with Disraeli, for the angels' side.

Streams of Memos. Luce formally retired as Editor in Chief of Time Inc. in 1964. Nonetheless, he had neither the temperament nor the inclination to abandon his lifelong interest in the affairs of America, the world—and his magazines. On frequent trips around the U.S. and abroad, he eagerly quizzed TIME correspondents about the stories they were working on, made frequent speeches, questioned statesmen and cab drivers with equal pertinacity, meanwhile keeping up a steady flow of memos to his editors in New York—the last of which arrived a few hours after his death.

After accompanying his wife on a busy two-day visit to San Francisco, where Clare Boothe Luce gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club, Harry Luce spent a normal Saturday at their home in Phoenix. He played nine holes of golf, read the papers, attended to some business, and entertained friends at lunch and cocktails before joining a dinner party at the Arizona Biltmore.