Nation: HENRY R. LUCE: End of a Pilgrimage

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Ahead of the People. By coincidence, Bunyan's hymn was sung in St. Paul's Cathedral two years ago when the world mourned Winston Churchill's death. Indeed, in their wholly different worlds, the two men had much in common. Like Churchill, a longtime friend, Henry Luce had a profound sense of history that enabled him to foresee the great events of the age: World War II, the cold war, the decline of empire, the American Century, the civil rights revolution, the Great Society (a phrase used by Luce in 1939), the rise of socialism in Britain, the economics of abundance in the U.S.

Both men were endowed with immense physical energy, tenacious intellect, a dazzling range of knowledge—and vast self-confidence. Luce was widely damned for his forthright expression of views that more often than not eventually proved right. As he observed, "It is sometimes said that the people are ahead of the politicians; it can also be said that journalism ought to be ahead of the people. Otherwise, the people are ill-served."

Luce was often, and unfairly, called a chauvinist. Certainly his proudest boast was: civis Americanus sum. He had infinite idealism about his country and the conviction that in time its people would create in America "the first modern, technological, prosperous, humane and reverent civilization." Nonetheless, in prophesying the American Century or analyzing the American Proposition, Luce was by no means advocating a narrow nationalism. He believed, on the contrary, that democracy is not a political system alone but a moral and spiritual undertaking based on universal principles and relevant to all mankind. "If men are not equal everywhere," he wrote recently, "there is no special magic which makes them equal in America."

Idea of Excellence. Henry Luce spoke not of America's manifest destiny but of its "manifest duty." Almost a year before Pearl Harbor, he foresaw the day when the U.S. would be "the Good Samaritan of the entire world," sending its food, its technicians and its educators to every corner of the earth "as a free gift." "We have thought," he said in 1963, "and we think, that there is a world of meaning still to be realized from the principles which gave this country birth. A world of meaning for us and, equally, a wealth of meaning for the world."

In the pages of his magazines and in his own life, Luce relished the material benefits of American prosperity. Yet he always expected more of his country. America, he declared in a searing speech in 1942, must not be "a mere use and convenience for our appetites." A Bull Moose Republican, he nevertheless foreshadowed the New Frontier and the Great Society. He demanded in 1959: "Do you want a cheap, shallow, provincial America? Or do you want an America where the ideal of excellence is at home?"

Personally and publicly, Luce extolled the Roman ideal of virtue as dedication to social and civic duty. "The American daydream," he noted, "has ended—or at least we are seeing the end of the American lead-pipe cinch." In 1962, he exhorted a Chicago audience: "Everything we know, from the atom to the stars, calls us to leave our comfortable habitations which no longer comfort us, and to strike forth on a pilgrimage to a new civilization."