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After he formally ascended to the higher altitude of editor-in-chief in 1944, Luce continued to monitor major stories, reading them in advance before they appeared in the magazine. Following publication, he gave each edition of TIME a thorough and sometimes brutal cover-to-cover read, marking each story with words of criticism or praise. Hedley Donovan, the Minnesota-born Time Inc. veteran and former FORTUNE managing editor who succeeded Luce as editor-in-chief in 1964, followed a similar practice. So, with variations, have his successors Henry Grunwald, Jason McManus and Norman Pearlstine.
It was a grueling process of editorial refinement that either improved and sharpened the story at each successive stage, or distorted it as it passed from hand to hand and mind to mind. Sometimes correspondents in the field and editors in New York took exactly opposite views about whether a story had gone from bad to good or good to bad in the editorial alchemy.
During Vietnam, a rift over editorial policy--the magazine's Saigon bureau's quarreling with the New York office's optimism about the war--eventually brought about a significant procedural change at TIME. Edited stories were thenceforth wired back to the reporting correspondents, whose comments and corrections were factored in before the stories went to press.
In the Luce tradition, however, TIME remained very much an editor's magazine. While researchers--and as of the '70s, correspondents--were the guardians of the magazine's factuality, the managing editor retained enormous authority through the selection of stories and, as TIME gradually introduced more personal opinion through bylined articles, the choice of writers.
The most public demonstration of editorial authority has been the annual selection of TIME's Man of the Year, a brilliant stroke of news packaging that Luce and Hadden invented during a no-news week late in 1927. Having neglected to put Charles A. Lindbergh on the cover the previous May, when he had made his famous solo flight, they concocted the Man of the Year idea to justify putting him on at year's end. The choice thereafter became a national guessing game, popular with advertisers but also a serious intellectual drill--a way to encourage Americans to think about the world, and the year just past, in the same ruthlessly appraising way Luce did.
Until the mid-'60s, the vast majority of TIME covers (99%) depicted people--Presidents, dictators, industrialists, generals, scientists, artists, writers, saints, revolutionaries--all in keeping with Luce's enthusiasm for flesh-and-blood personalities and his general sympathy with Carlyle's idea that great men cause great events. But with the '60s' challenge to authority in almost every American institution, from the White House to the family, and the nation's effort to redefine its idea of social justice, TIME began to examine issues and ideas as often as it did personalities. The '60s' work of demystification tended to subvert the heroic or idealizing assumptions that TIME sometimes brought to its cover subjects--an editorial habit of aggrandizement. The Ur issue, and in a way the ultimate subversion of an authority figure, appeared on the cover on April 8, 1966. With a starkness that seemed daring, even blasphemous, at the time, the cover asked, IS GOD DEAD?