The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

The Spy Who Loved Us 183
to anyone. His advice was the gold standard of accuracy. An
could speak the same truth to everybody everywhere because
he thought that eventually this truth would be self-evident.
The logical end to the bloody war was a revolutionary victory for
an independent Vietnam. This was the truth An ardently believed,
even if it was not always the truth he revealed.
When An went to work for Time Inc. in 1964, one out of
every five Americans was reading a Luce publication, either
Time, the country’s original weekly news magazine, or its
sisters, Life and Fortune. Founded in 1923 by Henry Luce and
his Hotchkiss prep school classmate, Briton Hadden (who died
of a streptococcus infection in 1929), Time was part of a publishing
juggernaut. With a combined weekly circulation of fifty
million, Luce at the height of his power was America’s unacknowledged
minister of information. He wielded tremendous
influence in shaping American opinion and defining public
policy, and a job at one of Luce’s magazines was reserved for
journalists and photographers at the top of their game.
Nicknamed “Chink” because he had been born in China in
1898 to a Presbyterian minister, Luce developed a particular
style for writing the news, which was at once omniscient, breezy,
and splendidly self-assured. The world was divided with
Manichean precision into “free” and “unfree” zones, mainly
Communist, and it was America’s duty to lead the struggle
against this godless enterprise. Luce advanced his position
most famously in an editorial written in 1941 for Life called
“The American Century.” According to Luce, America’s political
interests and its values and beliefs would define the twentieth
century, and anyone opposing America would suffer the
consequences. There was a bellicosity, a love of sport and war,
in Luce’s magazines and whenever America got into a fight, it
was always by definition a good fight.
Until his death in 1967, Luce liked to wing around the world
touring the outer reaches of his empire, dining with ambassadors