The clattering sound of typewriters—“slapsplapslap…slap…slapslap….slapslap…ching!”—can be heard in veteran Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow’s new book. But the more insistent sound in this slim volume is the thud, thud, thud of name dropping. If you were born in this century, you might need a scorecard to know who the players are.
To be fair, Morrow describes himself as a kind of Zelig. He has known—or at least encountered, read, or reported on—a great many powerful people and influential writers. Just a partial list of the major and minor characters who make an appearance in The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism, includes: Time publisher and editor Henry Luce, his glamorous and accomplished second wife Clare Boothe Luce, Franklin D. Roosevelt, JFK (a careless PT boat skipper), Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Elie Wiesel, Joe DiMaggio, Norman Mailer, Mary McGrory, Robert Caro, Alger Hiss, Joseph McCarthy, William F. Buckley Jr., Carl Bernstein, Henry Kissinger, New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal, Allen Ginsberg (Morrow “detested” his poetry), and an interminably rambling Mikhail Gorbachev.
I could go on; Morrow certainly does. Thucydides and Herodotus are also summoned on stage as archetypal journalists, indispensable “storytellers,” and presumably a reminder of the value of a good pre–Vatican II Jesuit education. Morrow attended Gonzaga College High School in Washington D.C. before Harvard. He graduated from Gonzaga two years after the tribal Catholic brawler Pat Buchanan. In addition to teaching Latin and Greek, the “Jebbies” did not hesitate to discipline unruly students with a biblical rod of iron, or a fist. It was a different time. Much of The Noise of Typewriters is also, as Morrow’s subtitle suggests, about “a different time.”
After college and a brief stint at the Washington Evening Star, where he worked with columnist Mary McGrory as well as Carl Bernstein of All the President’s Men fame, Morrow joined Time in 1965. He stayed for forty years, and his new book is an apologia for that magazine’s partisan journalism in defense of capitalism, liberal democracy, anti-communism, the Republican Party, and middle-class American values. Morrow laments the loss of the social and cultural consensus of the 1940s and ’50s, an era Time’s publisher evangelically named “The American Century.” The emergence of a prosperous and seemingly homogeneous American middle class was celebrated and to some extent shaped by “Harry” Luce’s artful and wildly successful magazines, which included Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, as well as Time. (Morrow neglects to mention that Life, once the most popular magazine in America, was as much Clare Boothe Luce’s idea as Harry’s.)
Luce’s magazine empire made him a fortune, placing him at the center of cultural and political power. Time embraced a “great man” approach to journalism, exemplified by the magazine’s much-anticipated and debated “Man of the Year” issue. Luce made a point of almost always putting a person on the cover of Time. The magazine’s profiles and trend issues helped readers make sense of events as well as their own lives and aspirations. That, Morrow believes, is what good journalism should do. Journalists are unavoidably storytellers and mythmakers. “Legends endure. Legends are memorable. Everything vanishes into the country of myth,” Morrow writes.
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