Harry and Teddy

by Griffith, Thomas

In the depression year of 1938, a boy from Boston's Jewish ghetto graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with an itch to see China and a traveling fellowship to get him there. In China, Teddy White was hired by the young John Hersey to work for Time magazine and quickly established himself as a brilliant correspondent. Hersey was a "mishkid" - a child born of missionaries in China - and so was his boss, Henry Luce, the press lord who ran Time and Life magazines. Luce, always wary of friendships, was entranced by White when they met. A love of China and an admiration for its ruler, Chiang Kai-shek, bonded them in a turbulent friendship that lasted for decades. . Yet this bond was quickly severed when Teddy turned against Chiang Kai-shek, having discovered and reported the truth about a terrible famine in the north of China that no one - including Chiang - would admit was happening. Soon Teddy could not get his reporting published in Time. It was blocked by a new Luce favorite, the arrog