一电子质量为m,电荷为e:[2010.01.07] American dreamer 美国追梦人 - 外刊精读 - ...

AT 14, though not later in life, Henry Robinson Luce was a great supporter of a revolution, the Chinese revolution of 1912. He wrote to a friend who was visiting Luce’s missionary parents in China, welcoming him to “a great land, peopled by a great nation, endowed with a great past, overshadowed by a greater future.” It was, he added, “the greatest and most stupendous Reformation in all history.”

早在14岁的时候，亨利?鲁斯就大力支持中国的辛亥革命。鲁斯的父母在中国当传教士，他写信给一位看望父母的朋友，欢迎他到“这片广阔的土地，这里屹立着一个大国，拥有伟大的历史，还有更伟大的未来。”他还写道，“这是历史上最伟大惊人的革命”。

Luce achieved much in his life. By sheer effort he won the glittering prizes at Yale, where he, a poor scholarship boy and undistinguished at games, made Skull and Bones, the secret society that was the nursery of the American establishment. He was helped through university by the wealthy widow of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the combine harvester, who had been persuaded by father Luce to stump up for his China mission.

鲁斯毕生成就斐然。通过艰苦努力，他赢得了耶鲁的辉煌奖励，这个拿奖学金的穷孩子在运动方面并不出色，加入了骷髅会，这个秘密社团是美国权贵阶层的摇篮。联合收割机的发明者麦考密克的富有遗孀帮助他读完了大学，正是她经鲁斯的父亲劝说资助他去中国传教。

With his more flashily gifted Yale chum, Brit Hadden, he founded Time magazine. After Hadden’s early death Luce went on to become the autocratic and fabulously wealthy boss of Time Inc, publisher of Time, Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated. He persuaded President Eisenhower that Mrs Clare Boothe Luce, his talented, neurotic wife, should be posted to Rome as the American ambassador. (He made, they both said, "an extraordinarily good ambassador's wife". )

他和才华横溢的耶鲁好友布里特?哈登一起创办了《时代》杂志。哈登英年早逝后，鲁斯继续前进，成为时代公司富可敌国的老板，出版《时代》、《财富》、《生活》和《体育画报》。他曾劝说艾森豪威尔总统，让自己既有才能又神经过敏的妻子克莱尔?布斯?鲁斯任美国驻意大利大使（大家说，鲁斯塑造了“一位非常出色的大使妻子”）。

Luce tried, with little success, to play kingmaker in presidential politics. In 1940 Time editors winced as he turned the magazine into a campaign puff for Wendell Willkie, and in 1948 Time was “as wrong as everyone else” in its confidence that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman, whom Luce called “a vulgar little Babbitt”. He hated Roosevelt.

鲁斯努力主宰历届美国总统大选，均告失败。1940年，他把《时代》杂志变成了吹捧温德尔?威尔基的工具，编辑们避之不及；1948年，《时代》“像别人一样犯了错”，竟然相信托马斯?杜威会击败哈里?杜鲁门，鲁斯把杜鲁门叫做“粗俗的小市侩”。他还讨厌罗斯福。

Where Luce was not wrong was in his famous essay, published in February 1941, that this would be “an American Century”. His point was not imperial, but idealistic, even chiliastic. It was America’s time, he wrote, “to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.”

有一点鲁斯没有说错，他于1941年发表的著名文章中写道，将迎来“美国世纪”。他的观点并不傲慢，但是充满理想，甚至还要天真。他写道，这是美国的时代，“美国作为强国在全世界传播理想，完成神秘的工作，把人类生活从野兽提高到赞美诗里仅次于天使的水准。”

Luce soon forgot the few words of Mandarin he learned from his amah or nanny, but never did he forget his beloved China, the country he had seen through the eyes of a missionary’s child in an impoverished province. He worshipped Chiang Kai-shek, corrupt dictator and historic loser. To an imaginary China, he dedicated his life.

鲁斯很快忘记了从奶妈那里学来的几个中文词，但是他从未忘记过挚爱的中国，他用贫困省份传教士儿子的眼光理解这个国家的特点。他崇拜腐败独裁、一败涂地的蒋介石。他把一生都献给一个假象的中国。

In this superb biography Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian, has told the curiously depressing story of a brilliant man who got everything wrong, including so many of the things that mattered most to him. Mr Brinkley has an eye for both the telling detail and the broad sweep of Luce’s role as the man who saw the need for a national news magazine and foresaw the American century.

哥伦比亚大学的历史学家阿兰?布林克里写下了这本出色的传纪，讲述这个显赫人物出奇压抑的故事，主人公样样都错，包括很多至关重要的东西。布林克里先生既关注细节又注重全面，描写了鲁斯其人发现了全国性新闻杂志的需求，预见到美国世纪的到来。

Time style, with its heroic epithets and inverted sentences (memorably parodied in a New Yorker profile by Wolcott Gibbs, with its famous last line, “where it all will end, knows God”) was the legacy of Luce’s and Hadden’s classical education at Yale. Luce tried to use his magazines to convert Americans to his ideas. He was largely frustrated by his editors, who ignored his political directives. Like Lord Beaverbrook (with whose granddaughter, Jeanne Campbell, Luce had the last serious love affair of his life), he liked left-wing writers, among them Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald and Daniel Bell, who despised his conservatism.

以评价人物和倒装句著称的《时代》风格（沃尔考特?吉布斯在《纽约客》杂志上的戏仿令人难忘，还有著名的结束语“天知道到哪儿是个头。”）是鲁斯和哈登在耶鲁大学接受的古典教育的遗存。鲁斯手下的编辑忽视他的政治倾向，让他大为沮丧。例如比佛布鲁克爵士（他的孙女让娜?坎贝尔是鲁斯一生中最后的风流韵事），他喜欢阿奇博尔德?麦克利时、德怀特?麦克唐纳德和丹尼尔?贝尔等右翼作家，他们却鄙视鲁斯的保守主义。

Mr Brinkley pleads that Luce was less “fevered” than other cold warriors, his attitude to domestic communism “more nuanced”. He did call for “the liberation of China” and a “rollback of the Iron Curtain with tactical atomic weapons”, and once speculated about “plastering Russia with 500 (or 1,000) A bombs”. He was a passionate believer in the superior material culture and the “national purpose” of America. He died of a massive heart attack in 1967, just as his crusade against communism in Asia was stumbling towards its own death in Vietnam.

布林克里认为，鲁斯没有其他冷战分子那么“狂热”，他对国内共产主义的态度“更微妙”。他的确提倡“解放中国”，“用战术核武器拉下铁幕”，一度设想“以500枚（或1000枚）炸弹打击俄罗斯”。他是美国优越物质文化和“国家目的”的狂热信徒。1967年，他死于严重的心脏病，正值打击亚洲共产主义的运动在越南渐渐走向灭亡。