HARRY AND TEDDY

An insider's affectionate and engaging appraisal of a world- class publisher's love/hate relationship with an independent-minded correspondent. As a longtime editor at Time and Life magazines, Griffith worked closely with both Henry R. Luce (the parent company's co- founder) and roving reporter Theodore H. White. He makes fine use of this familiarity in probing the ties that bound these two talented but difficult men. They first met during the spring of 1941 in war-torn China, where White (who escaped Boston's Jewish ghetto to earn a degree in Asian studies, summa cum laude, from Harvard) had been scrambling for freelance assignments before being recruited as a Time stringer by John Hersey. For Luce, born to Presbyterian missionaries in Tengchow in 1898, the trip was a sentimental journey. While the ultraconservative ``mishkid'' (missionary kid) and the instinctively liberal grandson of an Eastern European rabbi were drawn together by a mutual love of China, it was the postWW II conquest of this ancient land by Communist forces that drove them apart. In mid-1946 White quit or was nudged out of his job at Time shortly after coauthoring Thunder Out of China, a bestseller that had unkind words for Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and other Luce icons. The odd couple's friendship nonetheless survived the convulsive parting and was renewed, paradoxically perhaps, at the height of the McCarthy era. They remained close until Luce's death early in 1967. White who went on to write The Making of the President 1960 and other bestsellers died at 71 in 1986. Among the many portrayals of luminaries and honchos are provocative perspectives on Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Archibald MacLeish, and Vinegar Joe Stilwell. Absorbing, informative recollections of two men who helped shape contemporary perceptions of historic events. (8 pages photos, not seen)