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out of some combination of principle and self-interest. Most of all, however, the story demonstrates Harry’s desire to portray himself as a person of stature and authority, admired by his peers if at times resented by them for his talents, able quietly to curb their own excesses and steer them in the right direction. He had quelled a rebellion against Hadden at the
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, he claimed, to ensure a smooth transition. He had turned down the chairmanship at the
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to avoid a damaging controversy, and had dictated the choice of a responsible alternative. In this way he turned his liabilities into strengths, his failures into triumphs.
    In spite of the elements of self-deception that lurk in these descriptions, Harry was in many ways unsparing in his assessment of himself. He knew that despite his prodigious intellectual talents, despite his formidable abilities as a writer and editor, he was somehow lacking in social skills—able to attract the respect but not usually the genuine affection of those around him. It was a failing that was particularly visible to him because it stood in such contrast to the great strength of his friend and rival. Hadden was a much less gifted scholar than Harry and perhaps no more talented as a journalist, but he used his charismatic affability to win genuinely loyal friends and admirers. Harry was often intimidating in his unrelenting gravity. Brit, by contrast, was relaxed, even somewhat flippant, gently derisive of those who seemed to him too serious. “Watch out, Harry, or you’ll drop the college,” Hadden once shouted mockingly at Luce, who was walking with grim purpose across a Yale quad. Harry was aware of this difference and at times was almost morbid in his descriptions of his tangled relations with his peers. In the anguished aftermath of the
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election, for example, he described his relationships with Hadden in painfully cautious language: “I have the greatest admiration and affection for Brit, which in some measure at least, is reciprocated.” 29
    That these two close friends and colleagues were also very different from one another was not lost on their friends and classmates. They were almost constantly together, and they were also often at odds. “You never knew whether they were ready to fight or agree,” one of their classmates later recalled. Dwight Macdonald, who observed Hadden and Luce as a young Time Inc. writer in the late 1920s, described in retrospect the contrasts in their great friendship and rivalry:
    Luce/Hadden: moral/amoral, pious/worldly, respectable/raffish, bourgeois/bohemian, introvert/extrovert, somber/convivial,reliable/unpredictable, slow/quick, dog/cat, tame/wild, efficient/ brilliant, decent/charming, Puritanical/hedonistic, naive/cynical, Victorian/ 18th Century.
    Almost all of these comparisons, in Macdonald’s view at least, favored Hadden. Having been on the losing end of most of their competitions, and knowing how much more successful Brit was in making friends and securing allies, Harry almost surely sensed, but never admitted, that he was to some extent the junior partner of their collaborations. But no one could doubt the bond between them, a closeness greater than either man ever experienced with anyone else outside his own family. 30
    Harry sometimes gave himself less credit than he deserved in his own comparisons between himself and Hadden (and many of his other friends). He was especially different from them in his rejection of the cynicism and detachment that would become hallmarks of his generation’s intellectual elite, which were already visible in the culture of the Yale of his time. Harry was unapologetically a man of conviction, principle, and faith; and while he understood the social cost of his seriousness and tried at times to mute it, he was far too preoccupied with the moral basis of his actions to disguise his real self for very long. Running through his own commentary on his triumphs and setbacks, his elation and his