TIME at 60:

The atom was still unsplit. So were most marriages. Movies were silent, television existed only in the laboratory, and a "byte," however you spelled it, had to do with food, not information. Freud was becoming an unsettling household word, although the U.S. was not yet his colony. Hitler was still widely regarded as a hysterical Munich beer-hall brawler who could have benefited from Freud's treatment. In headlines "holocaust" was only a word for a large fire. Japan's chief export was raw silk. The jet set did not yet exist; its precursor, the smart set, took a week to cross the Atlantic. The juxtaposition of "man" and "moon" was strictly fantasy.

That was the world in which TIME was born.

It was a scrawny excuse for a magazine, 32 pages, with pictures looking, according to one wit, as if they had been engraved on pieces of bread, the red border of the cover still far in the future. Even the name had been a problem. Facts was the early working title. There had been other suggestions--Briefs, Hours, Destiny, Chance. The editorial staff fitted easily into three taxis to go to the printing plant. There, in an all-night siege "amid torn newspapers, fried-egg sandwiches and smudged proof sheets," according to a later account, the first issue was put to bed. And yet when the 24-year-old Henry Luce, co-founder of the magazine with Briton Hadden, looked at the result the next afternoon, he was pleasantly surprised: "It was quite good. Somehow it all held together."

Not everyone agreed with Luce's estimate. Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, called the idea of condensing news "disgusting and disgraceful." But Franklin D. Roosevelt praised the new creation, and so did Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. At any rate, TIME caught on, and it became part of the American and world scene, its presence reaffirmed in humor, fiction and legend. Its early style with its inverted prose and piled-up adjectives was endlessly spoofed, notably in a parody by Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker ("Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind)."

In 1940 a William Saroyan play, Love's Old Sweet Song, offered a character who sold TIME subscriptions and reinforced his pitch by reciting the euphonious glories of the magazine's masthead ("Carlton J. Balliett Jr., Robert Cantwell, Laird S. Goldsborough . . ."). In 1977 an angry protest novel by Robert Coover, The Public Burning, described TIME, ironically, as the national poet laureate. In a current Broadway musical, My One and Only, the hero dreams of being on the cover of TIME. In a recent song Billy Joel is more ambiguous:

All your life

All your life

Is Time Magazine.

I read it too

What does it mean ?

One thing it means is that not many institutions launched 60 years ago have survived, thrived and become part of folklore years ago have survived, thrived and become part of folklore. Without undue self-congratulation, and with much gratitude to our readers, we are proud that TIME did. We like to think that it happened, in part, because America and TIME developed and grew up together.

Sixty years ago, the U.S. was still provincial. It was a country of vast, lonely spaces and rural communities where people read magazines like the Saturday Evening Post by kerosene lamplight. The outside world was remote. America's role in World War I had destroyed the distance, but that was not yet clear. If the world was considered at all, it seemed somewhat menacing--especially the new Communist regime in Russia, which was seen as a fragile but ominous experiment (TIME wrote: "The czarist oligarchy has given way to proletarian absolutism"). Even so, the globe still appeared relatively ordered, like a neatly colored 19th century map, and it seemed that its parts could be kept in place.

Foreign countries were often quaint places to TIME, and the s magazine made rather pat generalizations about peoples and races ("Northumbrians are easily drastic"). But TIME was international-minded from the start. It grew much more so as the old maps went mad and the fate of America became intertwined with distant places hitherto unknown and still unpronounceable. Covering the world beyond America is today one of TIME'S most important tasks.

At home, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, the country went on "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." People laughed a lot but without bitterness. Underneath I its frivolity the country remained devout about the American verities. The American system was hardly questioned, and the phrase "God's country" could still be used unblushingly.

Similarly, TIME'S tone was flip and irreverent, but the magazine combined with this a certain solemnity about American--and Western--values. These included self-reliance, success and salvation through progress. TIME certainly did not accept T.S. Eliot's metaphor for modern civilization: a review of The Waste Land in the first issue suggested that the poem might be a hoax.

Today we like to think that some of the old irreverence is still there, though the flipness and the elaborate convolutions of the early "TIME style" are long gone. As for American and Western values, TIME very consciously maintains its faith in them. We believe in freedom, including freedom of conscience and enterprise; in democracy, however imperfect; in a strong and beneficial American role in the world, however difficult.

In 1963, in a 40th anniversary greeting, President John Kennedy thought he detected in a maturing TIME "an occasional hint of fallibility." Well, yes. But TIME still knows what it knows. We are still in the business of making judgments and we still do not claim objectivity, which from the start we considered impossible and undesirable. Instead we aim for fairness and balance. Since the introduction of bylines in 1970 (writers had labored anonymously before), many individual voices have been heard in TIME. Even so, we maintain a broad consistency of policy and beliefs. But we assert these beliefs with less evangelical fervor than was sometimes the case in the past. The change does not so much reflect an American crisis of faith--though that crisis is real--as indicate the world's growing diversity and complexity.

Sixty years ago, the universe of knowledge, it appeared, was still manageable; it could be comprehended through short cuts, and if that was impossible, then through hard, serious effort. TIME fitted that perception. It was a short cut, a gadget of knowledge. But it was also more. The very invention of the newsmagazine--with its orderly rubrics, its organization of information--symbolized the conviction that people could grasp the world and make sense of it. TIME was didactic. Parentheses were filled with statistics about height, weight, area, population. "Learned footnotes" sprouted at the bottoms of pages. But at the start, articles were short, often mere "items," snippets and extracts from other publications. Brevity and simplification were the goals. These became increasingly difficult to achieve. The past 60 years have seen an almost continuous explosion of knowledge--which, of course, began with the Enlightenment but picked up dizzying speed. The intellectual universe became ever harder for ordinary people, inharder for ordinary people, indeed even for specialists, to master. At the same time, the importance of specialized knowledge became dramatically clear as the arcana of science, technology, law, economics spread through daily life. TIME had to respond. Gradually, stories became longer, more thorough, more searching.

In other ways, too, TIME changed along with American society. The early TIME stood on ceremony, or its own version of it. People did not simply die--"Death, as it must to all men, came to" them. The magazine liked to spell out middle names and give full titles. As America at large became less formal, TIME gradually abandoned much of its etiquette.

The basic form of TIME journalism was the narrative--chronological narrative when possible. And so it remains. But increasingly, exposition and analysis had to supplement narration. This fact reflects a larger reality. America is an epic of action, but more and more, action is stymied by complexity or conflict. In a sense, America today is less a "story" than an argument.

TIME always practiced "personality journalism" and still does. But events made it ever harder to uphold Carlyle's dictum that history is but the biography of great men. At 60, we still believe in the power of men and women to shape their fate, but TIME is less likely than it used to be to explain events through people; roughly half of its covers are about trends and events rather than individuals.

Moreover, the almost obligatory human details of the early years, when stories might begin with the color of the President's necktie, have to some extent been pre-empted by TV. This fact, too, has a larger significance. In politics and elsewhere, TV has brought about a new conflict between appearance and reality, between "image" and substance. TIME must try, as must all print journalism, to find the substance behind the image.

Occasionally, the enormity of these past 60 years has exploded the familiar framework of TIME. New headings forced themselves into the magazine to accommodate War or the Atom or Space, and the physical appearance of the magazine changed dramatically. Yet the structure always reasserted and reassembled itself, the department structure that is the organizing principle and essence of TIME. It is a form that not long ago some people proclaimed obsolete in a world of instant and random electronic communications. Yet in today's chaotic world a sense of order and organization seems more useful than ever.

Before some of the events of these past 60 years, the only proper human reaction might have been an awed silence. How else to respond to the concentration camps? To man's escape from the earth's orbit? To nuclear destruction? Even perhaps to the computer? Yet journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air. TIME has spoken once a week for 60 years and, in so doing, has often been wrong--but, we hope, more often right.

This special issue offers a sampling of what TIME said during these amazing decades. Much had to be left out, and arbitrarily--just as much has to be left out in any weekly edition of TIME. For these omissions there is no real apology, except to say that what we have tried to create is not what we have tried to create is not a comprehensive record, but a sense of the past.

What we present in this issue is not history, but points to it. America has always been impatient with history, and has tried to ignore it or escape it. "History is bunk," said Henry Ford. The prophets of the counterculture agreed with that, as they declared history "not relevant." Easy enough to dismiss this as know-nothing arrogance. Yet in their own way, the Pilgrims and the founding fathers also sought to rise above history--that is, above the customary fate of other nations--firmly believing that America was a new start, a new order under the heavens.

In the past six decades, America was forced to make history, as well as submit to it. America was lifted by it, and humbled by it. Above all, America was forced to face it.

And in facing it, America, it is often said, has discovered limits. The country, however, remains so large, so strong and so surprising that the word "limits" still does not quite apply. "Choices" is perhaps more accurate. America is learning that it cannot have everything at once. It cannot have peace without power. It cannot have power without cost (and part of the cost is often not being loved by others). It cannot afford to use force without sophistication and diplomacy. It cannot have the benefits of competition without really competing in the world, and that means the loss of much ease. It cannot have vast individual liberties without sacrificing order. In short, it cannot have freedom--more freedom than any other country in the world--without pain.

As the Essay beginning on page 24 details, two of the great themes of the past 60 years have been the excesses of freedom and the rediscovery of the need for restraint. In trying to define restraint, in trying to make the many choices before America, the country conspicuously lacks a consensus and a principle of authority. Journalism cannot supply these. But it can at least attempt to provide the information needed for a renewal of consensus, perhaps even a reconstitution of authority. TIME hopes to continue playing a part in that task. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.