Columbia Journalism Review’s Henry Luce Foundation-Boeing Link-Pt.2

In the late 1970s, The Henry Luce Foundation (whose board of directors includes a former Vice President of Global Law Affairs and General Counsel of Boeing, as well as, since November 2023, Freedom House Trustee and Columbia Journalism Review [CJR] Executive Editor Sewell Chan) owned 6.7 percent of the 20th-century media conglomerate, Time Inc., which, like The Henry Luce Foundation, had been set up by Time magazine founder and owner Henry Luce, who had died in 1967. And in the late 1970s, 22 percent of Time Inc.’s stock was still then owned by Luce's family or their foundations, around that time.

In addition, at the time of Henry Luce’s death in February 1967, the Time Inc. stock which Luce owned was then worth about $109 million [equal to around $1 billion in 2024 U.S. dollars] and yielded him a yearly dividend of more than $2.4 million [equal to around $22.6 million in 2024 U.S. dollars], according to The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History Of A Changing Enterprise 1960-1989 book by Curtis Prendergast.

The same book also noted that $19 million [equal to around $179 million in 2024 U.S. dollars] worth of Henry Luce’s Time Inc. stock was then left to his wife, former GOP Congressional Representative and writer Claire Booth Luce, $15 million [equal to around $141 million in 2024 U.S. dollars] worth of Luce’s Time Inc. stock was then left to his two sons, and 13 percent of Luce’s Time Inc. stock had been then left to The Henry Luce Foundation in 1967.

According to the website of the CJR magazine and Boeing historically-interlocked Henry Luce Foundation:

“The certificate of incorporation for The Henry Luce Foundation was filed in the office of New York’s Secretary of State on December 24, 1936…The original board comprised members of Henry R. Luce’s family and colleagues at Time Inc…At Henry R. Luce’s death in 1967, the foundation became a major beneficiary of his estate...Following the death of Henry R. Luce’s widow, Clare Boothe Luce, in 1987, the foundation received a bequest totaling over $60 million [equal to around $166 million in 2024 U.S. dollars]...Henry Luce III (called Hank), the son of the founder…led the foundation for 44 years and ensured its continuity by…overseeing the growth of its assets…”

And by the 21st-century, according to its Form 990 financial filing for 2022, the value of The Henry Luce Foundation (whose board of directors co-chair since 2022 has been the former Vice President of Global Law Affairs and General Counsel of the Boeing firm, which still sold weapons to the IDF in the 21st-century) exceeded $1 billion in 2022.

In addition, from the over hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of corporate stock and U.S. government bonds The Henry Luce Foundation then owned (and paid the Virginia-based Investure money management firm over $3.7 million in 2022 to manage for it), the “non-profit” Henry R. Luce Foundation obtained a net investment income from dividends and interests from securities of over $48.8 million in 2022.

But In his 1979 -published book, The Powers That Be, the now-deceased former New York Times journalist David Halberstam characterized the role that Time magazine--of the Time Inc. media conglomerate which The Henry Luce Foundation later partially owned—historically played in generating support in the 1960s, for the then-escalating 1960s U.S. military intervention in Vietnam:

“Throughout the Vietnam War, Time did much of the heavy-duty advocacy through the Press section, attacking anyone critical of the war, praising anyone who liked it, and it was frequently and often brutally employed.”

And “in the spring of 1963,” according to David Talbot’s 2015-published book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the C.I.A., and the Rise of America’s Secret Government:

“JFK…invited the Luces to lunch at the White House…When the press lord launched into a lengthy diatribe on Cuba, demanding that Kennedy invade the island, the president suggested that Luce was a `warmonger’…Shortly afterward, Luce convened a …war council of his top editors at Time-Life, where he declared that if the Kennedy administration was not bold enough to overthrow Castro, his corporation would take on the task. Luce and his wife were already funding raids on Cuba, with the quiet support of the C.I.A.. Now Luce would escalate his crusade against the Castro regime, in direct defiance of Kennedy…Luce’s Life magazine…played a key role in the assassination cover-up by buying the Zapruder film and locking it away in the company vault…”

Until being recently appointed as the new President and CEO of the Upper West Side’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 2024, a former Acting Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Policy in the Democratic Obama administration’s Homeland Security Department, a former Bennington College president and (like CJR’s executive editor) a current Council on Foreign Relations member, named Mariko Silver (the daughter of a former Rockefeller Foundation Senior Executive and later Democratic Obama administration National Endowment for the Arts Chairperson), was the Henry Luce Foundation president and CEO between 2019 and September 2024.

And in 2022 the “non-profit” Henry Luce Foundation paid former Homeland Security Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Policy Silver a total annual compensation of $918,844 for then being the president and CEO of the Luce Foundation, on whose board of directors Columbia Journalism Review’s executive editor sits next to a former Boeing Vice-President for Global Law Affairs, according to the Form 990 financial filing for 2022 of The Henry Luce Foundation.

Yet according to a Wikipedia entry, “during her time at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security with Obama administration,” former Luce Foundation President and CEO Silver “worked on projects in…collaboration” on “issues such as `counter-terrorism’” and “`cyber-security’.” (end of part 2 of article. To be continued.)