[5]) Finally, he succeeded Time co-founder Henry Luce as the magazine's editor, serving in that position from 1949 to 1953.
Luce favored Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower but Matthews preferred his Democratic rival (and his Princeton classmate) Adlai Stevenson II.
It described him as a "lean, athletic editor" with "clipped, quiet speech was filled with obscure literary references" who rid the magazine of its double-barreled adjectives, puns and backward sentences.
Swanberg, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Luce and His Empire, criticized Matthews for emphasizing the readability of Time at the expense of objectivity.
"For him to be managing editor of America's most politically oriented and propagandist 'newsmagazine' was as if F. Scott Fitzgerald were Secretary of State," Swanberg wrote.
Correspondents include John W. Aldridge, Whittaker Chambers, T. S. Eliot, Valerie Eliot, Robert Graves, Eleanor Green, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Schuyler Jackson, Len Lye, Laurie Lee, William Piel Jr., V. S. Pritchett, Lyman Spitzer, and Adlai Stevenson.
[1] Matthews was married three times, to: Juliana Stevens Cuyler, Martha Gellhorn, and Pamela Firth Peniakoff.