Robert Luce, 83, New Republic Publisher

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A former publisher of the New Republic, Robert Luce, died November 29 at 83 at a Boca Raton nursing home.


He became publisher of the New Republic in 1963. He had earlier published Changing Times magazine.


Luce also founded a Washington publishing house, Robert B.Luce Incorporated, in the 1960s. The company’s first book, “The Kennedy Circle,” was published just before the inauguration of President Kennedy. It had nine chapters, each on one of Kennedy’s close advisers, by different noted journalists.


After leaving the New Republic in 1966, and selling the publishing house, he worked for Time-Life Books in New York as director of editorial planning.


He was distantly related to Henry Luce, the founder of Time-Life.


In 1997, he moved to Boca Raton and taught journalism at Florida Atlantic University at age 75. He remained at Florida Atlantic until 2001.


Robert Luce was born in 1922 in Grosse Pointe, Mich. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Forces before graduating from Antioch College in Ohio in 1946.


While stationed on Tinian in the Pacific Ocean’s Northern Mariana Islands during the war, he started a newspaper called the Daily Mission.


“He thought the boys who were going out to risk their lives should at least have a newspaper in the morning,” his widow said.


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