Henry Grunwald, who began his career at Time magazine as a copy boy and became its top editor and who later ran Time Inc.’s vast media empire, died of congestive heart failure Saturday in New York City. He was 82.
After his career in journalism, Mr. Grunwald became U.S. ambassador to his native Austria.
During his nine years as managing editor–the magazine’s highest position–he led Time through dramatic change. When he stepped down in 1977, Mr. Grunwald was considered the second-most influential editor in the magazine’s history, behind only its founder, Henry Luce.
He later spent eight years as editor in chief of Time Inc., managing the company through most of the 1980s, before being named ambassador to Austria by President Ronald Reagan in 1988.
After his two-year diplomatic career, Mr. Grunwald wrote two well-received memoirs, the first about his experiences as a refugee who narrowly escaped Nazi forces in Europe, followed by his unlikely rise to prominence in a new country, using a new language.
His second memoir, published in 1999, was a darker, more personal work, dealing with the progressive loss of his eyesight.
One of his longtime friends, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, described Mr. Grunwald’s most salient personal quality as “wisdom.” Noting that Time magazine often opposed policies he advanced, Kissinger said their friendship, partly based on their similar backgrounds, always remained sound.
“He was a man of absolute integrity with respect to journalism,” Kissinger said.
Mr. Grunwald was 17 when he arrived in the United States. In 1944, he became a part-time copy boy at Time, earning $4.50 a day.
He became skilled, even notorious, at reworking the prose of Time’s writers.
Once, as he watched over a reporter’s shoulder, the annoyed writer typed, “Kid, if you don’t cut this out, I’ll break every bone in your body.”
“I left the office in a hurry,” Mr. Grunwald later said, “but muttering, as I walked out, `Cliche.”‘
He was a foreign correspondent from 1945 to 1951.
Mr. Grunwald had a generally conservative worldview, but he had a more sophisticated and more liberal approach to journalism than the autocratic Luce.
When Mr. Grunwald took the helm of Time in 1968, one year after Luce’s death, he inherited a magazine whose stories derived largely from those first reported by newspapers and were often expressed in a lofty, view-from-above style.
“It became obvious over the years,” Mr. Grunwald said in 1978, “that a mere … digest was not adequate.”
His greatest contribution to Time, he said, was in fostering more original reporting.
He introduced new departments and features, including guest essays by well-known writers or experts; sections on the environment, behavior and energy; and special issues devoted to a single subject. He brought color photography to the magazine, a new format and, for the first time, gave bylines to the magazine’s previously anonymous writers. He ordered up Time’s 1966 cover asking the question “Is God Dead?”
By 1973, he had loosened Time’s habitual political conservatism to such a degree that he wrote the first editorial in magazine’s 50-year history. It called for the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
He “moved the magazine away from partisanship and strengthened the independence of its voice in national and world affairs,” Time editor in chief Norman Pearlstine said in a letter to readers that appears in the issue of the magazine out Monday.
