Henry Grunwald, who began his career at Time magazine as a copy boy, became its top editor and later ran Time Inc.'s vast media empire, has died. He was 82.
Grunwald, who also served as U.S. ambassador to his native Austria, died Saturday of congestive heart failure at his home in New York City.
During his nine years as managing editor -- the magazine's highest position -- he led Time through dramatic change, broadening the scope of its journalism and brightening its pages for a generation that was accustomed to getting its news from television. When he stepped down in 1977, 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 Reagan in 1988. After his two-year diplomatic career, 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. In 2003, he published his first novel. He had recently been working on a book about defibrillators, a technology that saved his life last year.
Beyond his achievements as a writer, editor and diplomat, Grunwald was known as a man of urbanity and grace who cultivated a dazzling international set of political, literary and cultural figures, including Vladimir Nabokov, Leonard Bernstein and Marilyn Monroe.
One of his longtime friends, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, described Grunwald's most salient personal quality as "wisdom."
"He was a man of absolute integrity with respect to journalism," Kissinger said. "He was altogether a man of great honor and great decency who leaves a hole in this country that is almost irreplaceable."
Grunwald was 17 when he arrived in the United States. He mastered English by going to movies on New York's 42nd Street. After graduating from New York University in 1944, he became a part-time copy boy at Time, making $4.50 a day.
His spoken English always retained a hint of his Viennese past, but he became adept with an editor's pencil. He became skilled at reworking the prose of Time's writers.
