An Immoderate Moderate
ROSS, IRWIN
An Immoderate Moderate One Man's America: A Journalist's Search for the Heart of His Country By Henry Grunwald Doubleday. 658pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Irwin Ross Retired roving editor, "Reader's...
...Passion never blinded him to irony or to the weight of counterargument...
...Thus what we get is less an intimate voyage than long chapters on the '50s, '60s and '70s that add little to what old-timers remember or younger readers have picked up elsewhere...
...According to Mrs...
...He had many contacts there and invariably received polite replies to his proposals...
...Whatever the label, he has always been comfortably lodged in the center...
...Henry was raised by a nanny...
...Another significant innovation was letting correspondents see the stories fashioned from their files prior to publication...
...Grunwald's early years and first forays in the U.S...
...The least compelling sections of the book are those that justify its subtitle, A Journalist s Search for the Heart of His Country...
...In addition, he notes, from his earliest years he was entranced by America and started learning English...
...Henry, meanwhile, graduated from high school and enrolled at New York University, attracted by the fact that it had an undergraduate journalism program...
...A brief stay in Biarritz was followed by a harrowing ship voyage to Morocco, where they were finally able to obtain admittance to Canada and, on the strength of that, transit visas to the U.S...
...editor-in-chief upon Henry Luce's death in 1967...
...Grunwald had to retire in 1987, at the age of 65...
...Ambassador to Austria, the country he and his parents had fled five decades before...
...In 1968 he was appointed to the top job of managing editor by Hedley Donovan, who had become Time Inc...
...After the Nazis took over, through Alfred's theatrical connections the Grunwalds managed to secure visas first to Czechoslovakia, then to France...
...Reviewed by Irwin Ross Retired roving editor, "Reader's Digest...
...Years later, Clare Luce told Grunwald a revealing story...
...A TV cable magazine was a dismal flop...
...The family was prosperous, for his father, Alfred, was a celebrated librettist...
...He thinks he was proposed by Nancy Reagan, at the prompting of Mike Wallace, a friend of both...
...It contains only a passing reference to his near blindness in recent years...
...The sections of the book on the inner workings of a news magazine are among the most interesting...
...The Grunwalds were assimilated Jews (insofar as anyone could be in that anti-Semitic land), but Henry was bar mitzvahed...
...Following his graduation in June 1944, the job became full-time...
...The foreign news editor, Whittaker Chambers, accepted one, encouraged him to produce more, and eventually suggested to the managing editor that the young man be given a tryout as a writer...
...He remembers kindly, for example, the late radical writer Andrew Kopkind, who once worked for Time...
...Grunwald has a wonderful tale to tell, a mythic American success story, immigrant variant: how a young Jewish refugee from Nazism with no connections, a lowly copy boy, rose to be managing editor of Time magazine, then editor-inchief of all Time Inc...
...contributor...
...He used HENRY GRUNWALD it to break into print by turning brief newspaper items into 7i'me-style "shorts" that he showed to different editors...
...his ambition was to be a playwright...
...his proposals were regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned...
...One Man s America ends with the author s return from Austria in 1990...
...Grunwald is a reflective man, yet he indulges in few ruminations about how he made it up the greasy pole...
...are interesting, but he shed his immigrant status with surprising alacrity...
...Luce, "One day he came home looking very happy and said, 'I've just met a bright young Jew named Grunwald who works for Time and will someday take that monkey off my back.'" Grunwald's account of his rise is rendered with charm and narrative skill...
...publications, and ultimately U.S...
...The writing, always crisp, is often eloquent...
...Although he was an indifferent student at his gymnasium, he was serious about writing...
...Even the trivia are illuminating...
...They arrived in New York in September 1940...
...Earlier encouragement from Luce notwithstanding, the one person he had to sell was his immediate boss, and he exhibited personal qualities Donovan prizednot surprisingly because they reflected his own...
...He apparently had no interest in either subject...
...Already married and a father of three, he edited several back-of-the-book departments for a decade, then served as foreign news editor and as an assistant managing editor...
...They lived in Paris for the better part of two years, fleeing the city by car when news came of the German breakthrough in May 1940...
...In his nine years as managing editor Grunwald made the magazine more liberal, renovated its format three times, invented several new departments, and ran longer pieces (sometimes too long in Donovan's view, expressed in his 1989 autobiography...
...His opinions on most issues (except communism and fascism, both of which he detested) might be called immoderately moderate...
...He understood their importance to morale, having suffered anonymity as well as continual rewriting during his years of apprenticeship...
...Grunwald introduced bylines too...
...This is emphatically not a problem in Henry Grunwald's absorbing autobiography...
...Soon he felt it was useless and switched his major to philosophy, taking courses both with James Burnham and Sidney Hook...
...He was tolerant and prided himself on being nonconfrontational...
...Oddly, Grunwald seems unaware that Time was hardly a microcosm of either New York or the liberal community, and that a large body of liberal anti-Communists backed Chambers over Hiss in the late '40s and '50s...
...But when it comes to politics and foreign affairs, not to mention culture and religion, he offers a lot of detail that is fresh and insightful...
...brought by Israeli General Ariel Sharon was a public relations disaster, though the company technically won...
...The new science magazine, Discover, was sold before it became profitable...
...His uncompromising rationalism appealed to Henry, but he couldn't accept pragmatism, believing that it was relativistic about moral values...
...But in a memorable article about his macular degeneration published in the New Yorker (December 9, 1996), Grunwald reports that a friend predicted readers would be able to tell what parts of the book were written on a word processor before the affliction and what parts were dictated...
...He was casting about for something to do when he was offered the post of Ambassador to Austria...
...Nor did political differences affect personal relations...
...Fortunately, he had been a supporter of her husband...
...Yet it was beyond him...
...He also has a sharp eye for the enlivening detail and encapsulating anecdote...
...All these traits were highly desirable, since Time was poised to move away from strident partisanship...
...Politically Grunwald might be termed a moderate liberal or a moderate conservative...
...It is a poignant story that his son tells well...
...The friend was wrong...
...a moderate supporter, to be sure...
...After only six years as a writer, Grunwald was made a senior editor at age 29...
...At several points Grunwald pays tribute to Hook's intellectual rigor and dialectical skills...
...In 1979, Grunwald was Donovan's natural choice as the next editor-in-chief...
...Strangely, in these chronicles Grunwald says nothing about the labor movement certainly a significant factor in the first two decades he covers or about the transformation of the business scene...
...The family moved into a furnished flat on Manhattan's West Side...
...Nevertheless, he kept trying until his death in 1951...
...Possessing an admirable sense of proportion, he rarely portrays himself on a par with the movers and shakers he calls on...
...He was too much the rationalist...
...Moreover, he is himself a major figure, one of the outstanding editors of the last half-century, and any reader interested in journalism or public affairs has reason to be curious about him...
...At the time, the Syrian leader told Grunwald that an extraterrestrial force was necessary to achieve peace between the U.S...
...Grunwald was born in Vienna on December 3,1922, a date that for some reason (perhaps an oversight) is not in the book but has appeared in Who's Who.{He also never discloses why he dropped his middle name, Anatole, which used to make a grander byline...
...Did you know that back in 1986 Hafez al-Assad took UFOs "very seriously...
...For sentimental reasons alone, it was an exciting opportunity...
...Apart from journalistic flair and proven talents as a writer and editor, Grunwald had the virtue of being in exquisite equilibrium...
...She made no complaint but retaliated by appearing topless at the next staff meeting...
...Fortune " Memoirs of journalists often suffer from self-inflation: Recalling personal encounters with the great and famous, the author shares center stage with them, puffing up his own modest stature...
...They had a comfortable apartment near the Ringstrasse as well as a country place...
...There was little money, despite Alfred's repossessing a small hoard of gold coins he had sequestered in Switzerland, because he could not break into Broadway...
...There ensued years of more frustration than achievement...
...Sometimes the anecdote is its own justification, such as the hilarious story about the Time writer whose colleagues covered her office walls with Playboy nudes while she was away on a vacation...
...and the USSR...
...Religion, on the other hand, he thought provided a firm anchor for values and through the years he felt a yearning for religious faith...
...His career was launched...
...The libel suit against Time Inc...
...He has always been a quick study...
...When the Alger Hiss case broke in 1948, Grunwald became one of Chambers' most fervent supporters on the magazinewhere, one gathers from these pages, there were a lot more anti-anti-Communists than plain antis...
...While still at NYTJ, on the advice of a friend, Grunwald got a copy boy's job at Time for three nights a week at $4.50 a night...
...On several occasions her husband had been falsely accused of being an anti-Semite, a charge that greatly dismayed him...
...The problem was that he never mastered the American idiom...
...Grunwald's predecesssor, Otto Fuerbringer, was a fervent Republican...
Vol. 79 • December 1996 • No. 9
