This is the autobiography of a loyal but unlikely Time-server. Henry Anatole Grunwald, to spell out his middle name in the manner of the newsmagazine on which he spent his working life, rose from copyboy to editor-in-chief. Yet he was the antithesis of the tall, Yale-educated WASPs who seemed destined to succeed at Time Inc. Grunwald was short, pear-shaped, and Jewish, a refugee whose family had fled when Hitler occupied Austria in 1938. America was his salvation and this book is a thoughtful, often anxious, and sometimes moving account of his love affair with what had seemed to him since childhood "a fantastic land." Grunwald also tells the story of how he became conductor of "the House Organ of the American Dream" (as Richard Pollack called Time) and thus perhaps the most influential print journalist in the world.

Grunwald's father, affectionately evoked despite his philandering with actresses, was a well-known Viennese librettist and Henry himself had youthful ambitions to be a playwright. But after their traumatic escape from the Nazis, the father was incapacitated by his inadequate English and the son, having graduated from New York University, found a job on the bottom rung of Time's ladder. Henry had painstakingly mastered the new language. Today his prose, though less effervescent than that of, say, Ben Bradlee, is generally workmanlike and occasionally epigrammatic. Of T.S. Matthews, Grunwald's first managing editor at Time, he writes: "His father was an Episcopal bishop, his mother a Proctor & Gamble heiress, and he was comfortable neither with God nor with mammon."

Poised menacingly between God and mammon, Henry Luce, the magazine's founder, also made Matthews feel uncomfortable. The fastidious managing editor banished the worst excesses of Timestyle. But, he later wrote, during Truman's presidency the "distortions, suppressions, and slant-ing of [Time's] political 'news' seemed to me to . . . commit an offense against the ethics of journalism." Grunwald, who like many grateful immigrants was a hard-line super-patriot, evidently disagrees. He does acknowledge that his early mentor at Time, Whittaker Chambers, gave an anti-Communist twist to stories he wrote or edited. Once, when challenged on a wholly unsubstantiated piece he had written about ideological developments in Hungary, Chambers retorted: "I know what they are thinking, I know what they are talking about in the cafŽs of Budapest."

However, Grunwald defends right-wing advocacy masquerading as reportage. He admits that his own highly favorable cover story on Eisenhower, during the 1952 presidential race, was "slanted." But, he says, "it was not outrageous, and it did not do violence to my own views. Besides, I told myself that I was merely a craftsman, like a carpenter who would build a chest or table to specifications." The analogy is false: reporters who write to order are not craftsmen but hacks. Their true role at Time was admittedly hidden by the fact that they were just cogs in a huge news-processing machine. But even so, many sacrificed their principles on Luce's altar. Murray Kempton put it trenchantly in 1964: "As a slaughterhouse of moral integrity, Time is the Verdun of the young."

Grunwald confesses to few qualms of conscience. Sharing Luce's views on many subjects, he seems in some ways to have modeled himself on the self-styled "skipper" of the "Ship of Public Opinion." Like Luce, he loved Time-traveling -- going off on long fact-finding journeys. He even entertains the notion that journalism is "the ultimate tourism." Sustained by a generous expense account -- Time did not balk at paying for "orchids and caviar for Maria Callas, as well as p‰tŽ for her poodle" -- Grunwald indulged his curiosity and delivered himself, on his return, of Lucubrations.

Grunwald also resembled Luce in putting his career before his family -- one of Grunwald's children complained that he was "not so much raised as edited." Moreover, he took Time almost as seriously as did his boss, though even Grunwald was surprised at Luce's manner of marking the magazine's fortieth birthday in 1963. The theologian Paul Tillich was invited to give an oration, which he portentously entitled: "The Human Condition in Relation to the Anniversary Celebration of Time Magazine."

 Nevertheless, it is apparent that Grunwald has misgivings about his past. He had a particularly hard time during the managing editorship of Otto Fuerbringer, a reactionary autocrat known as the "Iron Chancellor" when Grunwald was Time's foreign editor. Fuerbringer tried to create Time in his own image and thus, according to Matthews, "tortured" Grunwald, though Grunwald himself denies this. But Grunwald does feel guilty about the racial attitudes the magazine manifested during the 1960s, both in print and in the office -- one black writer felt so persecuted that he carried a knife to work. Grunwald also regrets his complacency about "the limits Time put on its female employees." Actually he still seems somewhat unreconstructed in this department. He recalls wondering aloud to his wife during a famous feminist debate whether anyone dared to tell Germaine Greer, "You're beautiful when you're angry." Oh, dear.

Matters improved in 1968, when Grunwald took over from Fuerbringer and instituted a gradual thaw. He listened to his writers, taking them on a retreat to Bermuda where they raged against journalistic tyranny and an editorial bureaucracy that mangled their ideas and maimed their copy. One writer, Ted Kalem, said that in most cases "the senior editors saved a story by amputating an arm, adding a third leg, and producing a monstrosity." Grunwald sympathized. He gave writers a freer rein and introduced bylines. Learning from Newsweek and seeking to complement television, he encouraged longer and more analytical articles on a wider variety of topics. By 1969, Richard Pollack opined, Grunwald had "put the Mighty Wurlitzer in tune." Time had become "a respectable magazine for the first time in its history."

One sign of respectability was its change of direction over Vietnam. Grunwald had maintained, in the words of a headline which came to haunt him, that America was fighting "The Right War at the Right Time." But by 1969 he admitted that it was an error, though not a "crime or sin." Similarly he turned against Nixon over Watergate. Actually Time was so tame that none of its minions was included in the president's "enemies list." But Grunwald was perturbed by the scandal because it cast doubt on the fundamental decency of the United States. In November 1973, when Agnew was safely out of the way, he called for Nixon's resignation on the ground that he had "irredeemably lost his moral authority."

Clare Luce, always contemptuous of her late husband's "little people" at Time, objected. More, she expressed her disgust at the "hubris of America's only Untouchable Institution, the Press." Grunwald was unmoved. He liked to cite the jurist Irving Kaufman, who said that journalists were like judges: "They sustain democracy, not because they are responsible to any branch of government, but precisely because, except in the most extreme cases, they are not accountable at all."

Time's irresponsibility was widely condemned after the so-called "blood libel" against Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, whom it accused of being "indirectly responsible" for a massacre at two Palestinian refugee camps in 1982. This was an unhappy case but Grunwald argues persuasively that Time was on much better ground than its critics appreciated.

It remained the voice of Middle America, the Main Street Gazette. It was largely staffed with "organization men." Indeed, the able young journalists tended to leave because they were made to feel like junior executives at Unilever, though at Time office affairs seem to have been rife despite difficulties of consummation -- one researcher about to be bedded on an editor's cluttered couch cried out, "Oh no! Not on top of the Jewish encyclopedia!" Time itself became part of a huge conglomerate in 1973, though efforts were made to keep the business and editorial sides apart. Himself a "neoconservative" corporate climber, Grunwald reached the top of the journalistic greasy pole in 1979. His friend William Buckley wired, "Congratulations! Together we can rule the world." Grunwald replied, "Thanks for including me."

Grunwald's commercial ventures, such as the launch of the science magazine Discover and the short-lived TV Cable Week, were not conspicuously successful. But his career came to a neat and poignant conclusion when, on his retirement in 1987, Ronald Reagan appointed him ambassador to Austria. On presenting his credentials to President Waldheim in Vienna he firmly refrained from smiling.

Journalists who accept plum jobs from politicians place themselves in an equivocal situation, as Grunwald recognizes. He writes that a journalist should not aspire to celebrity status: he must never forget that "he is only an observer and, almost by definition, an outsider." As an immigrant, Grunwald had felt himself to be an outsider. But he was clearly ambitious to get in and to associate on equal terms with insiders. When Time's art critic Robert Hughes encountered Grunwald and Henry Kissinger in an elevator, he exclaimed, "Ah! If it isn't Tweedledum and Tweedledee!" As ambassador, Grunwald arrived at the heart of the establishment. Yet once again -- to end on the worried note that echoes through this absorbing book like a discord in a sonata -- he was uneasy about his position.

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