AMERICAN LOVE AFFAIR

By John F. Stacks

When Henry Grunwald left Vienna in August 1938, he was a boy alone, carrying a single suitcase and fleeing the Nazis. When he returned in 1988, he was the ambassador of the United States of America, riding in a limousine with the Stars and Stripes fluttering from its fender. His first assignment was to register his adopted country's displeasure with the Nazi collaborator Kurt Waldheim, who had become his homeland's President.

In the intervening years Grunwald, now 74, learned English, met Marilyn Monroe and scores of Presidents and Prime Ministers (in roughly that order of importance), became the editor of this magazine and then editor-in-chief of its parent company and thus one of the most powerful people in American journalism. His memoir, One Man's America (Doubleday; 658 pages; $30), is an often eloquent and emotional account of this astonishing passage, filled with the triumphs of a determined and intelligent man successfully navigating the strange waters of an adopted country. He is candid, as well, about his occasional failures.

As Grunwald grew up in America, he first learned to love his new country, and later, in fine journalistic tradition, to criticize it too. "I love America because it took me in as a young refugee from the madness of wartime Europe and allowed me to make it my country," he writes. "I love America because it did the same for millions of others from everywhere. I love it because it is an experiment in living and governing beyond anything dreamed of before. But I'm also disappointed by America because it seems in danger of bungling the experiment."

Both his love and his criticism are tempered by his keen intellect and the immigrant's perspective on what he found in this country that was utterly different from what he left in Nazi Europe. As a young man, he is struck by the silliness of American attention to newspaper comic strips. He sees Superman as "something out of Nietzsche and vaguely associated with Nazi theories of a master race." But in the same strip he is able to see the positive side to this American absurdity: "I sensed America's ability to domesticate menace and shrink giants."

He brings this same insight and detachment to his encounters with the leaders of his new country. He admits that he enjoyed being seduced by John Kennedy but that he also saw in J.F.K. "signs of ruthlessness and the glib assumption of privilege." Grunwald never believed that Kennedy, had he lived, would have reversed the direction of American involvement in Vietnam, but, he adds, "part of me loved America loving Kennedy."

Grunwald made many forays around the world, adding his own impressions to those of the correspondents who reported for his magazine. Like most of those in power at the time, he was reluctant to give up on America's war in Vietnam, but after one trip to Saigon, reported back to his colleagues in New York that the best result one could reasonably expect was a standoff with North Vietnam. He takes responsibility, however, for writing, above a TIME essay defending the war, this headline: THE RIGHT WAR AT THE RIGHT TIME.

When Grunwald became editor of TIME in 1968, he immediately began moving the magazine away from the partisanship of its past and toward a more complex and centrist view of the world. If there is a flaw in this book, it is that he is too modest in assessing the importance of his reforms at the magazine, which this reviewer joined as a Washington correspondent in 1967. Before Grunwald's term as editor, the tone and direction of stories were largely dictated from the top down, often distorting the truth and suffusing the magazine with an alienating pseudo-Olympian pomposity. It is not too strong to say that Grunwald saved the magazine from itself.

He is also too restrained in taking credit for directing TIME's aggressive coverage of Watergate. It was Grunwald himself who, in November 1973, wrote the first editorial to appear in TIME. It called for Richard Nixon's resignation. "How strange, I thought, that three decades ago I had arrived in this country as a young refugee, in whose eyes the president of the United States was, if not God-like, certainly exalted. And here I was now arguing for a president's resignation." He felt entitled to that view, he reflects, because Nixon had dishonored the country Grunwald loved.

After Grunwald returned from Vienna to New York in 1990, he was depressed by the violence, the poverty and an insistent new tribalism that, he fears, threatens the whole American experiment. Yet, he writes, "I remain incurably optimistic about America." It is impossible to read the story of this man's life in America and not share that optimism.