NEW YORK (AP) – Henry A. Grunwald, a Time magazine editor who led the publication’s shift from conservatism to a more centrist view before becoming a United States ambassador to Vienna, has died. He was 82.

Grunwald died of heart failure Saturday at his Manhattan home, according to his daughter, Mandy.

During his tenure as managing editor at Time, Grunwald began to give writers bylines and introduced new departments including Behavior, Energy, the Sexes, Economy and Dance. He ordered up Time’s 1966 cover asking the question “Is God Dead?”

Before being named to the position in 1968, Grunwald had been a writer, senior editor and foreign editor at the magazine.

His role in shaping Time was perhaps second only to that of founding editor Henry R. Luce.

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 out Monday.

One of the most noted items of Grunwald’s tenure was when he personally wrote Time’s editorial during the Watergate scandal asking President Richard Nixon to resign.

“The nightmare of uncertainty must be ended,” he wrote in a Nov. 12, 1973, editorial. “A fresh start must be made. Some at home and abroad might see in the president’s resignation a sign of American weakness and failure. It would be a sign of the very opposite.”

Nixon resigned in 1974.

After serving 11 years as managing editor, Grunwald served as editor-in-chief of all Time Inc. publications – including Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People and Money – until retirement in 1987.

He was appointed U.S. ambassador to Austria, the country of his birth, by President Reagan and served in that post from 1988 to 1990.

Grunwald was born in 1922, and his family fled Nazi-occupied Austria for the United States when he was a teenager. His father was a librettist in Vienna who failed to find a foothold in American show business.

Grunwald himself had early ambitions to be a playwright but got a job as a copy boy at Time while a student at New York University and stayed there for his entire career.

Grunwald penned a 1997 autobiography, “One Man’s America: A Journalist’s Search for the Heart of His Country,” and a 1999 memoir about losing his sight due to macular degeneration, “Twilight: Losing Sight, Gaining Insight.” His first novel, the critically praised “A Saint, More or Less,” was published in 2003.

Grunwald was in the process of writing a book on defibrillators – a project that he began after the technology saved his life last year. Pearlstine said it was in Grunwald’s character to treat difficulties “as opportunities.”

Pearlstine recounted that last year, after the cardiac episode, Grunwald’s daughter Lisa told him he must have survived because he wanted to accomplish something else. No, Grunwald said, he just loved living.

“He did it very well,” Pearlstine said. “He left us with warm memories and the challenge of living up to his legacy.”

In addition to his daughter, Grunwald is survived by his wife, Louise Melhado, a son, a daughter, a stepson and four grandchildren. His first wife, Beverly Suser, died in 1981.

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