Otto Fuerbringer, the hard-driving, conservative-leaning managing editor of Time magazine during the political and social upheavals of the 1960s died Monday at his retirement home in Fullerton, Calif. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his son Jonathan.
With political inclinations attuned to those of Time’s founder, Henry R. Luce, with whom he had a close working relationship, Mr. Fuerbringer was appointed to the magazine’s top editorial position in 1960. The Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, political assassinations and a roiling youth culture were the stuff of headlines – and Time magazine cover stories – during Mr. Fuerbringer’s eight years as managing editor.
His tenure marked a shifting, if not quite a liberalizing, of Time’s political positions. From the earliest days of U.S. intervention in South Vietnam, Time had supported the war. A major shift came in 1968, the last year of his editorship, when Mr. Fuerbringer wrote a column contending the war could not be won. He had previously met several times with President Lyndon B. Johnson, but when they met again, after his column was published, the president said, “I’d rather see you than read you,” Mr. Fuerbringer recounted in 2007 in his autobiography, On Time.
Time’s circulation rose to 5 million from 3 million under Mr. Fuerbringer’s leadership.
Born in St. Louis on Sept. 27, 1910, Mr. Fuerbringer was the youngest of five children of Ludwig and Anna Zucker Fuerbringer. His father – like both of his grandfathers and three of his uncles – was a Lutheran minister.After graduating from Harvard in 1932, he got a job at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, writing a column about Boy Scout news. After 10 years at the paper, he was hired by Time to be a national affairs writer.
In an interview with Greenwich Magazine in 1991, Mr. Fuerbringer summarized his time as managing editor succinctly, and with decided understatement: “We were very lucky in the ’60s. It was a newsy decade.”
