“Is God Dead?” the article began. “It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no.” The article set off a backlash by religious conservatives.  It was one of a number of cover stories during Mr. Fuerbringer’s tenure that took on volatile issues. In 1964, for example, the magazine examined the sexual revolution; in 1967, it was the birth control pill.  Before Mr. Fuerbringer, Time covers had consisted mostly of sedate sketches of prominent people, mostly political figures. “America’s weekly icon,” he called them.  Breaking with tradition, Mr. Fuerbringer commissioned well-known artists to paint portraits (Marc Chagall produced a self-portrait) or carve sculptures for Time covers. And cover subjects included the folk singer Joan Baez, the poet Robert Lowell and the futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, whose cover portrait was etched in triangles, as if from his geodesic dome.  Time’s circulation rose to five million from three million under Mr. Fuerbringer’s leadership.  In 1968, a year after Mr. Luce’s death, Henry A. Grunwald was appointed managing editor, the start of a shake-up at Time. Mr. Fuerbringer was named editor of magazine development for Time Inc. and went on to lead the team that created two of the company’s most profitable publications, People and Money magazines.  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. The family had come to the United States from Germany in the 1830s.  Besides his son Jonathan, a former reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Fuerbringer is survived by his wife of 68 years, the former Winona Gunn; another son, Peter; two daughters, Alexis Selwood and Juliana Fuerbringer; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.  The ministry was not for Mr. Fuerbringer. At Harvard he was president of the campus newspaper The Harvard Crimson. After graduating in 1932, he returned to his hometown and got a $14-a-week 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.  Mr. Fuerbringer wrote more than 30 cover stories for Time, including one on Senator Harry S. Truman, before he became vice president. Mr. Truman is “a man as neat and grey as his double-breasted suits who has none of the flowing pretensions that many senators wear like togas,” Mr. Fuerbringer wrote. His article on the defeat of the Nazis showed Hitler on the cover with an X across his face.  With Mr. Luce’s backing, Mr. Fuerbringer entered the managing ranks in 1951, when he was promoted to assistant managing editor.  He lived in Greenwich, Conn., for more than 45 years. In an interview with Greenwich magazine in 1991, Mr. Fuerbringer summed up his time as managing editor succinctly, and with decided understatement: “We were very lucky in the ’60s. It was a newsy decade.”  A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2008, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Otto Fuerbringer, 97, Former Time Editor. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Fuerbringer was the hard-driving, conservative-leaning managing editor of Time magazine during the political and social upheavals of the 1960s.