Ralph Graves

I met Ralph Graves in 1993, when I was editor of the relaunched monthly Life. My colleagues and I had just reformatted the magazine; he dropped in to introduce himself and to tell me this Life was about half as good as the one he had worked for across 24 years. I wasn’t crushed–half as good as the adventuresome and immensely popular weekly Life that Ralph edited from 1969 to 1972 wasn’t bad at all. His phenomenal efficiency (a colleague once said, “The bottom of his inbox was always visible”) gave no hint of his imagination (he wrote a vivid novel set in 1st century Rome) or his editorial courage.

In 1969, when most Establishment media (including Life’s sibling, Time) were still supporting the futile war in Vietnam, he published head shots of 242 U.S. servicemen under the headline one week’s dead; only Life could have brought the war’s horrors home with such intimacy and impact. Three years later, when seismic changes in advertising compelled the magazine to cease publication, Ralph tucked into the lower-right corner of its final cover the word that inevitably came to mind upon his death June 10 at 88: goodbye.

Okrent was editor of LIFE from 1992 to 1996