Before coming to the Atlantic, Mr. Manning had worked for the Associated Press, United Press, Time magazine, The New York Herald Tribune, and the US State Department.

After leaving the Atlantic, he became part owner of the ­Boston Publishing Co. and oversaw its highly successful 25-volume series, “The ­Vietnam Experience.”

“Bob Manning was a great journalist who lived many lives,” Alan Brinkley, a professor of history at Columbia University and author of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century,” wrote in an e-mail. “He was one of the most important reporters at Time Inc., the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and a prolific book publisher. He was a friend of many reporters and writers, and a great friend of me and my family.”

The end of his Atlantic stewardship led to one of the bitterest feuds in Boston business history, a consequence of the purchase of the magazine by real estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman, a purchase Mr. Manning helped initiate, and Zuckerman’s subsequent discharge of his editor in chief and refusal to honor various contractual obligations he had ­assumed in acquiring the magazine.

Mr. Manning told a reporter at the time, “If the estimable custom of dueling were still in practice, one of us would now be dead, Zuckerman from a shot in the heart but more likely Manning from a shot in the back.”

The remark all too accurately represented the rancor that characterized the feud, as well as displayed the wit and pungency that helped gain Mr. Manning such a notable career.

“He saw the humor in life, really, a class act,” Charles U. Daly, former executive director of the John F. Kennedy ­Library Foundation and a friend of Mr. Manning’s for more than half a century, said in a phone interview. “I used to kid him that when he was running the Time-Life European operation that he had a Rolls-Royce to take him to the bathroom. ‘If one could have fit in the hallway,’ he’d say, ‘I would have.’ ”

Robert Joseph Manning was born in Binghamton, N.Y., the son of Joseph Manning and ­Agnes (Brown) Manning. As a senior in high school, he ­entered the offices of the local newspaper, The Binghamton Press, looking for work in the pressroom. Instead, he was ­offered the job of a copy boy who had been fired a few minutes earlier.

“I was enthralled,” Mr. Manning wrote in his 1992 memoir, “The Swamp Root Chronicle.” “The large Press city room smelled of gluepots, pipe tobacco, cigarette and cigar smoke and . . . there was also a whiff in the air of spent scotch or bourbon whiskey. Sounds as bright to me as bird calls came from the clattering of the typewriters and the clattering of the teletypes, and there arose occasionally, as if uttered by an angry crow, the sharp cry of ‘Boy!’ or ‘Copy!’ ”

Mr. Manning was soon promoted to reporter and in 1942 was hired by the Associated Press for its Buffalo bureau. His career was briefly interrupted by Army service in 1943, but within a year nearsightedness led to an honorable discharge. His military stint proved crucial to his journalistic future, however. Mr. Manning had been based near Washington, and the wartime manpower shortage had affected news organizations. Upon his discharge, he accepted an offer from UP to join its Washington bureau covering the White House and State Department.

A self-described “gangly lad who checked in from the provinces with little more to serve him than an ill-fitting suit, a hunt-and-peck technique at the typewriter, and a varnish of ­audacity,” Mr. Manning covered a broad array of stories — from Elliot Roosevelt’s wedding plans to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death — and did so with such distinction he was named a ­Nieman Fellow at Harvard during the 1945-46 academic year.