A decade is a long time, especially in the hyperkinetic world of journalism, and it's unlikely that too many of today's young generation of scribes remember A. M. Rosenthal. But there was once a very great man named Abe Rosenthal who hired me at the New York Times while I was still at college in America, who mentored me, who made me a foreign correspondent, and who remained my guru and friend until the end.
Abraham Michael died on May 10, 2006, at the age of 84, from the effects of a stroke. In truth, he died of a broken heart. Abe - as he was widely known - had been fired after 56 years of service by the New York Times, the very newspaper that he once helped rescue from financial collapse when he was executive editor by introducing special daily sections catering to a variety of audiences.
After his tenure as head of the news department, he chose to stay on as a columnist, a role that didn't quite suit him, and which fetched him even more antagonists than during his 17 years as managing editor and executive editor on account of his radically right wing views.
The Canada-born Abe should have left The Times after his editorship. But so intense was his devotion to the paper that he had joined as a stringer while at New York's City College in 1943 that he asked to stay on as a columnist. His political views became increasingly right wing - even though when he was editor Abe took great pride in asserting that he ensured that no ideology crept into the paper's news columns. Indeed, the epitaph on his tombstone at Westchester Hills Cemetery reads, "He Kept The Paper Straight."
That he did. But he had many biases of his own: he was, for instance, notoriously anti-gay; he wasn't initially a fan of the feminist movement; he was no friend of the Palestinians; he did not tolerate dissent in The Times' cavernous news room - so much so that many top reporters left during his tenure to join rival publications including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Abe argued, however, that his personal views were just that - personal. "Show me any news story where my personal views affected the fact," he'd often say to me when I was his news clerk before being promoted to the coveted position of staff reporter in 1973.
As for the departure of some of his stars, Abe always asserted that there was long line of other bright journalists waiting to join The Times, including Pulitzer Prize winners such as himself. (Mr. Rosenthal won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for international reporting.[1] As an editor at the newspaper, Mr. Rosenthal oversaw the coverage of a number of major news stories including the Vietnam war, the Pentagon Papers, and the Watergate scandal. Together with Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, he was the first westerner to visit a Soviet GULAG camp in 1988. Source: Wikipedia)
He may have kept the paper straight as editor, but the perception of a news publication - like that of most any company - is often shaped by what its employees and former employees whisper about it. And the word about Abe was that he was a very difficult man to work for. He would shout; he would scream; he would promote or demote staff members capriciously. That was his prerogative, of course, but it did not sweeten his reputation.
So much so that the then publisher of The Times, the late Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr., who was one of Abe's few close friends, was forced to remove him as executive editor. In what was generally seen as a slap in the face to Abe - or, at the very least, a strong rap on his knuckles - the position was given to his bitterest enemy at the paper, Max Frankel. Mr. Frankel was editor of the paper's influential editorial page at the time. The newsroom breathed a collective sigh of relief.
It's not that I have forgotten Abe's faults and failures. But he was always kind to me, which is what I remember; he was always helpful in offering guidelines to good writing, which is what I remember. ("Make the verb work," Abe would say, "and use as few adjectives as possible. And listen carefully to what people say when you interview them. The narrative often lies in the subtext.")
And Abe was strict about punctuality and about meeting deadlines, which is what I remember. He never forgot my birthday - we were both May-born - which is what I remember. His birthday gifts were always books, which is what I remember. ("Read, read, read," Abe would say to me.) Abe would recommend good plays and movies, which is what I remember. Abe introduced me to some of his celebrity friends, such as the late Theodore H. White and William F. Buckley, which is what I remember.
I remember what the columnist Wesley Pruden once said about Abe: "Like all good editors, Abe was both loved and loathed, the former by those who met his standards, the latter mostly by those who couldn't keep the pace he set as City Editor, Managing Editor and finally Executive Editor. He brooked no challenges to his authority. He once told a reporter who demanded to exercise his rights by marching in a street demonstration he was assigned to cover: 'OK, the rule is, you can [make love to] an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can't cover the circus.' We call that 'the Rosenthal rule.'"[2]
Most of all, however, I remember what a wonderful writer Abe Rosenthal himself was. His memorable essay, "There Is No News From Auschwitz" - published in the New York Times Magazine in 1958 - still haunts.
Mr. Rosenthal's personal piece came out the same year as Leon Uris's Exodus, but before the Eichmann trial and before Elie Wiesel's Night. Mr. Rosenthal later told Ari Goldman - also a former Timesman like me -- that he didn't think the Times would run his piece.
Mr. Rosenthal wrote in his 700-word essay: "And so there is no news to report about Auschwitz. There is merely the compulsion to write something about it, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz and then turned away without having said or written anything would somehow be a most grievous act of discourtesy to those who died here."
Well, a decade is a long time to be dead. Today's editors seldom mentor young journalists the way Abe mentored me. Journalism itself is going through a tumultous change: in Abe's time, there was no digital journalism, and there were always layers of copy editors to prevent egregious factual errors.
It was a romantic time to have been a journalist in the 1970s and 1980s, and Abe Rosenthal made it possible for me to get both a career and a life-long passion for the world of words.
Yes, I miss Abe Rosenthal every day of my life. It takes good fortune to meet and to be mentored by a man life like him. He will always be my journalistic hero, and I will always remember the extraordinary gifts he gave me - most of all, the gift of his presence.