Posted on 05/10/2006 7:44:54 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
NEW YORK – A.M. Rosenthal, a demanding editor who lifted The New York Times from economic doldrums in the 1970s and molded it into a journalistic juggernaut known for distinguished reporting of national and world affairs, died Wednesday at age 84.
He died of complications from a stroke he suffered two weeks ago, the Times said.
Rosenthal, known as Abe, spent virtually all of his working life at the Times, beginning as a lowly campus stringer in 1943. He rose to police reporter, foreign correspondent, managing editor and finally to the exalted office of executive editor, a post he held for nine years beginning in 1977. “Abe was a giant among journalists,” retired Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger said in a statement. “He was a great editor with extraordinary loyalty to his troops.”
On Rosenthal's watch, the Times published the “Pentagon Papers,” a history of America's secret involvement in Vietnam, which won the paper one of its many Pulitzer Prizes in 1972. But the paper started slowly on Watergate and never caught up with the rival Washington Post on the seminal story that brought down a president.
In 1986, facing mandatory retirement, Rosenthal stepped down as editor to assume a new role as a twice-weekly columnist. Thirteen years later, he was abruptly dismissed, with no explanation, he said, other than a comment by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. that “it's time.”
Rosenthal made clear that the parting was not his idea, telling one questioner that to say he had retired “would imply volition.” When asked by a reporter for the Washington Post whether he was fired, he replied, “Sweetheart, you can use any word you want.”
But that's not what it's known as today.
Perhaps it's not too late to attempt CPR on Abe.
Be kind of hard to watch something you had stuggled to build go down the toilet. RIP.
Sheesh. I don't much remember that part, but it obviously didn't last very long.
It must have really fried Rosenthal to get fired by a weasely empty suit like Pinch.
The story I heard, which of course is not referred to in this Times obituary, is that what finally caused Abe Rosenthal to be fired is that he went to Bill Keller and complained about Maureen Dowd. He said that she was an embarrassing nutcase who neglected to do any real reporting or investigating for her columns, and that if she wasn't removed from the OpEd page the Times's reputation would suffer.
According to another story, Dowd had been Keller's mistress a bit earlier.
Anyway, instead of firing Maureen Dowd, they fired Abe Rosenthal.
There was also, apparently, some resentment because Rosenthal took a high profile role in protesting against persecution of Christians in China. He wrote several fine OpEd pieces on this subject. Naturally Keller, Pinch, and the boys like China much better than they like Christians, and this offended them too.
He was a liberal, and his publication of the Pentagon Papers was inexcusable. But he was an honest and decent man. There was no longer a place on that newspaper for an honest and decent man who believed in high standards for reporting the news.
Retired N.Y. Times Executive Editor and columnist A.M. Rosenthal is photographed at New York Times headquarters in New York, in this Thursday, Nov. 4, 1999 photo. Rosenthal, a brilliant, demanding editor who lifted The New York Times from economic doldrums in the 1970s and molded it into a journalistic juggernaut known for distinguished reporting of national and world affairs, died Wednesday, May 10, 2006 at age 84. n(AP Photo/The New York Times, Jeffery A. Salter)
Rosenthal was unusual in that he truly started from the bottom rung of the New York Times and literally worked his way up to the top--a true "newspaper man." He will be sorely missed.
Remember, the obit is from the San Diego Tribune. And this is the kind of 'distinguished reporting' he's talking about: "On Rosenthal's watch, the Times published the 'Pentagon Papers,' a history of America's secret involvement in Vietnam, which won the paper one of its many Pulitzer Prizes in 1972."
If you're not familiar with it, that wasn't a "history" of anything. It was a selective leak of portions of classified documents, specifically organized to make America appear to be a terrorist nation attacking an innocent soveriegn government. And it was used to tar and feather a Republican President with the screwups of his Democratic predicessor.
Sound familiar? Basically, they change around the names and the clues for the crossword puzzle but when it comes to the news, there ain't been anything "new" in that rag for a very, very long time now.
Good points. Thanks for the reply.
Well, at least he'll probably be missed by any leftist reporters with a shred of integrity who may still be hanging around at the dying, former "paper of record".
May God have mercy upon his soul!
RIP.
I remember Mr. Rosenthal's columns on the Chinese communist persecution of Christians. In one column, he mentioned that he personally did not buy items made in communist China, because of this persecution. I was (and continue) doing the same myself, and remember how pleasantly surprised I was to read a liberal who did not excuse communist tyranny. I respected him for that stand.
That's how I viewed him, too.
I have heard stories like those you related, and without further comment on those, let me just point out that, contrary to what the current screaming faces on TV may lead younger people to believe, there were people on the Left who were honorable opponents.
May he be in a better place.
Didn't Abe come out of the ether after 9/11?
Many have said that if we had mined Haiphong Harbor and bombed much of Hanoi in 1965 the war would have been tremendously shortened, because that would have severely cut the amount of military supplies the North Vietnamese Army would have gotten and possibly severely hurt the support of the Viet Cong.
Rosenthal was a great journalist, writer, and patriot. He had a true love for his country and for fellow human beings, and it showed in his writing. He had so much more class than lots of other media people today.
I enjoyed reading his columns in the New York Daily News the last few years before he retired. I was very impressed by his strong support for the Iraq mission. May he Rest in Peace.
I'm not familiar with all of the details surrounding the Pentagon Papers case, and I was wondering if you could fill me in. From what I had read somewhere, it sounded as if the information in the Pentagon Papers was all old news and no longer important to the war effort, so that it did not harm national security when it was published. Am I wrong? I was just interested in whether it was a good idea for Rosenthal to publish them.
Well, actually, it was more of a propaganda gesture than anything else. I objected for several reasons. One, because they were stolen. Two, because they were classified, and it's never a good idea to publish classified documents just because you want to for political reasons.
The Pentagon Papers represented an enormous information dump. The whole thing was printed as a fat extra section of the New York Times, which few people probably actually read, and as a book, which few people probably read either. They bought it and put it on their coffee tables.
They didn't read it because they didn't need to. The New York Times and Washington Post were there to tell them what the papers said: That Nixon was a crook. Period.
I read the whole NYTimes insert at the time. The only really interesting revelation, to me at least, was that JFK ordered the assassination of Diem, the President of South Korea. Kennedy was a "Catholic," Diem was a Catholic, and Kennedy leaned over backward to prove to suspicious voters that he was not really a Catholic. So, killing a Catholic president at the urging of the Left and the symbolic Buddhist suicide monks was good politics. But it was a total disaster for the war effort. That one mistake did more to lose us the war than anything else, and there were plenty of other mistakes under JFK and LBJ.
Needless to say, although that revelation was in the Pentagon Papers, it was buried in the middle, and the left wing press never mentioned it. So very few people noticed it. There was no internet to get the word out. It was successfully covered up for all but a few.
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