experienced lifelong pain.
Other tributes focused on his remarkable career trajectory. Beginning as the Times stringer at New York’s City College, he was formally hired as a copyboy without even graduating. He was a reporter for nineteen years, covering the fledgling United Nations before becoming a foreign correspondent in 1955, assigned to cover India, Japan and Poland. He was expelled from Poland for reporting that was “too probing” for the Communist government there, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for international reporting. In 1963 he returned to New York to assume a new title, “metropolitan editor.” From there he climbed up the editorial hierarchy, becoming assistant managing editor, managing editor and finally executive editor of the entire paper in 1977.
Although a fierce protector of Times tradition, Rosenthal shook up the Metro staff, encouraging better, brighter writing from talented reporters like Gay Talese and rotating beat assignments that had previously been regarded as set in stone. He emphasized investigative reporting and broke precedent by assigning trend stories on controversial subjects like interracial marriage and homosexuality. Believing he had suffered some measure of career bias as a result of anti-Semitism, he upended the informal caste system at the Times, which had traditionally favored Ivy League WASPs over New York-bred Italians, Irish and Jews.
As executive editor, Rosenthal steered the Times through the coverage of the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture, the Watergate scandal and various Mideast crises. He played a central role in the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, bucking up Sulzberger and other executives who feared that printing the government’s own classified history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam would appear to the public as treasonous, expose the paper’s executives to federal prosecution, and lead to financial ruin. Rosenthal himself was not a dove; at his funeral, his son recalled him putting on a cowboy hat at home and singing “I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.” But as a Times editorial after his death noted, he believed that “when something important is going on, silence is a lie.”
Many of the tributes dwelled on Rosenthal’s role in rescuing the paper from financial peril and journalistic irrelevance in an age when television was killing off newspapers right and left, which was just as important as the big-ticket news stories he shepherded. Facing declines in ad revenue and circulation, as well as charges that the paper’s writing was dull, Rosenthal spearheaded efforts to broaden the paper’s appeal and liven up its pages. The result was the “Sectional Revolution,” expanding the daily paper from two sections to four, which encouraged a rebound in circulation along with ad sales and revenues.
At the same time, Rosenthal’s legendary bad temper did not go unmentioned. The newsroom atmosphere was suffused with his “tempestuous personality,” said the Times obituary writer Robert McFadden, “leading to stormy outbursts in which subordinates were berated for errors, reassigned for failing to meet the editor’s expectations or sidetracked to lesser jobs for what he regarded as disloyalty to The Times.” Some recalled Rosenthal as a vengeful man who kept a “shit-list in his head,” as one writer put it, and as “a shouter and a curser” who would make or break careers on a whim.
The one theme that resounded through almost all the obituaries and tributes was Rosenthal’s “tiger-ish” defense of high standards in reporting and editing, his call for “fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, causes and political agendas, innuendo and unattributed, pejorative quotations,” as McFadden phrased it. This sense of journalistic integrity perfectly embodied the Times’ founding motto of delivering the news “impartially, without fear or favor, without concern for party interest or sect.”
The reason why Rosenthal was obsessed with keeping editors and reporters from putting their “thumbs on the scale,” wrote the Times columnist Thomas Friedman, was because he believed a “straight” New York Times was “essential to helping keep democracy healthy and our government honest.” Rosenthal kept the Times “straight” by battling what he saw as the ingrained left-liberal tendencies of the newsroom, particularly the Washington bureau. He scolded reporters and editors he thought were romanticizing the sixties counterculture, which he viewed as a destructive force. While encouraging reporters to write with more flair, Rosenthal eschewed the subjectivity of the New Journalism, seeing this genre as substituting reportorial ego for a commitment to fact. He was vigilant about conflicts of interest, once firing a reporter who was found to have been sleeping with a Pennsylvania politician she covered while working for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I don’t care if my reporters are fucking elephants,” Rosenthal was said to have declared, “as long as they aren’t covering the circus.”
A tribute of sorts to the ideological neutrality of Times news reporting under Rosenthal had come from a rather unusual source: William F. Buckley’s National Review, the very bible of American conservatism. In 1972, as Spiro Agnew railed against the “elitist Eastern establishment press,” and Richard Nixon was livid over the Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers and its looming endorsement of George McGovern, the National Review produced an article examining the charges of left-leaning bias. Conservatives had long dismissed the Times as “a hopeless hotbed of liberalism, biased beyond redemption and therefore not to be taken seriously,” the magazine observed, asking, “But to what extent was this impression soundly based?” A subheadline telegraphed its findings: “Things on 43rd Street aren’t as bad as they seem.” The National Review audit examined five developing stories, which it said had a “distinct left-right line,” and concluded: “The Times news administration was so evenhanded that it must have been deeply dismaying to the liberal opposition.” It went on to state that conservatives and other Americans would be far more confident in other media—specifically newsmagazines and television networks—if those media “measured up to the same standard” of fairness. “Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated,” National Review said, “the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.”
This was very much a validation for Rosenthal, and for Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger, who also upheld the tradition of politically agnostic news reporting despite the shrill liberalism of the editorial page and, increasingly, the journalistic activism of a new generation of reporters touched by the lengthening shadow of the counterculture. Indeed, Rosenthal would cite the National Review piece on other occasions when challenged by accusations of political bias at the Times. Even Joseph Lelyveld, who took over the top editor’s job in 1994 and was undoubtedly to the left of Rosenthal, saw need for vigilance. “Abe would always say, with some justice, that you have to keep your hand on the tiller and steer to the right or it’ll drift off to the left.”
It was a priority of the postwar Times to become a national forum for opinion-free, straight news—as has been noted in numerous definitive books about the paper, such as The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times, by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, and Behind the Times: Inside the New York Times, by Edwin Diamond. This goal was accomplished under a succession of larger-than-life editors who were granted great autonomy, as well as unparalleled financial resources, to produce what the Sulzberger family has always considered a quasi-public “trust.” The paper held fast to several principles: ideological agnosticism, a sense of intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, and a respect for neutral recitation of the facts, free of political cant. It was a “theology” of gravitas and objectivity that allowed the Times to ask probing questions and to report often-uncomfortable answers without regard for consequences.
The need to be “straight,” to report the news rather than drive it, was reflected in how the paper covered the Bay of Pigs. Like other news organizations, the Times had most of the details about the impending invasion; in fact, they had become one of the journalism world’s biggest open secrets. But the Times hesitated to print the information since it could endanger the lives of the men landing on the beaches, it would effectively aid Castro, and it would interfere with national policy. In the end, the Times
