Reflections on Legendary N.Y. Times Editor
“Abe was not politically correct. He didn’t like homosexuals. He was not happy with the feminist movement, and it’s hard for me to pin down how he felt about minorities,” Nan Robertson told Journal-isms today.
Robertson was talking about A.M. Rosenthal, “a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who became the executive editor of the New York Times and led the paper’s global news operations through 17 years of record growth, modernization and major journalistic change,” as Robert D. McFadden reported this morning in the Times. Rosenthal died Wednesday at age 84, two weeks after suffering a stroke.
Robertson, who worked at the Times for 33 years, wrote “The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and the New York Times” in 1992 about the struggle by women for equality in the Times newsroom and in the field. The title refers to the tiny balcony of the then-all-male National Press Club where, until 1971, women reporters had to stand in order to cover world leaders who spoke there. They were not allowed to ask questions of the speakers or have lunch with the men downstairs.
“Typical of his volatile personality, his influence and impact on blacks and me personally were a mix of good and bad,” Paul Delaney, a senior editor at the Times under Rosenthal, said today.
The number of blacks on the paper expanded dramatically while he ran the Times; the paper made its first efforts to hire more than a handful of black journalists, Delaney said. “Anything he was forced to do he did grudgingly; minority and women’s discrimination lawsuits, which he fought,” were brought and settled. The paper began its first summer internship program for minority college students, started a minority copy editing program that produced a number of editors who are still there, and a reporter trainee program that produced some who are still in place. Thomas A. Johnson was named the Times’ first black foreign correspondent; Thomas Morgan became its first black assistant metro editor and Delaney its first black senior editor.
Delaney added that Rosenthal was “a nervous wreck” when invited to address a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in the 1980s, most likely in Dallas in 1986. “He’d never appeared before that many black journalists in his life and he didn’t want to bomb. He fared OK, receiving a nice reception,” Delaney said.
What Rosenthal really cared about, said Robertson,”was excellence. We must keep up standards.” He felt strongly about good writing, as he was a brilliant writer himself, she said.
“The only villain in ‘The Girls in the Balcony’ is Abe Rosenthal,” she said. “It was heartbreaking for me because I know he loved my husband,” Stan Levey, “and he loved me. He is the one who sent me and Flora Lewis to Paris. It wasn’t so much any sympathy for the feminist cause, but he felt that we were very talented.”
McFadden wrote of Rosenthal, “As a reporter and correspondent for 19 years, he covered New York City, the United Nations, India, Poland, Japan and other regions of the world, winning acclaim for his prolific, stylish writing and a Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer was for international reporting in 1960, for what the Communist regime in Poland, which had expelled him the previous year, called probing too deeply.
“Then, returning to New York in 1963, he became an editor. Over the next 23 years, he served successively as metropolitan editor, assistant managing editor, managing editor and executive editor, enlarging his realms of authority by driving his staffs relentlessly, pursuing the news aggressively and outmaneuvering rivals for the executive suite.”
Black journalists who worked under Rosenthal shared these edited observations today:
C. Gerald Fraser, former New York Times reporter and cultural columnist:
“Well, well, A. M. Rosenthal (as his byline read because, reportedly, his full name was thought to sound too ethnic) had to die before some of ‘his’ black reporters could express themselves to one another in one spot â??- Journal-isms â??- about their experiences as his minions. Abe so successfully administered his ‘creative tension’ policy in the N.Y. Times newsroom that only after they passed their probationary period would some new black reporters speak to other black reporters â??- and then, only in the men’s room. At adjacent urinals.
“On Jan. 1, 1966, there were no black reporters on the New York Times staff. There was one photographer, Don Hogan Charles, hired after white staff photographers balked at covering black communities in those riotous days. Don is still there. Several black reporters left the Times during a citywide newspaper strike in 1963. In early 1966, the Times hired Tom Johnson, a year later, Earl Caldwell, and in the summer of â??67, me. I think Rudy Johnson came relatively soon afterward as well as Nancy Hicks and maybe then, Charlayne Hunter. We were, I believe, the last black reporters hired by WASPs — who had run the newspaper since 1861.
“When Abe Rosenthal became the top editor in 1969, Johnson thrived. Tom had a knack for negotiating office politics. (Tom helped me get my job at the Times.) Tom stroked Rosenthal and Rosenthal responded favorably because Tom was a fine journalist. Abe sent Tom to Viet Nam and West Africa. Caldwell, a talented journalist, befuddled Abe and landed in California. And gifted, but lacking interpersonal skills, in the newsroom I stayed out of Abe’s way.
“One thing I learned from Abe: Addressing the audience at a memorial service for a reporter who was his good friend and mine, Abe said, ‘Most people who speak at these things talk about themselves.’ He didn’t, but the very next speaker, another journalist, did, egoism rampant.
“I shared a cab with Abe a few years ago. After retiring from the Times, I worked for the Earth Times, a now-defunct newspaper that focused on United Nations activities. The editor, a fellow former Timesman, had cut his journalistic teeth as Abe’s ‘copy boy.’ Abe and the editor remained close over the years and at various Earth Times affairs Abe was often the editor’s guest. After one occasion in mid-Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal area, Abe and I agreed to share a cab to our respective homes â??- his on the sumptuous Upper East Side, and mine farther north, uptown. The cab reaches Abe’s destination first. He gets out. I wait. The former New York Times executive editor of world renown steps on the sidewalk, and without a backward glance, says, ‘Goodnight, Jerry.’ And, I, Gerald, agape at Abe’s vulgarization of my Christian name and simultaneously, too proud to beg.” [Added May 12.]
Howard W. French, New York Times Shanghai bureau chief:
“I was interviewed and hired by Abe” in 1986, “and given a starting 2-week stint at the United Nations to cover the General Assembly.
“I returned to the newsroom when the GA was over and given a seat far in the back of the newsroom, and within a couple of weeks, Abe was gone – retired. Along with his departure came the reassignment and dispersal of all of the actors who had had anything to do with my recruitment.
“I was less than a nobody in one fell swoop, and it took me a couple of years to climb out of the obscurity into which I was cast. I’ve always wondered what small part the occasionally raw feelings for Abe at that time might have played in my treatment.”
Ernest Holsendolph, retired business writer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
“Abe was a prince. He hired me.
“But two things about him come to mind. When he interviewed me for the job, in 1972, he asked: ‘Ernest, do you have any problem with writing about issues OTHER than black people and their concerns? Most black reporters just want to write about blacks and civil rights . . .” In that computer-fast response black folks must make in such moments I wondered, what the hell is he talking about? What am I SUPPOSED to say? What is going to get me hired? And what do I really believe? As best I can recall after three decades, I said, of course, I am a journalist who is curious about everything, and I delight in discovering and telling people what I learn. He hired me as the first black reporter in the business news department, working for Tom Mullaney. Two brothers were working on the copy desk. And when I left a year or so later to cover the energy crisis in Washington, Reggie Stuart took my place as a writer in the business department.
“Another recollection. Years later, when I was covering transportation in Washington, I happened to be in New York and was allowed to sit in on the afternoon news meeting. Deregulation of the intercity bus industry was at hand, and I suggested a story on the impact on companies like Greyhound and Trailways, so important to lots of people. Abe said, ‘Really? I don’t know anybody who rides buses, do you?’ One of the early confirmations of what we all suspect. What’s in the paper mostly reflects the lives of the editors. It was ever so.”
Roy S. Johnson, sports journalist:
“In 1981, the NY Times then-sports editor, Joe Veccione, had extended me an offer to join the paper as a reporter covering the NBA. I accepted and thought I was in. But there was one more thing: I would have to meet Mr. Rosenthal. (At the time, Abe Rosenthal still approved the hiring of all reporters.) ‘Who?’ I asked. (Hey, I was REAL young!) He made me sit in the sports newsroom while he called the office of the venerable executive editor of the NY Times. ‘Mr. Rosenthal will see you now,’ Veccione said.
“Youth is a wonderful thing. I was too green and naive to know I was meeting not just one of the most powerful and respected journalists in the world, but a true legend. I was too ignorant to be nervous. I was ushered into a library next to his office where, to my surprise, my clips were spread across the table like a deck of cards on a Las Vegas blackjack table.
“I think I may have gulped.
“After a few very long minutes, Mr. Rosenthal walked into the room and began talking. He talked about his experiences as a foreign correspondent. He talked about the paper’s most historic moments. He talked about what it meant to be ‘a Timesman.’
“I kept waiting for him to ask a question. If he did, I don’t recall it or the answer I may have conjured in my haze. This went on for 5 or 50 minutes. I don’t recall that, either.
“What I do recall is that he hardly looked at me as he talked. Though I did feel that he was talking to me. This was NY Times 101 and it was a lecture he’d given many times. When he finished, he paused, took a breath, extended his hand and said, ‘Welcome to the Times.’
“As I returned to the sports department, Veccione stared at me with some apprehension. Apparently, Abe Rosenthal was no rubber stamp and he had sent some previous prospects out the door without the Welcome-to-the-Times handshake. ‘Well?’ Veccione asked.
“I gave my best no-big-deal shrug and offered: ‘He said, “Welcome to the Times.”‘
“Veccione gave me a bear hug. I remained at the Times for six years.” [Added May 12.]
Yanick Rice Lamb, editorial director, Heart & Soul magazine; Howard University lecturer:
“I didn’t have a lot of interaction with him at The Times. He made a point of walking over to me and welcoming me to The Times when I first started and said that he was happy that I was there and that I was greatly needed.
“At the time, I was doing layout (makeup) on the News Desk, which was sort of a very visible, mini-U.N. at the crossroads in the newsroom. We literally had editors from China, Puerto Rico, Ghana, Italy (plus me of Haitian descent) where metro, national and foreign intersected with the ‘blue wall’ (Abe & Co.) behind us.”
Nancy Hicks Maynard, founder-director, Editors’ World, a project to improve coverage of international news in mid-sized media markets:
“Abe was not editor when I joined the NYT in 1968. Clifton Daniel was managing editor and Scotty Reston was executive editor. Today’s obit seemed to go out of its way to emphasize his mercurial and some would say dictatorial ways. He was not at the height of his powers when I was in New York, and it was more difficult to see that behavior from Washington. I think the institution could have been kinder today. Clearly, some folks are still mad.
“I covered education and health care, before moving to the Washington Bureau (sitting next to Ernie Holsendolph and Jim Naughton in what we called the ‘inner city’ of the bureau). I’ve been searching my mind for diversity-related encounters with Abe, but I can’t remember any. He was the editor, and we dealt that way.
“When money got tight in the early 1970s and the newsroom cut back on travel, my immediate editor would scrutinize every trip, invoking Abe’s name. ‘The managing editor said . . .’ I got fairly sick of that fairly quickly, so I asked Abe to clarify the new standard for travel for the national staff. He said he had given no such instructions – only to make certain that each trip had a purpose. Needless to say, everything loosened thereafter.
“During Watergate, I was covering health care. Attorney General John Mitchell’s wife, Martha, was mouthing off in ways embarrassing to the Nixon Administration. They sent her to a private mental hospital to get her off of the national stage. One editor proposed that I try to get admitted to interview her (that would have been easy), and we marched into Abe’s office to get permission. He was livid. ‘New York Times reporters do not misrepresent themselves under any circumstance,’ he said. Makes you wonder about the recent integrity dust ups. No clarion voice like that in the newsroom now.
“And we talked about ballet. NYC Ballet was the premier cultural institution at the time, other than the Metropolitan Opera. George Balanchine was the ‘Abe’ of ballet. I think Abe was new to dance, and he was fascinated by it. I would join Anna Kisselgoff, who was number 2 critic at the time, for performances. One evening, there had been a special program of pieces choreographed to the music of Ravel. He loved the program, and we spent time talking about how the arts attract such a diverse swath of New Yorkers — young and old; rich and poor; evening dress and jeans. It was a window into the great passion of this man, which expressed itself in great ways and destructive ones.”
Ronald Smothers, New York Times reporter:
“Abe’s New York Times:
“I was hired as a reporter at the New York Times in 1972 by Arthur Gelb, then the metropolitan editor. But it was a time when all hires had to be ultimately approved by Abe Rosenthal. The obituary this morning in the Times brought back to me just how contradictory a personality the man was and what those contradictions, when mixed with the institution of the New York Times, wrought. Sometimes it was brilliant, sometimes it was a mess, but it was always fascinating.
“I came to the paper at a time when newspapers were being dragged kicking and screaming into an era when they had to diversify their staffs and hire minorities in order to accurately cover one of the main stories of the day. It was a time when they had to diversify or lose the moral high ground that papers such as the Times had staked out in editorially criticizing other sectors of the society that doggedly remained lily white. So it was under Abe Rosenthal that the Times came to grips with this new reality.
“But it was also the time when black employees rose up and sued the paper, contending that its efforts at diversity were meager and lacked real commitment to promoting newly hired minorities to prime news beats and editor’s posts. Mr. Rosenthal found himself somewhat besieged by this new and talented crop of black workers who were understandably impatient to move up and on at the paper in the ways that whites seemed to move up and on.
“But since the institution itself was dominated by a patronage management approach and social interaction in which one’s closeness to and acceptance by Mr. Rosenthal determined advancement, movement was always restricted by a black reporter’s ability to win that patronage. And like most large business institutions in the seventies, blacks often found it hard to be seen as trusted or seen as having anything in common with top newsroom managers that would create a basis for social interaction. We were from another world, despite our Ivy League pedigrees that were every bit as fulsome as our white colleagues’.
“To be sure, I and many of my black colleagues got the opportunity to cover news of black folks and black issues that might not have ordinarily gotten into the paper. And for this Mr. Rosenthal deserves much credit. But all of this was tinged with a sense of our ‘otherness,’ which suggested that we and indeed the news surrounding black issues would always remain on the fringe of the newspaper’s real business. Mr. Rosenthal once regaled me and others with his sense of the key to covering Harlem. He said it should be covered as if it were a foreign country. This spoke volumes about how he and the Times as an institution at that time may have viewed news about minorities: as something alien, exotic and unintegrate-able into the fabric of the paper’s traditional domestic political, public policy and economic news coverage.
“It was partly because of this view, I believe, that it was difficult for many black reporters to move seamlessly into the paper’s prime areas of coverage â?? areas where careers were made and the ranks of the promotable were created. The Times under Mr. Rosenthal did not have its first black City Hall bureau chief until 1979. Black reporters were not introduced as regulars on the national political coverage of presidential campaigns until 1984. Again, because Mr. Rosenthal so dominated what did and did not happen at the paper, both the fact that these things did happen as well as the slow pace at which they happened must be laid at his feet.
“Throughout his tenure, black staffers at the paper were able to flicker brightly and brilliantly for a time, but none burned intensely for a significant period of time. It will be a long time before any of us will have the perspective to know whether this was the consequence of his dominant personality and personal management style, the vagaries of large institutions such as the Times when it comes to issues of race or a combination of both of these.”
Reginald Stuart, Knight Ridder recruiter:
“Abe Rosenthal hired me in the winter of 1974.
“We had an interview of about an hour. He asked me some tough questions about how I would change his paper if I could. As I answered, I could feel myself bombing. Toward what would be the end of our interview, he offered me a job. I was surprised. I asked what did he want me to do? Business reporter, he said. I explained I had not done any business writing of substance in the nearly five years I had been reporting. He said, not to worry, ‘you’ll learn the jargon.’ We then talked about when I would start. He said he didn’t care when I started, he just wanted to know I would start. So, we talked about work I had in progress and quickly agreed on a start date. I told him I don’t take jobs to fail and I would not fail in this one. He said ‘good’ and that was it. That was the beginning of a 13-year run with the Times, most of which I enjoyed, all of which I spent learning much about myself and journalism and the nation.
“From my initial contact with Abe Rosenthal I learned two things: 1) You do not need a roster of people to interview prospects, just one person empowered and willing to make a decision and take risks. Also, you do not have to be an expert in the field about which you want to write. You only need the passion to pursue it with vigor and a commitment to succeed. Abe realized that and assured me that was all I needed to start as a business writer. He recognized I had the spark, even if I didn’t have the smarts.
“Abe was cherished by many and despised by many, depending on what mood he was in on any given day and whether you were in or out of favor with him. The day he fired my boss and his longtime colleague, business editor Tom Mullaney, I learned how cold the world of work could be and how tough a job he had. I realized he made a hundred or more decisions a day just as tough as that one and to do that year in and year out required a special kind of talent, a special love for this business and, probably more than he wanted himself, a cold heart. He was a great journalist, a risk taker who nurtured my career and a phenomenal leader.
“Abe did a lot to make sure the King’s English was respected. He had postings on his editor’s cork board from time to time railing about some corruption of the English language that had crept into the paper. He reminded me of my high school English teacher, Mildred Freeman, and reinforced the message to me that language, and correct use of it, was very important to communicating effectively. After reading one of Abe’s blowups, I got more serious about my writing, even though the criticism wasn’t aimed at anything I wrote. I just `got the memo’ and knew I didn’t want to be on the board for that reason.”
Roger Wilkins, Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History and American Culture, George Mason University:
“When I left New York to join the editorial page staff of the Washington Post in February 1972, I was to become the first working black member of that staff. The Times had no blacks. On my first day at the Post, my phone rang and it was Abe, with whom I was moderately friendly. He started right in: ‘Why did you go there? Why didn’t you come here? You’ve got a lot of friends here.’
“‘Two reasons, Abe,’ I replied. ‘They asked me. You didn’t.’
“Abe made a sound, ‘Unh,’ and hung up.”
