[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 63 (Friday, May 19, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E884-E885]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    REMEMBERING A.M. `ABE' ROSENTHAL

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 18, 2006

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, last week the Nation lost a giant in the field 
of journalism when A.M. ``Abe'' Rosenthal passed away at age 84.
  He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent and executive 
editor of the New York Times. After his days directing the newsroom 
were over, he penned the op-ed column, ``On My Mind,'' for the Times 
and later the New York Daily News, a forum from which he championed the 
cause of freedom and human rights.
  As Nicholas Kristof, who won a Pulitzer Prize last month as a Times 
op-ed columnist, said at Mr. Rosenthal's funeral, Abe Rosenthal used 
his column to make matters like human rights violations in China and 
Sudan ``recognizable as issues.''
  ``Abe fought to cure our blind spots, and it worked,'' Mr. Kristof 
said. ``He did indeed teach us to see.''
  Mr. Speaker, I insert for the Record an obituary from The Washington 
Post and an op-ed column by Mr. Rosenthal's son Andrew, a New York 
Times deputy editorial page editor, remembering Abe Rosenthal.

                [From the New York Times, May 17, 2006]

                      I Never Wrote for My Father

                         (By Andrew Rosenthal)

       Funerals have a way of reframing memories. After the burial 
     of my father, A. M. Rosenthal, who ran The Times for nearly 
     20 years and wrote a column for 13 more, I recalled the day I 
     met President George H. W. Bush, not long after I became a 
     White House correspondent.
       I was allowed to sit in on an interview that two of my 
     colleagues, Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman, were doing 
     for a magazine article. The White House told me not to ask 
     questions, but after a while, Mr. Bush said to me, ``You've 
     been quiet.'' I said the interview was supposed to be 
     strictly about the magazine article, but as long as he'd 
     asked, what did he think about the latest development on 
     Lithuania?
       He was angry and would not answer. He said he was ``not 
     gonna be sandbagged in the Oval Office.''
       On the way out, Marlin Fitzwater, Mr. Bush's spokesman, 
     helpfully noted that my introduction to Mr. Bush had gone 
     badly. He explained that Mr. Bush was unhappy with my father 
     for writing in his column that Mr. Bush had appeased the 
     Communists on China and (oh, great!) on Lithuania. ``The 
     president doesn't differentiate between you and your 
     father,'' he said.
       I sputtered that the White House owed me for five years' 
     psychotherapy. I'd only just begun convincing myself I was my 
     own man in my father's field, and now I learned that The 
     Leader of the Free World could not tell us apart?
       It was naive, of course, to think I could hide that little 
     coincidence of a last name. Dad was not just seen as the 
     embodiment of The Times; he saw himself that way. During the 
     tumultuous year 1968, my father said I could not wear an Army 
     fatigue jacket because anti-Vietnam protesters wore them. 
     ``When you go out,'' he said, not for the first or last time, 
     ``you're representing The Times.'' I was 12 years old at the 
     time.
       Still, I tried to walk around as if I were not really Abe's 
     son, first at The Associated Press, where I was a national 
     and foreign correspondent for nine years, and then at The 
     Times. (I even left the middle initial, M., out of my byline 
     because my father's initials were so famous.)
       I started to get the point that hiding in plain sight was 
     not working when I noticed that I hadn't received any checks 
     from WQXR, the Times radio station, for a weekly radio spot. 
     It turns out that WQXR was sending the $70 checks to A. M. 
     Rosenthal, instead of Andrew Rosenthal.
       I called my father, outraged. He had been happily cashing 
     the checks. He said he hadn't known why WQXR was paying him, 
     but ``when someone gives me a check, baby, I cash it.''
       I should have found the whole thing funny, but I didn't. 
     Then about a year later, I got a check for a reprint of my 
     father's classic 1958 essay, ``There Is No News From 
     Auschwitz.'' I sent him a copy of the check stub with a note: 
     ``When someone gives me a check, baby, I cash it.''
       Dad thought it was hilarious. And I've long since realized 
     that I overreacted on the ``Abe's kid'' front. But since my 
     father died, I've realized something else.
       When I read his obituary to my children, their amazement at 
     his accomplishments was matched by my amazement at how much I 
     had forgotten, even discounted. Then colleagues began sharing 
     their experiences of my father.
       They said what I knew, that he could be stubborn, 
     unreasonable and prone to anger. But what they held on was 
     how sure he was in his vision for the paper, how filled with 
     exuberance and a certainty about journalism that he freely 
     bestowed. I received dozens of stories about how he'd shaped 
     a reporter's career, how he'd traveled around the world to 
     get a correspondent out of trouble, how he'd stood up equally 
     to K.G.B. generals and to U.S. officials, how he'd helped 
     young people become better journalists, how he'd changed The 
     Times and the newspaper business.
       Jose Lopez, a photographer and photo editor, said the first 
     time they met, Abe Rosenthal told him, ``Always be the hawk; 
     never be the blackbird that sits on the wire.''
       David Sanger said when he'd been a news clerk laboring to 
     become a reporter, he'd come to his desk one day to find 
     Champagne and a note: ``For an explanation, see the executive 
     editor.'' Abe had promoted David, and wanted to celebrate 
     with him.
       ``I wouldn't argue that he was always the easiest boss,'' 
     David wrote. But, he said, my father ``knew how to infuse you 
     with his sheer joy of reporting and experiencing the world.''
       Alan Cowell recalled how Abe Rosenthal flew to South Africa 
     in 1986 to argue the authorities out of expelling him. John 
     Burns, whose courage is endless, said Abe ``set the 
     trajectory of my life.'' Maureen Dowd reminded me that her 
     mother had kept letters from my father framed in her home 
     until the day she died.
       In an era when journalism is commoditized, digitized and 
     endlessly televised, I feel the loss of that passion, drive, 
     emotion and energy. I also feel regret--not for sometimes 
     pushing my father away as I tried to be independent. I know I 
     was right to wait until he'd retired as executive editor 
     before joining The Times.
       But I missed something big.
       I never got to work for Abe.
                                 ______
                                 

                [From washingtonpost.com, May 11, 2006]

               New York Times Editor A.M. `Abe' Rosenthal

                            (By J.Y. Smith)

       A.M. ``Abe'' Rosenthal, 84, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 
     foreign correspondent who became chief editor of the New York 
     Times and played a key role in modernizing the Gray Lady of 
     American journalism for the new century, died May 10 at Mount 
     Sinai medical center in Manhattan. He had a major stroke two 
     weeks ago.
       Mr. Rosenthal's career at the Times spanned 55 years, from 
     1944, when he began as a cub reporter, to 1999, when he 
     retired as the writer of ``On My Mind,'' a column on the op-
     ed page. When he left the Times, he took his column to the 
     New York Daily News and continued there until 2004.
       In 2002, President Bush conferred on him the Medal of 
     Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, along with 
     Katharine Graham, the late chairwoman of The Washington Post 
     Co.
       A passionate, driven man, Mr. Rosenthal was ruthless in his 
     pursuit of perfection as he saw it and was never entirely 
     satisfied with his own work or that of others. He was a 
     brilliant and visceral judge of the news. He had boundless 
     curiosity about the world. He often viewed it with a sense of 
     outrage--at tyranny, at all forms of injustice and 
     exploitation, at stupidity, incompetence and ``unfairness.''
       His first big break came in 1946, when he got a two-week 
     assignment to cover the United Nations. He stayed on the beat 
     for eight years. His first foreign assignment was India, 
     where he was posted in 1954. He later worked in Poland and 
     Japan, but India retained a special fascination for him. He 
     once traveled 1,500 rugged miles to have a dateline that read 
     ``At the Khyber Pass.''
       In 1958, he moved to Poland and the next year was expelled 
     by the government for delving too deeply into its affairs. In 
     1960, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international 
     reporting for his dispatches from Poland. A story he wrote 
     after visiting the site of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-
     Birkenau in southern Poland has become a classic of 
     journalism.
       ``The most terrible thing of all, somehow, was that at 
     Brzezinka (the Polish name for Birkenau) the sun was bright 
     and warm, the rows of graceful poplars were lovely to look 
     upon and on the grass near the gates children played,'' he 
     wrote.
       ``And so there is no news to report from 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 be a most grievous act of discourtesy 
     to those who died there.''
       In 1963, Mr. Rosenthal was summoned to New York from Tokyo 
     to become metropolitan editor. By 1969, he had become 
     managing editor, and in 1977 he was named executive editor. 
     For 17 years, until 1987, when he became an op-ed columnist, 
     he was responsible for the news operation at the Times.

[[Page E885]]

       (The editorial page at the Times and at some other papers, 
     including The Washington Post, is run by an entirely separate 
     hierarchy that reports directly to the publisher. It is a 
     distinction that remains extremely important to papers where 
     the division is maintained.)
       As a manager, Mr. Rosenthal was said to be abrasive and 
     self-centered. A diminutive, bespectacled figure, he had 
     a volcanic temper. Many found him intimidating. He 
     advanced the careers of many journalists and derailed the 
     careers of others. He was a constant source of friction 
     and controversy in the Times newsroom. Admirers and 
     critics spoke of him with equal fervor.
       Arthur Gelb, a friend of Mr. Rosenthal's who also was the 
     Times's managing editor, once offered this explanation of the 
     Rosenthal character: ``In every field, in every art, if you 
     talk to an artist who has a very keen mind, you will find 
     they are very restless. Anyone who is truly creative has a 
     restlessness and natural impatience with others.''
       There was never any question about Mr. Rosenthal's impact 
     on the Times. He insisted on good writing and sent his 
     reporters on stories that often were ignored by other 
     publications--and might have been missed by the Times except 
     for his guidance.
       He expanded coverage in every direction. The religion page, 
     for example, became a venue for discussion of broad 
     theological and philosophical questions rather than a summary 
     of sermons.
       Reader-friendly stories and features were added and given 
     prominent display. New emphasis was placed on covering sports 
     and the city itself. The daily paper went from two sections 
     to four. The business report became a separate section. 
     SportsMonday, Weekend and Science Times sections were 
     published on different days of the week. Coverage of topics 
     such as food and the arts was expanded.
       At a time when many newspapers in New York and elsewhere in 
     the country were losing readers, the Times's circulation 
     increased and its financial health improved dramatically, due 
     to its expanding national and regional editions.
       Notable stories that Mr. Rosenthal assigned included the 
     case of Kitty Genovese, who was fatally stabbed in her quiet 
     Queens neighborhood. What had started as a brief crime report 
     became a lengthy examination of why 38 people heard her 
     screams for help without helping her or even calling police.
       Mr. Rosenthal wrote a book about the incident, ``Thirty-
     Eight Witnesses,'' in which he raised this question: ``What 
     was the apathy of the people of Austin Street compared, let's 
     say, with the apathy of non-Nazi Germans toward Jews?''
       Another memorable story Mr. Rosenthal ordered was about 
     Daniel Burros, 28, the blond and blue-eyed leader of the Ku 
     Klux Klan in New York and the No. 2 man in the American Nazi 
     Party, headed by George Lincoln Rockwell.
       After the Times wrote about Burros, Mr. Rosenthal got a tip 
     from a friend that Burros was Jewish and had celebrated his 
     bar mitzvah. When a reporter confronted Burros about his 
     past, he said he would kill himself if it was publicized. The 
     next day, the Times carried the story on the front page, and 
     the next night, Burros committed suicide.
       The Times was widely criticized, but Mr. Rosenthal 
     expressed no regrets.
       ``He was who he was, he did what he did, and I no more 
     would feel guilty of saying that a certain person robbed a 
     bank,'' Mr. Rosenthal told an interviewer. ``Was I happy that 
     he killed himself? Of course not. I did not feel that we had 
     done anything but the appropriate thing. It was he who was 
     misappropriating his life, both in what he was doing and how 
     he chose to end it. There were other ways he could have ended 
     it--he could have quit!''
       In 1971, Mr. Rosenthal played an important role in the 
     Times's publication of the Pentagon Papers, a landmark event 
     in the history of journalism. The papers detailed 25 years of 
     U.S. involvement and deception in Vietnam. The archive of 
     several thousand pages was classified as secret, and the 
     management of the Times expected the government to object to 
     the project.
       Mr. Rosenthal, by then the managing editor, put his 
     credibility and career on the line by marshaling the 
     arguments to go ahead anyway. He was supported by then-
     publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.
       On the second day of a planned multipart series, the 
     Justice Department went to court to block publication. There 
     followed two weeks of frantic litigation in courts in New 
     York and Washington and an expedited appeal to the U.S. 
     Supreme Court, in which the Times was joined by The 
     Washington Post. In the end, a divided court affirmed the 
     First Amendment right of the newspapers to bring the 
     information to their readers.
       Mr. Rosenthal regarded his greatest contribution to the 
     Times as his effort to keep the news report ``straight.'' By 
     that he meant free of bias and editorializing on the part of 
     reporters.
       ``I used to tell new reporters: The Times is far more 
     flexible in writing styles than you might think, so don't 
     button up your vest and go all stiff on us,'' he wrote in his 
     farewell column for the Times. ``But when it comes to the 
     foundation--fairness--don't fool around with it, or we will 
     come down on you.''
       Mr. Rosenthal gave up the executive editorship of the Times 
     at the end of 1986 and was succeeded by Max Frankel. His 
     first column on the op-ed page appeared Jan. 6, 1987. His 
     last column for the paper was published Nov. 5, 1999.
       As a columnist, Mr. Rosenthal's subjects ranged from the 
     evils of the drug trade--``helping make criminals and 
     destroying young minds''--to all forms of political, ethnic 
     and religious repression, from China and Tibet to Africa, 
     Europe and the Americas. He had a special interest in the 
     security of Israel and made regular visits to the country.
       Abraham Michael Rosenthal was born in Sault Ste. Marie, 
     Ontario, the fifth child and only son of Harry and Sara 
     Rosenthal. His father was born Harry Shipiatski in 
     Byelorussia (today's Belarus) but took the name Rosenthal 
     from an uncle in London on his way to Canada in 1903.
       He was a trapper and fur trader before moving the family to 
     New York in the early 1930s and settling in the Bronx, where 
     he became a house painter. He died of injuries suffered in a 
     fall from a scaffold when his son was 12.
       As a teenager, Mr. Rosenthal lost his four sisters to 
     various illnesses. He contracted osteomyelitis, a bone 
     disease, and used a cane or crutches. He regained his 
     mobility after being taken in by the Mayo Clinic as a charity 
     patient.
       He attended what was then called City College of New York. 
     Although tuition was free, he used to say, it was more than 
     he could afford. He worked on the school newspaper and was a 
     stringer for the New York Herald Tribune. When the Times 
     stringer at the college was drafted for World War II service 
     in 1943, he took his job. He became a full-time reporter in 
     1944.
       He became a U.S. citizen in 1951. He kept a plaque marking 
     the occasion on his office wall.
       His marriage to Ann Marie Burke Rosenthal ended in divorce.
       Survivors include his wife of 18 years, the writer Shirley 
     Lord Rosenthal, who lives in Manhattan; three sons from his 
     first marriage, Jonathan Rosenthal of Clifton, Daniel 
     Rosenthal of Milford, N.J., and Andrew Rosenthal, a New York 
     Times deputy editorial page editor who lives in Montclair, 
     N.J.; a sister; and four grandchildren.

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