A. M. Rosenthal
Abraham Michael "Abe" Rosenthal (May 2, 1922 – May 10, 2006) was an American journalist who served as The New York Times executive editor from 1977 to 1986. Previously he was the newspaper's metropolitan editor and managing editor. Following his tenure as executive editor, he became a columnist (1987–1999). Later, he had a column for the New York Daily News (1999–2004).
He joined the newspaper in 1943 and remained at the Times for 56 years, to 1999. Rosenthal won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for international reporting.[1] As an editor at the newspaper, Rosenthal oversaw the coverage of numerous major news stories including the escalation of the United States military's involvement in the Vietnam War (1961–1975), the New York Times scoop of the Pentagon Papers (1971), and events that were part of the Watergate scandal (1972–1974). Rosenthal was instrumental in the paper's coverage of the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder case, which established the concept of the "bystander effect", but later came to be regarded as flawed and not credible.
Together with Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, he was the first Westerner to visit a Soviet Gulag camp in 1988. His son, Andrew Rosenthal, was The New York Times editorial page editor from 2007 to 2016. His eldest son, Jonathan Rosenthal, is a retired physician who specialized in infectious diseases. His middle son, Daniel, is a retired financial executive who now owns a horse farm.
Early years[edit]
Rosenthal was born on May 2, 1922, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, to a Jewish family. His father, Harry Shipiatsky, was a farmer who immigrated to Canada from Poland in the 1890s and changed his name to Rosenthal. He also worked as a fur trapper and trader around Hudson Bay, where he met and married Sarah Dickstein.[1][2][3]
The youngest of six children, he was still a child when his family moved to the Bronx, New York, where Rosenthal's father found work as a house painter. During the 1930s, though, tragedy hit the family when Rosenthal's father died in a job accident and four of his siblings died from various causes.[1]
According to his son, Andrew, he was a member of the Communist Party youth league briefly as a teenager in the late 1930s.[4]
Rosenthal developed the bone-marrow disease osteomyelitis, causing him extreme pain and forcing him to drop out of DeWitt Clinton High School. After several operations at the Mayo Clinic, Rosenthal recovered enough to finish public schools in New York City and attend the City College of New York.[1] At City College, Rosenthal wrote for the student newspaper, The Campus,[5] and in 1943, while still a student, became the campus correspondent for The New York Times.[1] In February 1944, he became a staff reporter there.[1]
International reporting and Pulitzer Prize[edit]
Rosenthal was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times for much of the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1954, he was assigned to New Delhi and reported from across South Asia. His writings from there were honored by the Overseas Press Club and Columbia University.[1] In 1958, The New York Times transferred him to Warsaw, where he reported on Poland and Eastern Europe. In 1959, Rosenthal was expelled from Poland after writing that the Polish leader, Władysław Gomułka, was "moody and irascible" and had been "let down—by intellectuals and economists he never had any sympathy for anyway, by workers he accuses of squeezing overtime out of a normal day's work, by suspicious peasants who turn their backs on the government's plans, orders and pleas."[1]
Rosenthal's expulsion order stated that the reporter had "written very deeply and in detail about the internal situation, party and leadership matters. The Polish government cannot tolerate such probing reporting." For his reporting from Eastern Europe, Rosenthal won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for international reporting.[1]
Political views[edit]
Rosenthal supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and openly suggested that the United States should give Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Sudan an ultimatum and order the countries to deliver documents and information related to weapons of mass destruction and terrorist organizations. Otherwise, "in the three days the terrorists were considering the American ultimatum, the residents of the countries would be urged 24 hours a day by the U.S. to flee the capital and major cities, because they would be bombed to the ground beginning the fourth day."[14]
Rosenthal was criticized as being homophobic and curtailing coverage of issues about and relating to gay people, including the early years of the AIDS epidemic.[15][16]
Later career[edit]
Rosenthal had a weekly column at the New York Daily News following his run as a columnist at the Times until 2004.[1]