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“REMEMBERING A.M. `ABE' ROSENTHAL” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E884-E885 on May 19, 2006.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
REMEMBERING A.M. `ABE' ROSENTHAL
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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.
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.
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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.
(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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