Fit to Print: A.M. Rosenthal and His Times
Goulden, Joseph C.
BOOK REVIEWS EEven in its bare outlines, the life of A. M. Rosenthal would seem to offer promising material for a biographer. Born in Canada to immigrant Russian Jews, Abe Rosenthal grew up in the...
...At a meeting requested by a group of reporters who wanted to complain about his way of editing, Rosenthal told one: "You were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize...
...They give you an illusion.' " To judge by the other anecdotes Goulden tells, this is vintage Rosenthal: sharp, tough, direct...
...In later years, writes Goulden, Sulzberger would sigh deeply, saying, " 'The New York Times run by that man?' He would then shake his head slowly and wrinkle his nostrils, as if something unpleasant were around...
...In fact, the main, if unstated, complaint against him is neither FIT TO PRINT: A.M...
...This episode should give some idea of how much courage it took for Abe Rosenthal to struggle with his reporters and editors, and with the rest of the media as well, and not only survive for forty-odd years but flourish...
...In 1958, for example, when he was sent as a correspondent to Warsaw, Rosenthal and his wife were given a party by Sydney Gruson, the departing correspondent and a Times veteran...
...THE AMERICAN FOUNDATION FOR RESISTANCE INTERNATIONAL 6 East 39th Street Suite 1209 New York, New York 10016 AFGHANISTAN THE TERRIBLE DECADE 1978 - 1988 Curtis Cate, Editor A TIMELY REFERENCE HANDBOOK An overview of the Soviet Union's failed conquest against a background of 20 centuries of Afghan history...
...The opinions expressed here are his own...
...When he didn't like a piece, he would call the reporter and tell him how to fix it, adding that if he couldn't do it, there was always somebody else around who could...
...Please send me copy(ies) of AFGHANISTAN - THE TERRIBLE DECADE 1978 - 1988...
...Indeed, Goulden displays a feeling of superiority to Rosenthal throughout, and, apart from a few pro forma acknowledgments of his talents as a reporter and editor, writes about him with undisguised contempt...
...Rosenthal accepted instantly, quitting college to embark on what was to become one of the most successful careers in American journalism...
...At the same time, however, Rosenthal clearly had misgivings about Hersh...
...The ostensible reason for his loathing is the same as that offered by the dozens of Times employees, current and former, named and anonymous, who served as Goulden's primary source of information and with whose collective point of view he completely identifies himself...
...He himself had contracted osteomyelitis, an agonizing and crippling infection of the bone marrow...
...When he showed up, the city editor said he had been rejected by the Times's medical department, but he could be hired as a temporary employee, without insurance or benefits...
...Price $7.50 ea...
...Born in Canada to immigrant Russian Jews, Abe Rosenthal grew up in the Bronx section of New York City...
...W hat, then, lies behind it...
...At a friend's suggestion, he tried out for the college newspaper and discovered he had a talent for journalism...
...To such sentiments Goulden gives his unmistakable assent, adding his own unflattering references to Rosenthal's unkempt appearance, bad manners, and untoward ambitiousness...
...Although it was later revealed that Israeli pilots had carried out their bombing runs in ways designed to minimize civilian casualties, Goulden presents Friedman's complaint as though it were valid...
...It was wartime and the paper was short-handed...
...Unlike most of his colleagues, both inside and outside the Times, Rosenthal usually seemed to know when he had a story that didn't pass muster...
...Just prior to the arrival of a group of female editors, Rosenthal turned to the men around him and said, "OK, now let's bring in the cupcakes...
...During his brief tenure as executive editor and Rosenthal's boss, Reston came up with the idea of establishing a special corps of Ivy League-educated correspondents who would be accountable only to him and would operate separately from the Times newsroom, which Rosenthal controlled...
...As an editor, he had a clear idea of the kind of stories he wanted and of how they should be written...
...For postage & handling, add $1.50 for first copy and $0.50 for each additional copy...
...Other people stopped speaking to him...
...The article provoked a wave of denunciation in the national press, with newspapers across the country accusing the Times of "favoritism" on the grounds that Kosinski and Rosenthal were friends...
...Published by THE AMERICAN FOUNDATION FOR RESISTANCE INTERNATIONAL...
...This meeting took place in the late 1960s, at a time when Rosenthal was forcefully resisting pressure to abandon the paper's traditional standards in favor of what was being called the "new journalism...
...One day he asked the Times's city editor what his chances might be of getting a full-time job...
...mean drunk or sober...
...While there is, to be sure, much to criticize in the way Rosenthal handled the Times until his retirement as executive editor in 1986, Goulden's book is not a serious attempt to come to grips with such matters...
...Sulzberger, who was called in to straighten things out, decided that Rosenthal was not the sort who could be permitted to represent the New York Times in a foreign capital, and for the next five years he used his power on the paper to prevent Rosenthal from getting an overseas assignment...
...A valuable resource tool for all concerned with public affairs and current history...
...As this incident suggests, Rosenthal tried to resist the radicalization of the American media that began in the late 1960s and proceeded apace in the years that followed...
...In response, the Times, at Rosenthal's behest, ran a lengthy piece that not only refuted the Voice's charges but showed they were part of a disinformation campaign being waged against Kosinski by Polish intelligence...
...Bulk orders 10 or more $6.00 ea...
...As Daniel Schorr related the incident to Goulden: "Sydney began expounding about the liberal atmosphere in Poland, and how 'this is really becoming a liberal society, withfreedom of speech.' Abe cut him short...
...Contributed by the world's leading experts...
...Bulk orders 10 or more, $6.00 ea...
...mean justly or unjustly...
...From these office stories, thoughtful readers can get some idea of what Rosenthal believes and why he has been so successful...
...Soon he was hustling stories as a campus stringer, first for the New York Herald Tribune, then for the New York Times...
...ROSENTHAL AND HIS TIMES Joseph C. Goulden/Lyle Stuart/$21.95 Steven C. Munson THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 35 social nor personal...
...Their complaint, or so they have told Goulden in a seemingly infinite number of ways, is that Abe Rosenthal was mean: mean as a colleague or as a superior or as asubordinate...
...Goulden unwittingly makes this clear—just as, with the same inadvertence, he illuminates the true character and personality of his subject—through the numerous anecdotes he tells about Rosenthal's conflicts over the years with his reporters and editors...
...how, as a correspondent in India and Poland in the 1950s, he established a reputation as a gifted writer of feature stories and political analysis...
...mean as an enemy or as a friend...
...A must for the classroom...
...he was told to report for work in two weeks...
...Unfortunately, in telling this story, Goulden shows very little appreciation for his subject...
...Including Alexandre Bennigsen, Michael Barry, Rosanne Klass, Anthony Hyman, Rawan Farhadi, Chantal Lobato, Abdul Hakim Tabibi...
...Thus saved from becoming a cripple, Abe finished high school and attended the City College of New York...
...Name...
...Price $7.50 ea...
...To another, he was even harsher: "You were a failure when we sent you to Brazil...
...The paper carried you, andsaved you, and here you are, bitching about editors...
...A concise chronology of the terrible decade with facts and dates...
...H e is, first and foremost, a man who has a mind of his own and isn't afraid to speak it...
...By book's end, Goulden is describing how he sat in the apartment of Rosenthal's former mistress and helped her plot her revenge...
...In the prologue he announces that Abe Rosenthal is "not a very likeable human being," and this statement sets the tone for what follows...
...Reston later remarked, in referring to the incident, that Rosenthal "wanted something more than I did, and he got it...
...When he was a teenager, his father was seriously injured while working as a house painter...
...According to Goulden, David Halberstam, a long-time acquaintance of Corry's, stopped him in the lobby of the Times building and, shaking his fist at Corry, said, "How could you...
...ORDER COUPON...
...Sulzberger, who for many years was the Times's foreign affairs columnist, took an instant dislike to Rosenthal when he was still a young reporter covering the U.N...
...That it was this offense that so infuriated Rosenthal's critics was made plain by the treatment meted out to the author of the article, John Corry...
...If some of Rosenthal's critics see in him only the grasping and vulgar Jew of their intolerant imaginations—and such refined and highly assimilated Jews as C. L. Sulzberger are by no means unsympathetic to this attitude—others find him objectionable simply because he feels no need to apologize for his ambition or for doing what was necessary to achieve it...
...When Rosenthal heard about the scheme, he confronted Reston and forced him to abandon it...
...After a series of botched treatments, he borrowed money to travel to the Mayo Clinic, where doctors performed, without payment, an operation that lasted eighteen hours...
...He was not always successful...
...but, in any case, mean...
...In 1982, the Village Voice published an article alleging that the Polish emigre novelist Jerzy Kosinski was a literary fraud supported by the CIA...
...In the case of Seymour Hersh, for example, and his various "exposes" of the CIA, Rosenthal let his desire to beat the competition get the better of his judgment...
...Address...
...Ultimately, however, social or personal prejudice goes only so far in explaining the hostility toward Abe Rosenthal...
...Either way, the hostility of Rosenthal's critics leads them to downplay or obscure the fact that the story of his life—which is the story of a rise from humble origins to a position of power, fame, and wealth—is a typical fulfillment of the American dream...
...The politics of the various resistance factions explained...
...You would never have been nominated if Jerry Gold [a copy editor] hadn't worked on your stories...
...I enclose my check for $ Made payable to The American Foundation for Resistance International and mail it to 6 East 39th Suite 1209, New York, NY 10016...
...How could you...
...Foreword by Sidney Hook...
...I f Abe Rosenthal won few friends for trying to be fair-minded in covering Israel, he perhaps earned the most enemies for the way he handled an altogether different issue: Communism...
...The story of this career is told by Joseph Goulden in Fit to Print: A. M Rosenthal and His Times...
...Sydney, they don't have freedom of speech—they have freedom of talking, that's all...
...Present and future outlook...
...Now this complaint, to anyone who has ever worked for a large organization in the business of gathering news, will sound both familiar and absurd...
...During a trip to Paris, where Sulzberger was based, Rosenthal made a scene in a hotel over some traveler's checks thathad been stolen from his room...
...This charge, however, was simply a blind for the real objection—which was that Rosenthal had used his newspaper to point out the truth about the behavior of Communists...
...In truth, of course, what Rosenthal was trying to do in the Times's reporting on Lebanon was to maintain decent journalistic standards at a time when the rest of the American media were engaged in a frenzy of anti-Israel reportage and commentary...
...Corry's colleague Harrison Salisbury cut him dead...
...By the time Abe was eighteen, four of his five older sisters had died as well, one of them in childbirth...
...editor and executive editor, he carried out a transformation of the entire paper that saved it from financial ruin...
...It is mainly a rehash of the same criticisms of Rosenthal that have been making the rounds in journalistic and literary circles for the past couple of decades...
...he languished for three years before he died...
...In part the anti-Rosenthal animus springs from a certain social attitude, best exemplified in Goulden's book by the figure of C. L. Sulzberger...
...Sulzberger's disdain was shared by another, to use Goulden's word, "gentleman" of the New York Times, James "Scotty" Reston...
...Being mean distinguishes Abe Rosenthal hardly at all, and therefore cannot be the real cause of the animosity directed against him...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989...
...Confident of his own instincts and judgment, Rosenthal was not a man to back down...
...The family was poor...
...That's pretty much the story of Rosenthal's professional life, isn't it...
...Short biographies of the leading personalities on both sides...
...During the 1982 Lebanon war, Thomas Friedman, in one of his dispatches from Beirut, described an Israeli bombing raid as "indiscriminate...
...Goulden recounts how, as a young city reporter, Rosenthal got a scoop on Andrei Gromyko that landed him his first big assignment, covering the United Nations...
...It is hard to dislike a man who has the insouciance to talk that way these days...
...In 1968, he fought with Harrison Salisbury, a Times eminence, over coverage of the violence-ridden Democratic National Convention, demanding time and again that editors change copy to "take out the goddamned editorializing...
...When Salisbury complained to Rosenthal that he was "cutting the guts out of our stories," Rosenthal replied, "No I'm not, I'm trying to make them honest...
...In that time, and despite the persistent attacks, Abe Rosenthal has refused to be intimidated either by the gentlemen of the press or by the left-wing orthodoxy that has long since taken the place of serious or independent thought among them...
...familiar because there are so many against whom it has been lodged, and absurd because it is so widely accepted that behaving like an SOB is often, or sometimes, necessary simply to get people to do what they're supposed to do...
...how in the early 1960s he was picked to be metropolitan editor and given the task of revitalizing the Times's approach to reporting and writing news...
...He claims that Rosenthal, as a Jew who strongly supported Israel, expected his Middle East correspondents to follow "implicit marching orders" to shield "Israel from the probing criticisms directed at other countries...
...Goulden notes that Rosenthal used to greet the reporter with a pat on the back and the words, "Well, well, how's my little commie today?'a remark that reveals no small degree of anxiety about the kind of articles Hersh was writing and he, Rosenthal, was allowing into print...
...it is political...
...He has resisted, moreover, with an admirable elan and sense of humor, perhaps best illustrated by a story Goulden tells about a staff meeting Rosenthal held in 1985...
...As he once told someone, Hersh "is like a puppy that isn't quite housebroken, but as long as he's pissing on [Washington Post editor] Ben Bradlee's carpet, let him go...
...Goulden also quotes Sulzberger as saying, in regard to a run-in he had with Rosenthal in the 1970s, "Yapping little dogs should be kicked, not heeded...
...Edited by Curtis Cate...
...when the word was cut from his story, he publicly complained, provoking charges of censorship against the Times...
...and how, in the 1970s, as managing Steven C Munson, who worked for the New York Times Magazine from 1980 to 1981, is director of policy at the Voice of America...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
