A. M. Rosenthal

Was for a time a correspondent in Japan for The New York Times magazine

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, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 84.

His death, at Mount Sinai Medical Center, came two weeks after he suffered a stroke, his son Andrew said. Mr. Rosenthal lived in Manhattan.

From ink-stained days as a campus correspondent at City College through exotic years as a reporter in the capitals and byways of Europe, Asia and Africa, Mr. Rosenthal climbed on rungs of talent, drive and ambition to the highest echelons of The Times and American journalism.

Brilliant, passionate, abrasive, a man of dark moods and mercurial temperament, he could coolly evaluate world developments one minute and humble a subordinate for an error in the next. He spent almost all of his 60-year career with The Times — he often called it his life — but it was a career in three parts: reporter, editor and columnist. Continue reading the main story

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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.

After being named managing editor in 1969, Mr. Rosenthal was briefly outranked by James B. Reston, the executive editor. But Mr. Reston soon accepted a vice presidency, Mr. Rosenthal assumed command of news operations, and the executive editorship was dropped until 1977, when Mr. Rosenthal took the title.

At the helm of a staff of highly regarded editors and writers that included many young stars he had recruited, Mr. Rosenthal directed coverage of the major news stories of the era — the war in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandal and successive crises in the Middle East.

Publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was a historic achievement for The Times. The papers, a 7,000-page secret government history of the Vietnam War, showed that every administration since World War II had enlarged America's involvement while hiding the true dimensions of the conflict. But publishing the classified documents was risky: Would there be fines or jail terms? Would readers consider it treasonous? Would it lead to financial ruin for the paper?

The Nixon administration tried to suppress publication, and the case led to a landmark Supreme Court decision upholding the primacy of the press over government attempts to impose "prior restraint" on what may be printed. Major roles were played by Times staff members, among them Neil Sheehan, the correspondent who had uncovered the papers. But it was Mr. Rosenthal as editor, arguing strenuously for publication, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher, who made the crucial decisions.

Despite the crisis atmosphere, there were some light moments. In an oft-told tale, Mr. Sulzberger recalled that when he told Mr. Rosenthal he wanted to read the Pentagon documents before deciding whether to publish them, Mr. Rosenthal, with barely concealed glee, wheeled a grocery cart containing the papers into the publisher's office.

After 17 years as a principal architect of the modern New York Times, Mr. Rosenthal stepped down as the top editor in 1986 as he neared his job's mandatory retirement age of 65. Mr. Sulzberger said at the time that Mr. Rosenthal's "record of performance as executive editor of The Times will last as a monument to one of the titans of American journalism."

He then began the last phase of his Times career, nearly 13 years as the author of a twice-weekly column, "On My Mind," for the Op-Ed page. His first column, on Jan. 6, 1987, and his last, on Nov. 5, 1999, carried the same headline, which he wrote: "Please Read This Column."

As that injunction implied, the columns reflected his passions and what he saw as a personal relationship with readers. He addressed a range of foreign and domestic topics with a generally conservative point of view. But there were recurring themes — his support for Israel and its security, his outrage over human rights violations in China and elsewhere, his commitment to political and religious freedoms around the world, and his disgust at failures in America's war on drugs.

It was an assignment he relished, and he surrendered it reluctantly. He said in an interview with The Washington Post that Arthur Sulzberger Jr., by then the publisher of The Times, had told him "it was time."

"What that means, I don't know," he said, adding, "I didn't expect it at all."

He left, but he did not retire. "I've seen happier days," he said, cleaning out his office, adding, "I want to remain a columnist." In February 2000, he began an untitled weekly column for The Daily News that reflected his increasingly conservative convictions and continued until 2004.

Under the Microscope

Perhaps more than those of any editor in modern times, Mr. Rosenthal's life and career were chronicled closely, and his personal traits and private and professional conduct were dissected and analyzed with fascination in gossip and press columns, in magazines and books, and in the newsrooms and bars where those who had worked for or against him told their tales of admiration and woe.

The extraordinary interest was rooted only partly in the methods, achievements and faults of a powerful figure in journalism; it came, too, from the man himself: a table-pounding, globe-trotting adventurer who shattered the stereotype of the genteel Times editor with his gut fighter's instincts and his legendary bouts of anger.

Canadian-born, reared in poverty in the Bronx, he had a childhood scarred by the deaths of his father and four of his five sisters, and by a disease that crippled his legs for a year, forced him to drop out of high school and left him a teenage charity patient. Friends later called it a hard beginning for a life of struggle.

A gravel-voiced, jowly man with a tight smile, a shock of black hair parted vaguely on the left and judgmental gray-green eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, he was regarded by colleagues as complex, often contradictory. Not least, he saw himself as the guardian of tradition at The Times; but he presided over more changes than any editor in the paper's history.

He often spoke of keeping the paper "straight," and was tigerish in defense of high standards of reporting and editing, which called for fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, causes, political agendas, innuendo and unattributed pejorative quotations.

As managing editor from 1969 to 1977 and as executive editor until 1986, he guided The Times through a remarkable transformation that brightened its sober pages, expanded news coverage, introduced new production technology, launched a national edition, won new advertisers and tens of thousands of new readers, and raised the paper's sagging fortunes to unparalleled profitability.

Time for Change

By the end of the 1960's, The Times, despite a distinguished journalistic history, had a clouded future. Its reporting and writing were widely regarded as thorough but ponderous. Revenues were declining, profits were marginal, circulation was stagnant, and some studies said The Times might be doomed in the age of television to join a dozen New York newspapers in the elephant graveyard.

Mr. Rosenthal's objective, often stated in memos to the staff and in public comments, was a delicate one: to forge dramatic changes in The Times, to erase a stodgy image with a new look and to improve readability and profitability — all this while maintaining the essential character of the newspaper.

Many innovations during Mr. Rosenthal's tenure are familiar components of today's Times. He expanded the weekday paper from two to four parts, including separate metropolitan and business news sections, and inaugurated new feature sections for weekdays: SportsMonday, Science Times on Tuesdays, the Living section on Wednesdays, the Home section on Thursdays and Weekend on Fridays.

Critics said the feature sections undercut The Times's reputation for serious reporting, and some called articles on gourmet cooking and penthouse deck furniture elitist in an age of homelessness and poverty. But defenders said the sections usurped no space from regular news and brightened the paper's tone. The innovations, highly popular with readers and advertisers, were copied by many newspapers across the country.

Mr. Rosenthal also redesigned most of the Sunday feature sections; started suburban weeklies for New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island and Westchester County; and began a series of Sunday magazine supplements that focused on business, travel, home entertainment, leisure activities, education, fashion, health and other subjects.

The Sunday innovations drew a similarly split critical reaction — defended as stylish and colorful, disparaged as distractions from important news. But most were also popular with readers and advertisers, and the supplements became sources of large advertising income.

In 1980, Mr. Rosenthal also began a national edition of The Times, an abridged version of the regular newspaper that was distributed originally in Chicago and other Midwest cities and has since extended its reach nationwide. The national edition's pages today are beamed by satellite from New York to plants across the country, where they are printed for same-day regional distribution.

Expanding general news coverage, Mr. Rosenthal enlarged the foreign and national news staffs and the Washington bureau, and pressed local reporting out into the suburbs of New York. Winning Pulitzer Prizes, sometimes two or three at a time, became annual events for the staff under the Rosenthal stewardship; The Times and its staff members won 24 Pulitzers during his years as editor.

Ad and Circulation Growth

While many newspapers were struggling to redefine themselves and stay alive, The Times prospered under the presiding team of Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Rosenthal. Lines of advertising rose to 118 million in 1986 from 87 million in 1969. Circulation increases in the same period were more modest — up 80,000 daily to one million, and up 112,000 on Sundays to 1.6 million — but most of the gains were made among higher-income readers, enabling The Times to raise its advertising rates and its profitability.

Revenues of The New York Times Company soared nearly sevenfold, to $1.6 billion in 1986 from $238 million in 1969, while net income in the same period rose to $132 million from $14 million.

As executive editor, Mr. Rosenthal, assisted by top lieutenants, including the managing editor Seymour Topping and the deputy managing editor Arthur Gelb, who was Mr. Rosenthal's closest friend and confidant, decided which articles would appear on Page 1 and what emphasis each would be given. His decisions thus helped shape the perceptions not only of millions of readers but also of government and corporate policy makers and news editors across the country.

Mr. Rosenthal came to be regarded in government, in business, in the arts and in professional journalistic circles as the most influential newspaper editor in the nation, perhaps the world, with only Benjamin C. Bradlee, his counterpart at The Washington Post, as a possible rival.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Rosenthal consolidated his authority over The Times's sprawling news and feature operations, ending the relative independence of the Sunday sections and of the paper's Washington bureau. He eventually assumed responsibility for all material published in the daily and Sunday Times — everything but editorials, Op-Ed articles and advertising.

Throughout Mr. Rosenthal's years as editor, press critics chronicled his rising fortune and the growing success of The Times. But they also described Mr. Rosenthal personally and as an administrator in generally unflattering terms and characterized his staff as rife with grumbling and low morale.

Wielding enormous power to hire, reward and transfer subordinates, he personally approved all news staff promotions, raises and major assignments, shaping the pyramid of personnel under him and approving all major appointments to local news beats and to national and foreign bureaus. In the process, he made and broke the careers and dreams of scores of reporters and editors. Among those whose careers flourished under Mr. Rosenthal were two future executive editors of The Times, Joseph Lelyveld and Bill Keller, who now holds the title, and Anna Quindlen, the author and former Times columnist. In a newsroom atmosphere suffused with Mr. Rosenthal's tempestuous personality, there were stormy outbursts in which subordinates were berated for errors, reassigned for failing to meet the editor's expectations or sidetracked to lesser jobs for what he regarded as disloyalty to The Times. Others, meanwhile, won promotions, raises and access to his inner circle.

Supporters of Mr. Rosenthal said his news and staff decisions were always journalistically defensible. His defenders insisted that his standards were necessarily high and that many staff members who objected to his style or opposed his decisions had themselves failed to measure up.

A Stormy Wake

His critics, however, said that it was loyalty to the editor, not to The Times, that counted, and that many of Mr. Rosenthal's decisions to shuffle assignments or break careers were made in fits of anger. They also blamed what they called his combative and imperious style for many resignations, including those of some highly regarded reporters and editors, from a staff that in former days had rarely lost members except to retirement or death.

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Max Frankel, who initially lost out to Mr. Rosenthal in the competition to become executive editor but who later succeeded him in that post, assessed his predecessor in a memoir, "The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times," published in 1999, five years after his own retirement. One chapter was titled "Not-Abe," a reference to Mr. Frankel's belief that one of his tasks as executive editor was to set a more collegial tone in the news department.

"Abe Rosenthal left the newsroom with a reputation for brilliant, instinctive news judgment coupled with an intimidating, self-centered management style," he wrote. "Most of his values were admirable, and many of his tactics were therefore forgivable." But Mr. Frankel added: "His innermost judgments of people depended not just on their value to The Times but on their regard for him and his ideas."

The book began a public feud. Outraged by his successor's evaluation, Mr. Rosenthal, in interviews, belittled Mr. Frankel's tenure, and in an article in Vanity Fair ridiculed his observations and even his professionalism.

Friends said that Mr. Rosenthal had often wondered aloud at the enmity he aroused and that he sometimes expressed hope that his detractors would someday see his objectives and the best interests of The Times as synonymous.

On the day his last "On My Mind" column appeared, The Times, in a rare gesture, devoted an editorial to Mr. Rosenthal's achievements. "His strong, individualistic views and his bedrock journalistic convictions have informed his work as a reporter, editor and columnist," it said. "And his commitment to journalism as an essential element in a democratic society will abide as part of the living heritage of the newspaper he loved and served for more than 55 years."

At a White House ceremony on July 9, 2002, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, to Mr. Rosenthal and 11 others, including Nelson R. Mandela, Nancy Reagan, baseball's Hank Aaron, the tenor Plácido Domingo and Katharine Graham, the late chairwoman of The Washington Post.

Son of a Trapper

Abraham Michael Rosenthal was born on May 2, 1922, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the son of Harry and Sarah Dickstein Rosenthal, both natives of Byelorussia. His father, born Harry Shipiatsky, was a farmer who migrated to Canada in the 1890's, changed his name to Rosenthal and later became a fur trapper and trader in the Hudson Bay area.

The Rosenthals had six children, five of them girls. Abraham was the youngest. When he was a boy, the family moved to the Bronx, where Harry Rosenthal became a house painter and Abraham attended school.

In the 1930's, a series of tragedies enveloped the family. Abraham's father died of injuries suffered in a fall from a scaffold; one of his sisters died of pneumonia; a second died of cancer that had been misdiagnosed; a third died after giving birth to a child, and a fourth died of cancer.

As a teenager, Abraham developed osteomyelitis, a bone-marrow disease, in his legs. It left him in acute pain, able to walk only with a cane or crutches. Because of the family's poverty, he received inadequate medical treatment; one operation was carried out in the wrong place on his legs, and while encased in a cast from neck to feet he was told he might never walk again.

He was forced to drop out of DeWitt Clinton High School for a year. His family, meantime, appealed to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and he was accepted as a charity patient. There he underwent a series of operations and eventually recovered almost completely, though he experienced pain in his legs for the rest of his life.

Finishing high school, he enrolled at City College, joined the staff of the school newspaper and discovered that he liked, and was good at, reporting. In 1943, he became the campus correspondent for The Times. He wrote about campus life and, as did many others who became Times reporters, covered Sunday church sermons and wrote occasional brief commentaries, "Topics of The Times," for the editorial page. He was diligent and eager, and editors soon eyed him as a promising young reporter.

In February 1944, at a time when many staff members had gone to war, Mr. Rosenthal was hired as a staff reporter. Though he had only a few credits to go for a degree, the 21-year-old cub quit City College to devote all his energies to his new job. (Four years later, after he had established himself as one of the city's best reporters, City College awarded him a bachelor's degree. In 1951, he cleared up another long-pending formality, becoming a United States citizen.)

After two years of local reporting that included several exclusive stories on Andrei A. Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Mr. Rosenthal was assigned to cover the United Nations.

His byline began to appear regularly on the front page over articles about global tensions, economic and health problems, Security Council walkouts and figures ranging from world leaders to the men who shined their shoes.

Reporting on the World

In 1954, he was assigned to New Delhi and for the next four years covered the tangled affairs and kaleidoscopic cultures of the Indian subcontinent. He reveled in its exotic diversity and developed a deep emotional attachment to India and its people.

Mr. Rosenthal quickly established himself as an outstanding foreign correspondent. He was perceptive and aggressive, sensitive to the nuances of people and politics, fascinated with culture, art, history. He could write against a deadline with grace and a distinctive style, and he did not rely excessively on the American Embassy.

Instead, he traveled almost constantly to cities and villages all over India. He made forays into Pakistan, Ceylon, Nepal and Kashmir. Once he traveled 1,500 miles into the Hindu Kush for the dateline, "AT THE KHYBER PASS." His reporting from India was recognized in awards from the Overseas Press Club and Columbia University.

In 1958, Mr. Rosenthal was transferred to Warsaw and covered Poland and other nations of Eastern Europe for two years. Writing articles that the censored Polish press could not print, he portrayed a nation whose political, economic, artistic and cultural life had been choked by Communist controls.

He disclosed a food shortage that necessitated shipments of Soviet meat to Warsaw; wrote of Polish admiration for Western literature, films and art; and described Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev's chilly reception by the people of Warsaw and, a week later, a tumultuous greeting for Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Rosenthal's writing style was disarmingly personal: it was as if he had written a letter home to a friend. An article for The New York Times Magazine, based on a visit to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, was typical.

"And so," he wrote, "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."

The 1959 dispatch that led to Mr. Rosenthal's expulsion called the Polish leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, "moody and irascible," adding: "He is said to have a feeling of having 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."

His expulsion order charged: "You have written very deeply and in detail about the internal situation, party and leadership matters. The Polish government cannot tolerate such probing reporting." Those phrases were cited by the Pulitzer committee the following spring when Mr. Rosenthal was awarded the prize for international reporting.

After a brief tour in which he was based in Geneva and covered assignments in Europe and Africa, Mr. Rosenthal was sent to Japan for two years. He relished the assignment. Again, he wrote of people and politics, traveling frequently through the Japanese islands and to Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, New Guinea, Okinawa and other destinations.

Ascending in New York

In 1963, Mr. Rosenthal was persuaded by his mentor and friend, The Times's managing editor Turner Catledge, to give up the correspondent's life to become an editor.

His first assignment was command of a large, tradition-bound city news staff, not with the usual title of "city editor," but as "metropolitan editor," reflecting new authority that he had demanded over a previously independent cultural news staff and a mandate for change throughout the newsroom.

He soon transformed the staff. Ignoring seniority that had long determined which reporters got the day's top news assignments, he began favoring the best writers, regardless of age; he changed beat assignments that had stood for years; he began emphasizing investigative journalism and sent reporters out to capture the flavor, complexity and conflict of neighborhoods.

He encouraged his staff to abandon the stiff prose and lockstep ideas that had long characterized local news in The Times, and invited articles written with imagination, humor and literary flair. He assigned pieces on interracial marriage and other topics atypical for The Times. And he assigned far more work than had been customary. While his moves upset many staff members, they also won praise from readers and his superiors and awards for the staff.

One article assigned by Mr. Rosenthal, focusing on New Yorkers' fear of involvement in crime, recounted the murder of Kitty Genovese, a Queens woman whose screams were ignored by 38 neighbors while her killer stalked and attacked her repeatedly on a street for 35 minutes. The article shocked New York, and Mr. Rosenthal later wrote a short book on the episode, "Thirty-Eight Witnesses."

Propelled by his performance as metropolitan editor, Mr. Rosenthal was named assistant managing editor in 1966 and associate managing editor in 1968. Later, as managing editor and executive editor, he often traveled abroad to meet correspondents and foreign dignitaries, sometimes wrote reflective magazine articles and spoke publicly on freedom of the press and other matters.

Mr. Rosenthal and his first wife, Ann Marie Burke, who married in 1949, had three sons, Jonathan, of Clifton, Va., Daniel, of Milford, N.J., and Andrew, of Montclair, N.J., who is the deputy editorial page editor of The Times. The couple were divorced in 1986.

In addition to his first wife and sons, Mr. Rosenthal is survived by his second wife, Shirley Lord, whom he married in 1987, and by a sister, Rose Newman of Manhattan, and four grandchildren.

A funeral will be held at 10:30 a.m. Sunday at Central Synagogue, at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street in Manhattan.

Mr. Rosenthal's final column for The Times was a summation of his life and his career in journalism. "As a columnist," he wrote, "I discovered that there were passions in me I had not been aware of, lying under the smatterings of knowledge about everything that I had to collect as executive editor — including hockey and debentures, for heaven's sake."

Returning to those passions, chief among them human rights, he closed by saying that he could not promise to right all wrongs.

"But," he wrote, "I can say that I will keep trying and that I thank God for (a) making me an American citizen, (b) giving me that college-boy job on The Times, and (c) handing me the opportunity to make other columnists kick themselves when they see what I am writing, in this fresh start of my life."