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Abe Rosenthal and the Golden Age

Back in the seventies, during an alarming downturn in stock price, advertising sales, revenue and circulation at the New York Times, the famed executive editor A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal confessed to having a recurrent nightmare: It was an ordinary Wednesday morning and “there was no New York Times.” Rosenthal outlived his nightmare. Along with the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and a group of skillful news executives, he put the paper back into the black. In the process, this team revolutionized the way the paper reported the news and set an example that transformed newspaper journalism in the rest of the country.

Rosenthal retired from the executive editor position in 1986 and then wrote a twice-weekly column on the op-ed page until 1999. Along with James Reston and a handful of others, he is identified with the New York Times’ golden age, a time when the paper spoke to—and for—the nation. In May 2006, Rosenthal died after a massive stroke at the age of eighty-four. He had worked fifty-three years for the Times, after coming aboard as a copyboy in 1946 in his early twenties.

Rosenthal’s death prompted a week’s worth of published tributes and flattering obituaries, describing how, as his Times obituary put it, “he climbed on rungs of talent, drive and ambition to the highest echelons of the Times and American journalism.” The salutes culminated in the passionate eulogies delivered at his funeral, held at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. An estimated eight hundred people attended the service, representing a Who’s Who of New York’s business, media, political and cultural elite, including figures as diverse as Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Beverly Sills, Charlie Rose, Midge Decter and Rudy Giuliani. The honorary pallbearers were led by the former mayor Ed Koch and William F. Buckley Jr. They were followed by a half-dozen men who had worked with Rosenthal at the Times, including his former boss, Arthur O. Sulzberger. That week, Buckley had hailed Rosenthal as the commanding figure in the evolution of serious daily journalism, which he had influenced as decisively, in Buckley’s opinion, as William Randolph Hearst had the tabloids, and Henry Luce the weekly newsmagazines. Sulzberger, by then the former publisher, had told the New York Sun that “It was the golden age of journalism when Abe was at the Times.”

Some of the tributes focused on Rosenthal’s impoverished and tragic background. He was the son of a Byelorussian immigrant who became a Canadian fur trapper before coming to America to work as a housepainter. Abe’s father died after falling off a ladder, four of his five sisters passed away before he was an adult, and Abe himself was afflicted with osteomyelitis, a rare bone disorder. The medical care he received was substandard. At one point an operation was performed on the wrong part of his leg, and as he was lying in a full body cast he was told that he would never walk again. It was only after being admitted to the Mayo Clinic as a charity case that he recovered, but he still experienced lifelong pain.

Other tributes focused on his remarkable career trajectory. Beginning as the Times stringer at New York’s City College, he was formally hired as a copyboy without even graduating. He was a reporter for nineteen years, covering the fledgling United Nations before becoming a foreign correspondent in 1955, assigned to cover India, Japan and Poland. He was expelled from Poland for reporting that was “too probing” for the Communist government there, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for international reporting. In 1963 he returned to New York to assume a new title, “metropolitan editor.” From there he climbed up the editorial hierarchy, becoming assistant managing editor, managing editor and finally executive editor of the entire paper in 1977.

Although a fierce protector of Times tradition, Rosenthal shook up the Metro staff, encouraging better, brighter writing from talented reporters like Gay Talese and rotating beat assignments that had previously been regarded as set in stone. He emphasized investigative reporting and broke precedent by assigning trend stories on controversial subjects like interracial marriage and homosexuality. Believing he had suffered some measure of career bias as a result of anti-Semitism, he upended the informal caste system at the Times, which had traditionally favored Ivy League WASPs over New York-bred Italians, Irish and Jews.

As executive editor, Rosenthal steered the Times through the coverage of the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture, the Watergate scandal and various Mideast crises. He played a central role in the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, bucking up Sulzberger and other executives who feared that printing the government’s own classified history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam would appear to the public as treasonous, expose the paper’s executives to federal prosecution, and lead to financial ruin. Rosenthal himself was not a dove; at his funeral, his son recalled him putting on a cowboy hat at home and singing “I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.” But as a Times editorial after his death noted, he believed that “when something important is going on, silence is a lie.”

Many of the tributes dwelled on Rosenthal’s role in rescuing the paper from financial peril and journalistic irrelevance in an age when television was killing off newspapers right and left, which was just as important as the big-ticket news stories he shepherded. Facing declines in ad revenue and circulation, as well as charges that the paper’s writing was dull, Rosenthal spearheaded efforts to broaden the paper’s appeal and liven up its pages. The result was the “Sectional Revolution,” expanding the daily paper from two sections to four, which encouraged a rebound in circulation along with ad sales and revenues.

At the same time, Rosenthal’s legendary bad temper did not go unmentioned. The newsroom atmosphere was suffused with his “tempestuous personality,” said the Times obituary writer Robert McFadden, “leading to 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.” Some recalled Rosenthal as a vengeful man who kept a “shit-list in his head,” as one writer put it, and as “a shouter and a curser” who would make or break careers on a whim.

The one theme that resounded through almost all the obituaries and tributes was Rosenthal’s “tiger-ish” defense of high standards in reporting and editing, his call for “fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, causes and political agendas, innuendo and unattributed, pejorative quotations,” as McFadden phrased it. This sense of journalistic integrity perfectly embodied the Times’ founding motto of delivering the news “impartially, without fear or favor, without concern for party interest or sect.”

The reason why Rosenthal was obsessed with keeping editors and reporters from putting their “thumbs on the scale,” wrote the Times columnist Thomas Friedman, was because he believed a “straight” New York Times was “essential to helping keep democracy healthy and our government honest.” Rosenthal kept the Times “straight” by battling what he saw as the ingrained left-liberal tendencies of the newsroom, particularly the Washington bureau. He scolded reporters and editors he thought were romanticizing the sixties counterculture, which he viewed as a destructive force. While encouraging reporters to write with more flair, Rosenthal eschewed the subjectivity of the New Journalism, seeing this genre as substituting reportorial ego for a commitment to fact. He was vigilant about conflicts of interest, once firing a reporter who was found to have been sleeping with a Pennsylvania politician she covered while working for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I don’t care if my reporters are fucking elephants,” Rosenthal was said to have declared, “as long as they aren’t covering the circus.”

A tribute of sorts to the ideological neutrality of Times news reporting under Rosenthal had come from a rather unusual source: William F. Buckley’s National Review, the very bible of American conservatism. In 1972, as Spiro Agnew railed against the “elitist Eastern establishment press,” and Richard Nixon was livid over the Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers and its looming endorsement of George McGovern, the National Review produced an article examining the charges of left-leaning bias. Conservatives had long dismissed the Times as “a hopeless hotbed of liberalism, biased beyond redemption and therefore not to be taken seriously,” the magazine observed, asking, “But to what extent was this impression soundly based?” A subheadline telegraphed its findings: “Things on 43rd Street aren’t as bad as they seem.” The National Review audit examined five developing stories, which it said had a “distinct left-right line,” and concluded: “The Times news administration was so evenhanded that it must have been deeply dismaying to the liberal opposition.” It went on to state that conservatives and other Americans would be far more confident in other media—specifically newsmagazines and television networks—if those media “measured up to the same standard” of fairness. “Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated,” National Review said, “the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.”

This was very much a validation for Rosenthal, and for Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger, who also upheld the tradition of politically agnostic news reporting despite the shrill liberalism of the editorial page and, increasingly, the journalistic activism of a new generation of reporters touched by the lengthening shadow of the counterculture. Indeed, Rosenthal would cite the National Review piece on other occasions when challenged by accusations of political bias at the Times. Even Joseph Lelyveld, who took over the top editor’s job in 1994 and was undoubtedly to the left of Rosenthal, saw need for vigilance. “Abe would always say, with some justice, that you have to keep your hand on the tiller and steer to the right or it’ll drift off to the left.”

It was a priority of the postwar Times to become a national forum for opinion-free, straight news—as has been noted in numerous definitive books about the paper, such as The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times, by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, and Behind the Times: Inside the New York Times, by Edwin Diamond. This goal was accomplished under a succession of larger-than-life editors who were granted great autonomy, as well as unparalleled financial resources, to produce what the Sulzberger family has always considered a quasi-public “trust.” The paper held fast to several principles: ideological agnosticism, a sense of intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, and a respect for neutral recitation of the facts, free of political cant. It was a “theology” of gravitas and objectivity that allowed the Times to ask probing questions and to report often-uncomfortable answers without regard for consequences.

The need to be “straight,” to report the news rather than drive it, was reflected in how the paper covered the Bay of Pigs. Like other news organizations, the Times had most of the details about the impending invasion; in fact, they had become one of the journalism world’s biggest open secrets. But the Times hesitated to print the information since it could endanger the lives of the men landing on the beaches, it would effectively aid Castro, and it would interfere with national policy. In the end, the Times ran a one-column story instead of the four originally planned. No date for the invasion was mentioned—only a CBS News report that it was “imminent.”

The lacerating political and journalistic self-assessment that followed the Bay of Pigs debacle was the backdrop for the Times’ deliberations over whether to go into print with the infamous Pentagon Papers. “A tale of reckless military gambles and public deceptions” according to Max Frankel, executive editor from 1986 to 1994, the papers showed that “the government had hidden the true dimensions of its enterprise and its abundant doubts about the prospects for success” at every stage “along a twenty year arc.” Yet far from being the journalistic no-brainer it might be considered today, the Pentagon Papers case provoked considerable agony and debate at the Times. For Punch Sulzberger, the idea of publishing live military secrets was anathema, and as the internal debate flared, he invoked the national interest to delay publication. Rosenthal, the managing editor, agreed with Sulzberger’s qualms. According to Frankel, he asked “Were we on an ego trip?” before finally agreeing to publish the papers after it was found that no current military secrets would be disclosed.

The New York Times took a similarly cautious approach to the subject of civil rights in the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, maintaining careful neutrality in explaining the historic shifts that were afoot, as well as the resistance these shifts were provoking. The paper was solidly behind most of the major civil rights developments—Brown v. Board of Education, the March on Selma, the protests in Birmingham. But it also gave positive coverage to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s now-famous 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, while some media identified with the left excoriated it. The Times affirmed Moynihan’s insight that, as with immigrants at the turn of the century, “Negro upliftment” would come through programs that asserted the primacy of the mainstream culture and promoted the values needed to enter it. Moynihan was not “blaming the victims,” the Times took pains to explain, but was blaming three hundred years of white racism that had victimized them.

Another subject on which the Times showed far different leanings from today was cultural separatism, especially as associated with black militancy and the Black Power movement. An editorial in 1966 described Black Power as “racism in reverse” and said it “could only bring disaster to the cause of racial equality.” When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, the editorial page called him “an extraordinary but twisted man, turning many gifts to evil purpose.” The editorial concluded: “The world he saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark. But he made it darker still through his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of the darkness he spawned and killed him.”

The Times was hardly quick to embrace the emerging counterculture either, or its radical critique of American consumerism, family structure and political authority. Rosenthal himself was appalled at some of the destructive excesses of the antiwar movement, particularly the 1968 takeover of Columbia University and the sacking of President Grayson Kirk’s office. He was dubious of the subjectivity and relativism inherent in the counterculture and its replacement of objectivity with political and cultural partisanship. “We live in a time of commitment and advocacy,” he wrote somewhat sardonically in one staff memo. “‘Tell it like it is’ really means, ‘tell it like I say it is, or tell it as I want it to be.’ For precisely that reason it is more important than ever that the Times keep objectivity in its news columns as its number one, bedrock principle.” A subsequent memo would tell the staff that the Times “shouldn’t stick fingers in people’s eyes just because we have the power to do so.”

As Edwin Diamond notes, Rosenthal was especially on guard against the counterculture’s reflexive anti-Americanism. In early November 1969, he wrote a memo about the “awry picture of America” that, he maintained, the Times was perpetuating. Drawing his examples from the November 7 issue, he cited a story on page 7 about a GI trial in Fort Dix, a report on an MIT sit-in on page 8, an account of the moratorium on page 9, a story on the Army memo of that antiwar protest on page 13, and a report on page 22 about the ongoing Chicago trial, flanked by two different stories about poverty and housing demonstrations. He ended his list with a story on page 27 about job discrimination, before declaring that “there were others.” November 7 was not even a particularly outstanding day for that kind of thing, Rosenthal went on.

But I get the impression, reading the Times, that the image we give of America is largely demonstrations, discrimination, anti-war movements, rallies, protests, etc.... Obviously all these things are an important part of the American scene. But I think that because of our own liberal interests and reporters’ inclinations we overdo this. I am not suggesting eliminating any of these stories. I am suggesting that reporters and editors look a bit more around them to see what is going on in other fields and try to make an effort to represent other shades of opinion than those held by the new left, the old left, the middle-aged left and anti-war people.

Another time that Rosenthal’s nose for radical chic got out of joint was over a story by Robert Reinhold in 1979, marking the tenth anniversary of Woodstock. Reinhold had called Woodstock a symbol of national, cultural and political awakening, extolling it as the culmination of a decade-long youth crusade for a freer style of life, for peace and for tolerance. Rosenthal did not see the story until the Saturday evening before it ran in the Sunday edition. Livid, he ordered it out of all subsequent editions.

A hallmark of Rosenthal’s commitment to keeping the Times “as close to the center as possible” was his wariness of allowing culture critics to thread their political opinions into reviews of plays, books, movies and television shows. Political opinions don’t belong in cultural reviews, Rosenthal believed. Otherwise the Times “would have ten extra commentators on the paper.” The news columns would not be made “into a political broadsheet, period,” he insisted; there would be no “editorial needles.”

Throughout his tenure, Rosenthal was backed up by Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger, who had become publisher in 1963 somewhat accidentally after his predecessor, Orvil Dryfoos, a Sulzberger in-law, died unexpectedly. Punch Sulzberger brought a special temperament to the job: content to stay “out of the way of the hired hands” was how someone once described his idea of his role. He tended to take an editorial interest in things that might appeal to or alienate advertisers, such as restaurants, movies and plays, and when he did choose to make his objections known, he did so within channels, complaining only to the top editor. Of course he would have general conversations with his editors, often at the end of the day, over a bottle of wine. Generally, though, he kept his power in reserve, like a “hidden hand.” It was no wonder that many at the paper likened him to the Wizard of Oz.

In 1976, however, Punch Sulzberger became uncharacteristically involved in the paper’s journalism. A World War II veteran with an abiding patriotism and a disdain for communism, he had long felt uncomfortable with the left-wing opinions on the editorial page, which was edited by his cousin John Oakes, a legacy appointment inherited from his predecessor. The editorial board had endorsed George McGovern for president in 1972. When Jimmy Carter ran in 1976, some on the editorial board were talking about backing Ramsey Clark. In addition, it appeared likely that the Times would lend its endorsement in New York’s U.S. Senate race to the strident left-winger Bella Abzug over Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Sulzberger’s preferred candidate.

Sulzberger’s concern about the leftist slant of the editorial board coincided with a drastic drop in share value and profit. In 1968, the price of Times stock was $53 a share; by 1976, it was $14.50. A cover story in Business Week, headlined “Behind the Profit Squeeze at the Times,” said, “Editorially and politically, the paper had also slid precipitously to the left and has become stridently anti-business in tone, ignoring the fact that the Times itself is a business.” An internal analysis conducted by the marketing and advertising departments of the Times a few years earlier found that the editorial page had become the principal reason why some people questioned the paper’s impartiality. Among those growing most impatient with the partisanship were members of “the Club,” a group of Wall Street bankers upon whom the Times relied for financing.

Phase One of “Punch’s Putsch,” as the effort to bring the editorial page to heel and oust John Oakes became known, was Sulzberger’s decision to overrule the endorsement of Bella Abzug and instead support Moynihan. This decision infuriated Oakes and some of his editorial writers, especially Roger Wilkins. Phase Two involved the hiring of William Safire, a former Nixon speech-writer, as a conservative columnist to temper the monolithic liberal tone of the editorial page. Within several months Oakes had stepped aside and all but a few of his editorial writers were reassigned or retired.

But Sulzberger’s primary commitment was dealing with the alarming underperformance of the paper’s stock, especially since it was matched by severe losses in circulation and advertising. In a one-month period in 1971, daily circulation dropped by 30,000, down to 814,000. This is when Rosenthal began to have his nightmare about waking up one Wednesday morning and there being no New York Times.

To help determine how to address this dire situation, the Times set up a network of in-house task forces and committees. Management also hired professional market analysts to survey readers and advertisers in order to gauge what was wanted—and what was wanting in the paper’s coverage. The analysts returned shocking news: the Times had very little readership under the age of thirty-five. More distressing yet was what the polls and surveys suggested the Times should do. Interest in foreign and national news was practically nil, the market researchers reported, while arts and entertainment scored significantly higher. If the Times was to engage the under-thirty-five reader, it had to focus on the two questions that members of that demographic found most compelling: what to do with their time, and what to do with their money. In short, “lifestyle,” embodied in special weekday sections devoted to leisure time, sports, home, fashion, popular entertainment and contemporary arts.

In a panic, the paper began looking around at publications that seemed to ring bells with younger, affluent urbanites. One was New York magazine, full of service features and celebrity profiles. The other was the Village Voice, with its radical-chic politics and hip take on the downtown scene. Still another was People magazine, which was demonstrating that a sensibility shaped in direct imitation of television could make for a winning format on the printed page as well.

For someone like Abe Rosenthal—an accomplished foreign correspondent, city editor and at this point the managing editor poised to take over the executive editorship in 1976—looking to these particular publications for guidance was distressing. In an interview, he had once described the Voice as “an urban ill, like dog shit in the street, to be stepped over.” He admitted to one interviewer that New York magazine “used to drive me out of my mind.” But eventually, Rosenthal’s resistance was overcome by pragmatic acceptance of the demographic facts. Still, if the Times was going to do “soft” journalism, it would be superior soft journalism, he proclaimed. Instead of “thinning the soup” by watering down its serious coverage, the paper would be “adding more tomatoes” to create a richer broth, which would enhance its appeal in places it had not had appeal before.

The “Sectional Revolution,” as this transformation came to be called, was managed by Rosenthal and Punch Sulzberger along with Walter Mattson, the senior financial manager. It basically saved the paper, restoring circulation and profits to the tune of $200 million in the late 1980s. But in terms of the paper’s overall credibility and gravitas, and its tradition of neutral reporting without ideological taint, the lifestyle revolution was insidious, providing a back door to the countercultural values, liberationist ideologies and special interests that Rosenthal had tried so hard to keep at bay.

Even as this door opened, there was someone coming in the front door who changed the paper in far more fundamental ways. It was Punch’s son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who sat somewhat distractedly in a front-row pew at Central Synagogue on the day that Rosenthal was being eulogized, along with the journalistic sensibility he both projected and protected at the Times. Just as Abe Rosenthal had epitomized the virtues of the paper’s ancien régime, “Young Arthur” would symbolize the postmodernism that lay athwart its future.