Friday, Sep 5, 2008
After 55 years, Abe Rosenthal exits the New York Times, unquietly.
Nov 12, 1999 | As word leaked out last week that the New York Times had cancelled Abe Rosenthal's weekly op-ed column, people were trying to figure out what exactly had happened: Was he retiring? Or was he sacked?
Ever the editor, the 55-year Times veteran has something to say about it himself. "I have refused to allow any use of the word 'retired,' because I already retired and it would imply volition to me," he said from his home office in New York on Friday. "So we just said I 'left' in a very nice way. One retirement a lifetime is enough."
The 77-year-old Rosenthal, the epic and legendary czar of the Times, served as top editor there from 1969 to 1986. He helped remake and modernize the paper during those turbulent years (bringing it from two sections to four, for instance) but also earned the enmity of some who thought him cantankerous and overbearing. He wrote his column for 13 years; with its end came a surprising outpouring of admiration and affection, some of it from people he doesn't even know.
"It has buoyed me," he says of the response, with obvious emotion. "It's hard to describe but I feel as if I'm soaking in a wonderful hot bath of affection. I have received very warm, lovely e-mail from foreign correspondents and other correspondents, staff members in New York and around the country. It just keeps coming in. It makes me very happy. And I've heard from I don't know how many readers. I'm moved by them very much, not only by what they say but by the trouble they took to write them."
By his own account, Rosenthal needed some buoying. "There were a few days -- a couple of weeks maybe, knowing about it beforehand -- when I was in considerable depression. Not clinical but depressed. And it took me time to pull out of it and I believe I have." The fan mail helped, as did most of the editorial comment -- though he objected to a New York Observer editorial that said he had trouble with former Times publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger.
"Punch Sulzberger was one of the nicest and best men I've ever met, and probably the best publisher in modern American history," he says. "He and I got along beautifully.
"It was because we both had the same concept of the New York Times," he said. "He didn't have to have long discussions. We knew what we wanted and what we didn't want. We wanted to expand the paper, make it more interesting to more people but also keep its character. And we could almost look at each other and know what we were thinking."
Of Punch's son and the paper's current publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., he declines comment. And an article in the December Vanity Fair is something else he'd rather not discuss -- though it's getting quite a bit of attention among the staff of the New York Times. David Margolick's media piece, "Clash of the Times Men," is a hair-raising and invective-laden recounting of the feud between Rosenthal and his successor as the paper's top editor, Max Frankel. And it hit the newsstands less than a week after Rosenthal left the offices on 43rd Street.
In journalism as in comedy, timing is everything. Margolick (who reported on the law for the Times for 12 years and is now a contributing editor at Vanity Fair) was essentially following up on the story that had been simmering all year. Frankel, who led the Times from 1986 to 1994, savaged his predecessor in his memoirs, "The Times of My Life and My Life at the Times," published earlier this year. He portrayed him as alternately self-promoting and self-pitying, small-minded and grandiose, and stated his sole goal as executive editor to be the "not-Abe."
Rosenthal was uncharacteristically slow to respond -- at first. But in interviews in Israeli papers (Ha'aretz and the Jerusalem Post) this spring, Rosenthal confessed to looking at his rival's book long enough to throw it in the trash.
"I'm a city boy and I know enough that when I walk along and I see a dog shitting in the street, not to stop and examine his dung," he told the Post. "I just walk on and forget his existence."
As if. In Vanity Fair, Rosenthal gilded the turd, calling Frankel a "coward," "somewhat of a liar" and "a bit of a fool." He blamed Frankel for missing the Watergate story and criticized his editing of the Sunday paper. Other than that I guess he liked him fine.
Rosenthal regrets having responded to questions about Frankel's book and is reluctant to talk about Margolick's article, either. "You see what is happening here is somebody wrote a book and that book was unpleasant and unpleasant things are constantly being commented on and I'm constantly being asked to comment on a rather despicable book," he says. "I don't like having my career, which is not at an end, being linked to this. I can't help it, but I certainly have no intention of dignifying it or anything. I've had it with this."
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