Behind the Times (30 page)

Abraham Michael Rosenthal was describing his City College days as a commuter student during the early 1940s. He was so poor, he said, that he had to eat “ketchup sandwiches” in the school cafeteria.
As Rosenthal explained it, the sandwich consisted of two slices of white bread, available for a few pennies, smeared with ketchup, free, from the condiment table. The audience let out an audible sigh, a collective mixture of admiration and remembrance. But then Abe Rosenthal’s listeners were with him even before he began speaking. It was a soft New York evening in June 1988, and history of a sort was being made. Rosenthal’s appearance at the Sutton Place Synagogue at 225 E. 51st Street was his first speaking engagement since leaving the post of executive editor of
The New York Times
and becoming a
Times
columnist.

Well before 8:30
P.M.
, some four thousand men and women had quietly filed past blue wooden police barricades, and filled the synagogue sanctuary as well as the adjacent social hall, where closed-circuit televisions had been set up. In one of the front rows of the sanctuary a few seats were reserved for Rosenthal’s guests, including his wife of eleven months. She was the second Mrs. Rosenthal, listed on the masthead of
Vogue
magazine as Shirley Lord, beauty/health editor. Shirley Hussy Lord Anderson Rosenthal was born in London (her
second husband, the textile magnate Cyril Lord, was known as England’s “Carpet King”; her third husband, David Anderson, was the architect who built the Lords’ Caribbean beach house). She was the author of two steamy novels; blonde, buxom, and at five feet, eight inches, the same height as her new husband. W, the fashion paper, referred to her as “that great marzipan creation.” In 1985, shortly after Rosenthal had ended his marriage of four decades, two mutual friends of Rosenthal and Lord’s, the television personality Barbara Walters and the former operatic singer Beverly Sills, introduced the
Times
man to the
Vogue
woman. The couple soon became part of the New York celebrity scene, or at any rate that part of it known as New Society (to distinguish it from the more traditional society based on “old money” and “breeding”). Abe and Shirley Rosenthal were seen at all the New Society places; they attended such roaring ’80s affairs as the fiftieth birthday party of the financier-corporate raider Saul Steinberg, which featured tableaux vivants—elaborate replications of great works of art, with hired actors posing in the “pictures.”

Not many in the audience that Rabbi David B. Kahane welcomed were likely readers of Lord’s novels; some of them probably were familiar with the tabloid gossip columns that chronicled the high life of the newly rich and infamous. Mostly, though, they were sober-minded New Yorkers, the kind of people who have read the
Times
all their adult lives. They were spending their evening as a
Times
reader might, participating in “the Jewish Town Hall,” in Rabbi Kahane’s words. Their guest speaker for the evening, the rabbi said, “was a towering giant of journalism, who would take the audience along on an intellectual journey.” “Our speaker,” the rabbi said, “although born in Canada, is a true New York success story … a poor immigrant boy who attended CCNY, where the tuition was free, but as he has said, it was still a little more than his family could afford.…” Rabbi Kahane referred to Rosenthal’s assignments abroad as a
Times
correspondent in Poland, India, and Japan, and to his steady advancement at the
Times
, from metropolitian editor to managing editor to executive editor and then, after his retirement from the newsroom, to his new life as an Op-Ed columnist. “Tell us about your journey from Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario, to the
Times
,” the rabbi said, yielding the lectern to Rosenthal. The audience settled back, ready to hear the narrative of a plucky boy’s rise from poverty to power, a good Jewish success story.

Rosenthal began by declaring that he was making his first public speech in twenty years. “When I was the
Times’
editor, I didn’t think I should make speeches, because the
Times’
news department has no politics. But now I’ll speak my mind, because I’m a columnist, and I’m paid to pop off.” If some congregants were skeptical of the notion of the apolitical
Times
, they didn’t show it. The audience saw one of its own: a Jew and a New Yorker. The man standing before them was, like many of the men in the audience, in late middle age, conservatively dressed in a bankers’ blue suit, white shirt, blue silk tie, and black-tasseled loafer shoes. He appeared neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. Rosenthal’s most distinctive feature was his full head of hair, still black in his sixty-seventh year and styled over his forehead. The yarmulke he wore kept slipping to the side of the mass of hair, and Rosenthal had to keep righting the cap as he talked.

Rosenthal moved quickly through the early Ontario years. He skipped mention of the original family name, Shipiatsky, and of its roots in Byelorussia. He passed over his own painful medical history; osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone marrow, crippled him in his early teens. The audience would have admired the story of the boy who had to walk with a cane during high school, who did not get proper treatment and the needed corrective surgery until he was accepted as a charity case at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Understandably, the audience might have had different reactions to the other details that unsympathetic biographers—for example, Rosenthal’s former colleague and longtime ill-wisher, Harrison Salisbury—were careful to include: that Rosenthal’s father, Harry, who had settled the family on a farming commune in Canada, was an atheist; that Rosenthal, the youngest of six children and the sole male child, was babied and fussed over by his five older sisters; that his sister Ruth had become a member of the Young Communist League and married another young Communist, the dashing George Watt, who fought with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain (“God how I admired that man,” Salisbury quoted Rosenthal as saying); that Rosenthal was raised in a socialist household, learned no Hebrew, and was never bar mitzvahed; that he eventually married an Irish Catholic and brought up his three children without religious training. Still, his listeners would have understood that Abe Rosenthal always considered himself a Jew, as Salisbury told it, because he was perceived as Jewish.

None of Rosenthal’s red-diaper background was surprising, given
the secularist ideals of the time among many immigrant Jews. What made it relevant to the poverty-to-power narrative were the adult Rosenthal’s politics. He despised the Gomulka government when he served as the
Times’
Warsaw bureau chief in the late 1950s. His tour of duty came during the height of the cold war, at a time when the suffocating air of the police state hung over the Communist-bloc countries of Eastern Europe. Part of Rosenthal’s reaction grew out of his competitive journalist’s feeling that Poland was a “second-rate story in the suburbs,” too far removed from big events. In 1960, however, Rosenthal won a Pulitzer Prize for his Polish coverage, and realized he hadn’t wasted his time. But the honor didn’t make him mellow or less ambitious. Contrary to his opening disclaimer, he was no more apolitical than he was bald.

The Shipiatskys moved to New York in the mid-1920s, to live in a Bronx cooperative apartment complex sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing Worker’s Union. The family name had been changed to Rosenthal, and the father had found work as a house painter. Around the boy’s thirteenth birthday, Rosenthal told the Sutton Place audience, his father died from injuries suffered when he fell from a scaffold. There were audible groans. (Four of Rosenthal’s sisters died at relatively young ages—two from cancer, one from pneumonia, and one shortly after childbirth—though this too was omitted from the family narrative.) When Rosenthal talked of his college days, recounting how he had only five cents to spend in the CCNY cafeteria, he began to choke with emotion, as if telling the story for the first time. One of Rosenthal’s classmates from the CCNY days, Robert Schiffer, has stayed in touch through the years, and Schiffer takes the ketchup story with a pinch of salt.
“I’ve heard it many times,” says Schiffer, who served as a demographer at the United Nations in New York. “Since everybody was in the same Depression-era boat, no one felt he had anything less. We were not all that poor.”

Rosenthal asked for questions from the audience. A questioner expressed concern about the “unfair” coverage of Israel. Rosenthal acknowledged that some of the images of Israel on American television were harsh, “but you have to pay a price if you’re an open democracy, and a free press is part of that price.” He disposed of a question about Kurt Waldheim quickly. “He’s a liar,” Rosenthal said, to loud applause. He had more difficulty when asked about the Reverend Jesse Jackson and black attitudes toward Jews. Jackson, Rosenthal said, had
visited the
Times
in the weeks before the New York Democratic primary the past April. “I advised Jesse to make a healing gesture,” perhaps by meeting with Jewish leaders to counteract the effects of his “Hymietown” reference to New York. “But he couldn’t rise to it, and that was a pity. The proper question is, ‘What can we do to heal the rift between these historic allies, Jews and blacks?’ ” Several members of the audience were visibly displeased; Rosenthal sought to reassure them. “The Hymietown remark was disgusting,” Rosenthal said. “But has no one in this room ever made an antiblack remark?” A woman quickly shouted, “No!” Rosenthal just as quickly turned to her, and said with the fast mouth of a New Yorker, “Then you should run for president.”

He was asked about his choices on the eve of the presidential campaign (both parties’ political conventions would be held in the next two months). “I sat out 1972,” he began by way of context. “I wouldn’t vote for Nixon. McGovern made me ill and Norman Thomas wasn’t around.” At the moment, he was still “very lukewarm” about the 1988 front-runners, George Bush and Michael Dukakis; Rosenthal wished that Mario Cuomo or Bill Bradley were running. There was time for only a few more questions, and Rabbi Kahane said he would ask them. Tell us, he said, turning to Rosenthal, the major influences in your life, the most memorable story you covered, and the most memorable person you ever encountered. They were a fan’s questions, but Rosenthal’s answers were not the usual stuff of a
People
magazine interview, any more than he was a standard
People
celebrity. He mentioned “the many influences on a person, such as family and religion.” Then added: “In my case, what influenced my life and, I believe, is the reason I’m alive, is the United States of America.” The answer produced more applause, though some puzzlement as well. The Shipiatsky-Rosenthals were not a refugee family (as some in the audience were); his parents emigrated well before Hitler’s terror against European Jews; they settled initially not in the United States but in Canada.

Rosenthal surprised his auditors once again with his choice for most important story. “News is usually so depressing; it’s about wars, disasters, and so forth. But the story of men going to the moon lifted the heart.” He had an “inspired idea” during the
Times’
editorial planning for the first Apollo lunar-orbit flight in December 1968, he remembered. “I asked Archibald
MacLeish to write a poem to appear on page
one for the
Times
in celebration of the occasion. We had him on an open line during the countdown, to dictate a new lead for his poem if anything went wrong.”

The audience didn’t pick up on the journalist’s humor about the poet laureate of the United States standing by, at his farm in western Massachusetts, ready to phone the desk with a “top” for a page-one story in the
Times.
Rosenthal’s remembrance of the “most memorable person” was equally puzzling, except perhaps to those who had worked for Rosenthal or had encountered him during his years at the
Times.
The Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru was his choice, he told the men and women of Sutton Place Synagogue. “Nehru was mean. He went around yelling at people. He was not a lollipop. He was not warm and cuddly. But he was beautiful, a great man, a father to his country. He could have been a dictator, but he kept India a democracy and he was accessible to his people. He was a leader.”

With that, the man who ran the news pages of the
New York Times
for two decades finished and sat down, to sustained if perplexed applause. Two members of the audience who knew Rosenthal exchanged glances. Their looks conveyed the same thought: Describing the beautiful, mean, shouting, great Nehru, Rosenthal was describing as well how he saw himself.

The efforts to “explain” Abe Rosenthal became a cottage industry during the years he edited the
Times.
Alexander Cockburn, Geoffrey Stokes, and other columnists of the
Village Voice
, the weekly newspaper in New York, conducted a Rosenthal watch in the 1970s and 1980s, documenting his alleged depredations, regularly updating the infamous Rosenthal “shit list” of
Times
staff people said to be in disfavor. Rosenthal and his news department were fair game. The
Times
was the most important journalistic force in town, and a subject as worthy of regular scrutiny as City Hall or the New York theater. It made good journalistic sense for the
Voice
to act as jeer leaders; the
Times
was a competitor, and the columnists could assume their readers also read the
Times
, and were familiar with what they were writing about. A major complaint was that Rosenthal had moved the
Times
news columns to the right. From the
Voice
’s left-liberal position, the charge was accurate. Rosenthal later acknowledged “
a grain of reality” in the criticism. The
Times
, he said, had been pulled temporarily “off course and to the left” in the late 1960s and early 1970s by some
reporters and midlevel editors. “In the absence of any countervailing intellectual thrust,” he remembered, “the paper was not always where it should have been—in the center.” By the 1980s, Rosenthal said, he was satisfied that he had taken full control of the news pages and was supplying the needed balance. The
Times
was once again on course, “not right wing but as close to center as possible.”