Gray Lady Down. William McGowan

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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 СКАЧАТЬ