by Gay Talese
And so 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.…
If Rosenthal were to be made the city editor his reporting days would be over. Rosenthal would have to devote all of his time and energy to solving the problems of the newsroom, and there was a chance that he would be unwilling to do this. The finest reporters, with few exceptions, were hungry for public recognition and acclaim, and they would not quickly trade this for the extra money and anonymous power of executive life. And yet there was a point of no return. After a reporter had won all the prizes, had been everywhere, had covered every imaginable type of story, he began to recognize a repetition about his work—the situations and places seemed the same, the shortcuts were learned, there were no new challenges. If a reporter could obtain a column, of course, as Reston had, then journalism could still be interesting. But if the individual was destined to remain a reporter for twenty or twenty-five years, it could lead to stagnation and frustration, which would exist until he quit newspaper work and tried something else—or, if he had an opportunity to become an editor, he might find that stimulating. Catledge had never missed reporting and by-lines after he had become an editor. The same had been true of Clifton Daniel. Maybe Rosenthal, too, could be won over. There was little chance of Rosenthal’s getting a column as long as C. L. Sulzberger was writing one on foreign affairs for The Times. Perhaps, at thirty-nine, Rosenthal had gone as far as he could go with his writing. But if Rosenthal had the desire and talent to become a great editor, if he could somehow inspire a sluggish staff in New York and transfer his technique to other reporters, then Rosenthal’s loss as a writer would be well worth it to The Times. Whether it would be worth it to Rosenthal was another question. But Catledge, as he thought more about it, was becoming intrigued with the idea of Rosenthal in the newsroom, and Catledge decided that during his forthcoming trip to the Orient he would spend time with Rosenthal, would sense his mood and see if he was tired of writing and living overseas and would like to come home and try something new.
In Tokyo, Rosenthal was having the time of his life. He was living with his wife and sons in a tatami-floored house with servants. He was enchanted with the Japanese people, their efficiency and industriousness, their vibrancy and verve in a racy, gaudy city of joyous confusion. Protected by the American military, the Japanese concentrated on their industrial expansion and prosperity, and they were endlessly fascinating to write about. The Japanese women were delightful and intelligent, and the men seemed to Rosenthal to be ever on the make—making money, making love, dancing, singing, enjoying themselves without a sense of sorrow. This is what most appealed to Rosenthal about the Japanese—he did not feel sorry for them. They were enjoying their prosperity, they knew how to live, they moved noisily through the night and woke up guiltlessly each day, and Rosenthal was soon influenced by their spirit. In Poland, Rosenthal had felt gloom, repression, and suspicion—as he wrote in The Times: “In Poland there is a strange daily sensation of seeing and hearing things that look and sound ordinary, but have a startling twist to them, like bullets coming out of a child’s popgun.” In India, where he had worked between 1954 and 1958, it had been different, and in many ways worse. Surrounded by street sights of unbelievable poverty, Rosenthal felt a nagging discomfort and guilt. He had not quite been prepared for what he found in India, even though he had been warned in advance by Krishna Menon at the United Nations one day, a tense day in which Rosenthal had provoked Menon’s anger by nodding casually while the Indian diplomat was discussing poverty—“Don’t nod your head at me like that, young man! You don’t know what kind of poverty I am talking about!”
Menon had been right. Nothing that Rosenthal had known before could be compared with India, although Rosenthal as a boy in America had lived in poverty and had experienced inadequate medical care as a charity patient, had suffered the premature death of his father and four of his five sisters due to accidents or incurable illnesses or inferior care, and he had been reared with the thought that the essence of life was the absence of pain. His mistrust of doctors was deep and perhaps permanent.
As a teen-ager he walked on crutches or with a cane, victimized by osteomyelitis that had forced him to drop out of school for two years. The hospital to which he had been assigned in New York was a squalid, ill-equipped place where the patients were all but ignored, sometimes being treated by an intern—the “doctor of record” rarely appeared—and sometimes being unable to reach either a nurse or an orderly. One operation on Rosenthal’s legs had been done in the wrong place, and during his recovery he was told that he would never walk again. Fortunately, one of his sisters had written to the Mayo Clinic, which accepted him as a charity patient, and successfully used sulfa drugs that eventually restored his mobility. The Mayo Clinic became his boyhood symbol of humanity in America, and he was able to return to school, although he would never be an active participant in sports. Shy, skinny, and intense, he became a reader of books, a young man of quiet determination.
Reared in the Bronx, he was the only son of a house painter, Harry Rosenthal, who had been born in Byelorussia. Harry Rosenthal’s real surname was Shipiatski; he had permanently borrowed “Rosenthal” from a maternal uncle whom he had visited in London after he had left Byelorussia and was en route to Canada. He was a rugged, very physical man with muscles that bulged from his shoulders, and when he arrived in Ontario, in the late Eighteen-nineties, he took a job laying railroad tracks. Later he worked on one of the early utopian farms, leading a wild and semipoetic existence that he elaborately described in letters home to his father, a somewhat rakish rabbi, letters that so excited his younger brothers that they, too, soon left Byelorussia for Canada, as did a girl friend whom Harry Rosenthal later married.
After leaving the utopian farm, where the utopianism had eventually bred inefficiency and tedium, Rosenthal became a fur trapper and trader in the Hudson Bay area, and of all the things that he did, he enjoyed this the most. With a sled and a team of huskies, he wandered far and wide, becoming enthralled with the open air and sense of freedom that he felt, and he hoped that someday his son, Abraham Michael Rosenthal—who was born in 1922 in Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario—would work in the outdoors, perhaps as a forester, which he considered the ultimate of aspirations. But before the boy was old enough to work, the family had moved from Canada. The Depression was on, the fur business was in decline. After several trips back and forth across the Canadian border, Harry Rosenthal settled his family permanently in the Bronx and went to work as a house painter. He had done this on previous occasions and had disliked it. He disliked it now even more, and he came to hate New York, to wish that he were back in the open land and rustic freedom of Canada. One day while painting, he fell from a scaffold. As a result of his injuries, he later died.
Abe Rosenthal attended elementary and high schools in the Bronx. The death of his father had been preceded a year before by the death of one of his older sisters, of pneumonia; then, while young Rosenthal was a student at City College, a second sister died of cancer that had been misdiagnosed. A third sister died during postnatal care after a hospital had released her; and finally, several years later, a fourth sister died of cancer. Abe Rosenthal remembered the addresses of every apartment that he had lived in since leaving Canada, remembered how the apartments became smaller and smaller as there was less money and more death.
At City College, Rosenthal worked on the campus newspaper. He did not plan to become a journalist, having nothing so precise in mind. But he did well on the paper, and when the student who was the CCNY correspondent for the Herald Tribune was drafted by the Army, Rosenthal took over that position. Primarily because of the draft, there was a rapid turnover among students holding these campus correspondents’ jobs for metropolitan newspapers, but
Rosenthal, who was 4-F because of his illness, was not affected. When The Times’ correspondent left, Rosenthal quit the Tribune for The Times, which paid a few dollars more—twelve dollars a week—and on a winter afternoon in 1943, Rosenthal, nervous and awed, entered The Times’ newsroom for the first time. He walked up the aisle and sat at an empty desk near the back, removing from his coat pocket some notes pertaining to campus activities. But he was so petrified that he could not begin to use the typewriter; he merely sat upright and stared around the big room at all the people who seemed quietly preoccupied and distant. Then he was startled by the soft voice of a stranger behind him, a lean and homely-looking man wearing glasses, asking, “What’s your name?”
“Abe Rosenthal.”
“What do you do?” the man asked pleasantly.
“I’m the City College correspondent.”
“Do you need paper to type on?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where we keep the paper around here?”
“No.”
“It’s over there in that box,” the man said, and then he proceeded to walk down the aisle, to grab a batch of paper, and to place it on Rosenthal’s desk.
“Do you know how to slug a story?”
“No,” Rosenthal said.
The man showed Rosenthal where his name should go, at the upper left-hand corner, with a single word to describe the subject of the story.
“Do you know what you do after you finish your story?”
“No,” Rosenthal said.
“You give it to that copyboy standing over there.” Rosenthal nodded.
“By the way,” the man said, “my name is Mike Berger.”
“Thank you, Mr. Berger.”
“Mike,” the man said.
As was the practice with other campus correspondents, copyboys, and clerks who hoped to one day become Times reporters, Abe Rosenthal attended a church service each Sunday morning so that he could write a brief account of the sermon for the Monday edition of The Times. Sometimes these stories by Rosenthal and about eight others would fill more than a half-page of The Times with pithy exhortations and homilies that hardly anyone read except the preachers who delivered them, and the young aspiring journalists who reported them. While these stories, each of which rarely exceeded five or six paragraphs in length, never carried by-lines, their authorship was known to The Times’ religious-news editor, who made the assignments, and who was alert for any signs of irreverence that the church coverage might reveal.
Many of the men and women who later became Times reporters broke into print initially by covering Sunday sermons. They were paid about three dollars per story, and this amount was to include the cost of transportation to and from the church, and also any donation that they might feel compelled to drop into a collection basket. The tradition was to deposit a quarter in the first collection, and to dodge the second.
While the competent coverage of a Sunday sermon was just one of many preliminary tests confronting an aspiring Timesman, and was not in itself regarded as singularly significant as the writing of a “Topics of The Times” or a short editorial—which paid respectively $25 and $15—it was also true that the incompetent coverage of a sermon was very significant. If a young man could not reliably cover a church sermon, the editors reasoned, he could probably not reliably cover anything—which was sometimes the case. The misspelling of a pastor’s name, the misquoting of the sermon, or the misinterpretation of the message were all irredeemable sins. There was one Times copyboy who, hoping to cover a sermon without attending the church service—thus avoiding the collection plate—arrived at the church a half-hour early, walked to the rectory door on the side of the building, and rang the bell, planning to ask the pastor for an advance text of the sermon. But the bell that was rung was not the doorbell; it was the fire alarm. And its sudden clangor interrupted a Sunday school class, sending children scurrying into the street; and it provoked a pastoral protest that started the young Timesman’s career in reverse.
Such indignation as this was never caused by Rosenthal’s coverage. He was diligent and cautious, determined to let no incident stall his progression to the reportorial staff. After he had done several outstanding articles about campus life at City College and dozens of impeccable sermons, and after seeing that his work during his first year as a correspondent was hardly ever changed by the copydesk, Rosenthal summoned the courage one day to approach the city editor and ask about his promotion to the staff. Rosenthal’s inquiry had been prompted by his awareness that a girl who had been the Columbia College correspondent was in possession of a reporter’s press card, a fact that he discovered inadvertently after her handbag had fallen open to the floor. Rosenthal’s competitive spirit was stirred by the sight of her press card, and he sat silently at his desk for a while watching the city editor’s every move, waiting for the perfect moment to approach, being both timid and aroused. Then, as the city editor, David H. Joseph, stood and was putting on his coat and was about to leave the newsroom, Rosenthal sprung from his chair, rushed down the aisle toward Joseph, and unhesitatingly asked the question: when would he be promoted? David Joseph’s reaction was neither one of shock, surprise, nor even great interest. It was as if the question were too trifling to justify Joseph’s delay in getting home to dinner. “You want to go on the staff,” Joseph said, casually, “okay—you can go on the staff.” Joseph then buttoned his coat, turned, and left the room, leaving Rosenthal frozen in a state of disbelief and ecstasy.
At twenty-one, he was a Timesman, and one of the first things that he did was to quit college. He had only four credits to go for a degree, but he now felt so totally involved with The Times that his relationship with City College seemed an intrusion. Years later, after Rosenthal had established himself as perhaps the brightest young man on the New York staff, he was cited as a distinguished alumnus of City College, and one of the deans requested that he address the student body. When Rosenthal explained that he had never graduated, the dean said that a degree could be arranged if Rosenthal would submit a paper. But Rosenthal never found the time to write it, being so busy covering daily news from the United Nations, and so finally the dean asked Rosenthal to submit one of his magazine articles, which Rosenthal did—a Collier’s magazine piece about the United Nations—and, with that, he received his degree.
At this time, in 1950, Rosenthal’s by-line from the U.N. was regularly on page one. He had begun writing about United Nations activities in 1946 when Turner Catledge, wanting to see a feature story written about the New York City life of a U.N. delegate, presented the idea to the city editor, and Rosenthal drew the assignment. The subject of the feature was to be Andrei Gromyko of the Soviet Union, and Rosenthal trailed Gromyko for an entire day, jumping into taxicabs to follow Gromyko’s limousine no matter where it went. Luckily for Rosenthal’s story, Gromyko—who seemed unaware that Rosenthal was following him—took a sightseeing tour during the afternoon, encircling most of Manhattan while Rosenthal pursued him in a cab and charted the entire excursion, observing where Gromyko stopped his limousine and what New York sites seemed to attract him. Rosenthal’s story, a well-written descriptive account, delighted Catledge. It was given a big play in The Times, complete with a map that Bernstein had ordered to show exactly where Gromyko had traveled, and this article led to Rosenthal’s being assigned to The Times’ bureau at the United Nations.
The United Nations then, early in 1946, was meeting in temporary quarters on the campus of Hunter College in the Bronx, a subway stop from where Rosenthal was then living with his mother. It was an ideal assignment—The Times gave almost unlimited space to the daily activities of the U.N., meaning that there was adequate room for feature articles and pictures as well as news stories and texts, and Rosenthal was fortunate, too, in having the freewheeling, informal William H. Lawrence as his bureau chief. Lawrence allowed Rosenthal to handle many of the lead stories and also to write impressionistic pieces about this rather bizarre Bronx scene of flapping flags
and Brooks suits, wide Communist trousers, and silk Hindu saris. The United Nations populace seemed much more united on the Bronx campus, and later at Lake Success on Long Island, than it would seem after it had moved in 1951 into its present headquarters, the glass skyscraper and smooth complex along the East River in Manhattan. The skyscraper would bring verticality to the U.N., would divide it into a thousand tiny compartments, would section off these people who had come to New York from all sections of the world seeking unity. But in the Bronx and Long Island, before the Manhattan structures were opened, the U.N. was horizontally spread through several smaller buildings, and the delegates, their aides, and the press were forced to do a great deal of walking from place to place—and there was much more mingling and meeting along the paths, streets, and steps, and the U.N. seemed to Rosenthal to be a spontaneous and convivial place. The Security Council in 1946 even held some of its sessions in a Bronx gymnasium, and The Times’ bureau in those days was set up in what had been a hair-drying room for girls. It was here that Rosenthal first met James Reston.
Rosenthal was then twenty-four, and Reston, at thirty-seven, was the most admired and envied member of the staff. Reston seemed to Rosenthal to have everything—success, fame, and he radiated health; he walked with the bouncing step of a winner, slightly forward and on his toes. He had good complexion, even teeth, a full head of dark hair—a college athlete who had remained in shape, a onetime golfer now playing for higher stakes. It was said that during the previous year, in 1945, Reston had persuaded the powerful Senator Arthur Vandenburg to influence the Republican party away from its isolationist policy. In the same year, Reston had distinguished himself while covering the United Nations conference in San Francisco, and in 1944 he had won his first Pulitzer for his reporting of the Dumbarton Oaks conference, which established the foundation for the United Nations. It was before that conference in Georgetown—attended by the United States, Britain, Russia, and Nationalist China—that Reston had quietly obtained the position papers of the Allied powers, and during the meetings he was able to dip into his file and to write knowledgeably about the private sessions. Not only were Reston’s journalistic rivals upset by his series of exclusives, but many diplomats were dismayed. The Russians suspected that the Americans had leaked the information to Reston, while the Americans believed that he had gotten the data from a friend in the British Embassy. After a note of caution had been sent to the British, and after the F.B.I. had begun to investigate, the British Ambassador, Lord Halifax, refused to see Reston even though the two were friends and the British had leaked nothing. Lord Halifax explained to Reston: “I’m not going to keep your friendship at the price of losing that of the American Secretary of State.” Reston’s source had actually been from within the Chinese delegation, which had been displeased with the political arrangements at the conference, and was therefore willing to cooperate with The Times—confirming one of Reston’s lessons to journalists: “You should always look around for the guys who are unhappy.”