Color is a factor. Ghanaians reacted toward Frenchmen killing Algerians, not toward Congolese killing white missionaries.
Strangeness is a factor. Americans react to the extermination of Jews but not to the extermination of Watusis.
There are national as well as individual apathies, all inhibiting the ability to react. The “mind-your-own-business” attitude is despised among individuals, and clucked at by sociologists, but glorified as pragmatic national policy among nations.
Only in scattered moments, and then in halting embarrassment, does the United States, the most involved nation in the world, get down to hard cases about the nature of governments with which it deals, and how they treat their subject citizens. People who believe that a free government should react to oppression of people in the mass by other governments are regarded as fanatics or romantics by the same diplomats who would react in horror to the oppression of one single individual in Washington. Between apathy, regarded as a moral disease, and national policy, the line is often hard to find.
There are, it seems to me, only two logical ways to look at the story of the murder of Catherine Genovese. One is the way of the neighbor on Austin Street—“Let’s forget the whole thing.”
The other is to recognize that the bell tolls even on each man’s individual island, to recognize that every man must fear the witness in himself who whispers to close the window.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This edition of Thirty-Eight Witnesses was inspired by Andrew Blauner, the literary agent of New York. For years he has had an intense interest in the story of Catherine Genovese and was determined that my original version of Thirty-Eight Witnesses be reprinted and updated.
About the Author
A. M. Rosenthal (1922–2006) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign correspondent and the longest-serving executive editor of the New York Times, holding the position from 1969 to 1987. He joined the Times as a staff reporter in 1944 and ten years later was assigned to the paper’s New Delhi bureau. As a foreign correspondent, Rosenthal reported from India, Poland, and Japan, among other locales, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. In 1963 he returned to New York and quickly rose through the editorial ranks at the Times, overseeing coverage of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Iran-Contra scandal. He played a decisive role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers and, for his exceptional support of human rights, received the United States’ highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, from President George W. Bush in 2002. Thirty-Eight Witnesses (1964), Rosenthal’s groundbreaking account of the murder of Kitty Genovese and ensuing public outcry, is a classic of twentieth-century journalism.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1964, 1999 by A. M. Rosenthal and the New York Times
Preface copyright © 2009 by Samuel G. Freedman
Photographs are reprinted by permission of The New York Times/Redux.
Cover design by Andrea Worthington
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2643-7
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