The death of A.M. Rosenthal, coming as it does in a season of doubt among the big newspaper combines, is an occasion to think about how great newspaper editors are made. Though born in Canada, Rosenthal became a voice, at times a personification, of New York, where, while attending City College, he started working for the New York Times. He never stopped. He rose through the ranks, serving as a correspondent at the United Nations and in India and Poland and as metropolitan editor, before acceding to the editorship at a time when the country was engaged in an unpopular war in Indochina. That was when the newspaper came into possession of, and published, the classified history of the Vietnam war known as the Pentagon papers.

We can remember sitting in a coffee shop and picking up the Sunday Times on the morning the story was published and comprehending the enormity of the scoop. It precipitated one of the greatest showdowns between the free press and the American government since the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts, when Bache’s Aurora was siding with France against the Federalist administration of John Adams. We have never wavered in our admiration for the scoop artistry involved in breaking the story of the Pentagon Papers and for the courage of the publisher and editor of the Times in their willingness to put their newspaper on the line for the right of its readers to know the classified history of a war that was then still in progress and growing ever more desperate.

At the same time, we never shared the hostility to the American expedition in Southeast Asia that seemed to animate not only the sources of the Times but also, particularly in subsequent years, the Times itself. As Rosenthal’s experience in news-papering lengthened, we have the sense that some of his own views began to change. This became ever more apparent once Rosenthal retired from the executive editorship and took up a pen again for his column, “On My Mind.” We don’t speak of Vietnam but other issues. His emergence as an emotional and loving supporter of Israel was a beacon for many readers of the time, as was his outspoken voice against the persecution of Christians by communist and other dictatorships overseas.

It would be inaccurate to say that A.M. Rosenthal emerged as a bona fide neo-conservative, but the affection between him and the conservatives, both of the neo- and non-neo variety was warm and genuine and ran in both directions, as we saw one snowy day in December of 2003 when Rosenthal danced a little dance with his cane after being introduced by William F. Buckley Jr. and being presented with the “Mightier Pen” award from the Center for Security Policy.

This had only deepened when he was cast out from the newspaper to which he had given his life. It seemed to us a sign of the paper’s having started a decline, a view that may have been hinted at, albeit obliquely, in a comment to the New York Sun’s Pranay Gupte yesterday from the chairman emeritus of the New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who said of Rosenthal, “He was a great editor, a great human being, and one of my closest friends. It was the golden age of journalism when Abe was at the Times.”

Rosenthal was an encourager of this newspaper. After leaving the Times and then serving a stint as a columnist at the Daily News, the editor published his final column in the pages of The New York Sun, on May 18, 2004. It argued for the press, amid the furor over American abuses at Abu Ghraib, not to lose sight of “the masses of people Saddam slaughtered.” He told us he hoped to write more, perhaps, he told us, under the byline Abraham Rosenthal. He once called the use of the initials in his byline a “second circumcision,” though it may have been used because the full name was hard to fit in one of the Times’s columns, which were then eight to a page.

A year or so ago, we stopped in to visit Abe and Shirley in their duplex apartment on a sunlit corner of the East Side. It was filled with her flowers and beautiful touches and his vast collection of books and mementos, including one letter he particularly liked, from the Dalai Lama, propped up on a mantle. As he guided us through this collection of the framed triggers of memory, the thing that struck us most is how much he had loved his newspaper life. It was the last real conversation we had with him, and it occurred to us, as we left him there in a sunlit corner of the apartment, such enthusiasm was the essential ingredient of every great editor’s career – that he loved the newspaper life.