Robert Morgenthau, who died Sunday at the age of 99, exemplified what defines our greatest prosecutors. He’d been United States attorney in Manhattan but then found the job he was made for in district attorney of New York County. He held it for 35 years, longer than any other. He was, as the Times puts it, the “bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers.” Yet his greatest quality, we often felt, is that he could spot the glass eye.

He told us the yarn over lunch, after we’d asked for what he looked when he hired young prosecutors in the vast office — and legendary proving ground — that he headed in Lower Manhattan. The story involved a widower with four children who’d gone to the local bank for a loan. The junior loan officer was sympathetic, but the poor father lacked security. The bank’s vice president gave him the same answer. So he was taken in to the bank’s president.

“I have one glass eye,” the bank president said, “and if you tell me which one it is, you will get the loan.” The young man gazed into the banker’s face and pointed to his left eye. “Absolutely right,” the banker exclaimed. “You get the loan, but do you mind telling me how you knew it was my left eye?” Said the young widower: “I thought I saw a glimmer of human kindness.” That, Morgenthau said, was what he looked for in young prosecutors.

We glimpsed that spirit for the first time at a cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard, where we were a stranger. Morgenthau was the celebrity in the room. When the conversation turned to Israel, we’d put in a sprightly good word for Ariel Sharon. The room fell momentarily into an awkward silence, which was broken when Morgenthau called out, “I love Sharon. I think he’s great.” And so began a friendship.

After we launched the English language edition of the Forward, Morgenthau took us to lunch — this was in the booth with his name on it at Forlini’s, behind the courthouse — and asked what he could do to help. A newspaper may need capital, advertising, circulation, we said, but the real specie was scoops. Morgenthau cocked an eyebrow and said, sotto voce, that he wouldn’t be surprised if an indictment was handed up against Clark Clifford.

We knew that the former defense secretary had been entangled in Morgenthau’s long campaign to investigate the bank known as BCCI, but not that he would be indicted. Morgenthau declined to elaborate, and, in one of the blunders of our career, we failed to put a reporter on it. The Washington Post ended up breaking the story two days ahead of the indictment, which rocked Washington. It taught us to pay heed when Morgenthau dropped a hint.

Morgenthau was a Democrat, yet seemed to be moving rightward with every passing election. So we were a bit surprised when one morning he called to ask if we’d ever met the House’s new chairman of Ways and Means, Charles Rangel. We had not. So Morgenthau proposed breakfast at the Carlyle. The two of us were already seated when Mr. Rangel showed up. “Good morning, chairman,” we said, “how are you this morning?”

“Back in Korea, I was lying in an icy ditch,” Mr. Rangel rumbled. “Ninety percent of my unit had been injured or killed, some lying frozen not far away. I prayed I might get out of there alive, and I haven’t had a bad day since.” Morgenthau piped up that in World War II, he’d had a destroyer shot out from under him in the Mediterranean and was bobbing in the sea when he made his own deal with the Almighty, and he hadn’t had many bad days since, either.

So we said that we were lying in the mud of the U Minh forest in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, with enemy tracers snapping overhead and hand grenades going off, when we, too, swore that if we got out alive, we’d walk the straight and narrow. And we haven’t had many bad days, either. Then the three of us had an appreciative chuckle and settled down to one of the most enjoyable breakfasts we can remember.

It turns out that Mr. Rangel had started in Morgenthau’s office when Morgenthau was United States attorney under JFK and LBJ. The DA was enormously proud of — and loyal to — Mr. Rangel. Even when Morgenthau had moved rightward. And even when Mr. Rangel came under fire for using Congressional letterhead to write to such figures as David Rockeller to try to raise funds to help fund at City College a modest center to prepare minority students for public service. This greatest of prosecutors may not have had a glass eye, but he had that glint of human kindness. How we need it now.