City Pays Homage To an Editor Who Played It Straight

Although yesterday was a gray day and much of the discussion was of the Gray Lady, the funeral of A.M. Rosenthal filled Central Synagogue with colorful recollections of his fierce and feisty life.It was a Jewish service for the man who became a bar mitzvah at the synagogue at the age of 70.And it was with a Jewish perspective that Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and survivor of the Holocaust, summed up the example of the life: “You showed us it is possible to love the Jewish people just as much as the nation we live in,” Mr. Wiesel said.Nicholas Kristof described Rosenthal as a humanitarian and spoke of his days as a columnist writing about marginalized peoples, such as the women of Kenya and the persecuted in Poland. “In a larger sense, Abe’s target was the blind spot of the Times,” Mr. Kristof said, referring to the paper’s insufficient coverage of the Holocaust.Mayor Bloomberg focused on Rosenthal as a New Yorker, born in Ontario but raised in the Bronx. “Abe really did love this city with all his heart,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Like most ‘native’ New Yorkers, he came from out of town.” As for his contributions: “Some have suggested he made the paper into his own fierce, feisty image, but actually I think he made it a more accurate reflection of the city itself,” Mr. Bloomberg said.One of the many amusing anecdotes related during the service was the story of an uneaten pound cake. The cake went back and forth between Rosenthal and his colleague at the New York Times, Arthur Gelb, until Arthur’s wife, Barbara Gelb, sewed what was left of the crumbs into the lining of Rosenthal’s overcoat.The magisterial, at times imperious, Rosenthal had a down-home side, his son, Andrew, observed. “The same man who ruled the Times with fierceness that has become the stuff of legend slammed an old cowboy hat on his head and danced in the living room with his shirttail hanging out, singing along incredibly badly to the song ‘I’m Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.’ He was the cowboy from the Grand Concourse.”Rosenthal loved the newspaper life. Mr. Gelb recalled how much his friend enjoyed reciting his first byline story, in 1943, about the battleship New York. “It got to the point that me and Bernie Kalb would say, ‘Not that battleship New York again.’ But it was his journalistic birth announcement,” Mr. Gelb said. And he knew how he wanted to be remembered upon his death. “He wanted his epitaph to read, ‘He kept the paper straight.’ And that you did, my dear friend,” Mr. Gelb said.A retired Times columnist, William Safire, concentrated on Rosenthal’s work as an editor at the newspaper. Rosenthal wanted a paper to report the news “without fear or favor,” Mr. Safire said. “But ‘without favor’ did not mean without flavor.” He recalled “the hoo-haa of traditionalists when Abe ran a piece going into the complexities of pickles.” Barbara Walters said she was not listed in the program because she’d had plans to go to Europe to work on a story. “I can hear Abe in my ear, saying, ‘No one gives a damn about your travel plans. Get on with your talk.'” But perhaps the words Ms. Walters will remember most fondly are the ones he often uttered when he saw her: “Give me a hug!'”It was Ms. Walters and Beverly Sills who arranged for Rosenthal to meet Shirley Lord, who became his second wife, and helped him adjust to major career transitions . The first meeting took place at the Four Seasons, and the second at a dinner party Ms. Walters hosted. “They were captivated with each other, it was the right match,” Ms. Sills said. As Ms. Lord Rosenthal put it in a statement Ms. Sills read, “We lived a life full of adventure and hope.” The match followed a first marriage by which Rosenthal had three sons.Leading the march of the honorary pallbearers were Mayor Koch and William Buckley Jr. Following behind were men who had worked with Rosenthal at the Times, James Greenfield, Bernard Kalb, Joseph Lelyveld, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and Warren Hoge, James Hoge Jr., and Saul Steinberg.The service opened with “Voi Che Sapete,” the famous aria from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” Expressing the man’s patriotism, young artists from the Metropolitan Opera performed “America the Beautiful.”Among the hundreds of journalistic, civic, and business leaders who attended the service were Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Mortimer Zuckerman, James Wolfensohn, Pete Peterson, Donald Marron, Floyd Abrams, Maureen Dowd, Anna Quindlen, Neal Kozodoy, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, Paul LeClerc, Lally Weymouth, Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, Ken Auletta, Osborn Elliott, Sidney Zion, Betsy Gotbaum, Charlie Rose, and Mayor Giuliani.

City Pays Homage To an Editor Who Played It Straight

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