Leaders from business, journalism, and law gathered at the New-York Historical Society Wednesday for the seventh annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism, awarded Wednesday to Claudia Rosett, journalist-in-residence of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, for her reporting on the U.N. oil-for-food scandal.

It was the kind of party that Breindel himself would have loved, New York Post columnist Eric Fettmann told the Knickerbocker, referring to the New York Post editorial page editor and columnist Eric Breindel, who died in March 1998 at the age of 42. “This kind of occasion was made for him.”

Ms. Rosett’s writing on international affairs reaches across continents. She covered China’s Tiananmen Square uprising and broke the full story of the North Korean labor camps in the Russian Far East in 1994. She served as a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board in New York from 1997 to 2002, and has written for publications such as the New York Times, the New Republic, the American Spectator, and The New York Sun, among others.

News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch welcomed the audience, and gave a special welcome to Breindel’s mother, Sonia. Mr. Murdoch said he was pleased to pay tribute to his late colleague. Thursday, he noted, would have been Breindel’s 50th birthday. “He left us far too early,” he said. Breindel also left behind a rich legacy of writing, he said. “Eric had the passion of one whose highest intellectual concern is for the truth. Eric maintained friendships with people from all political persuasions and walks of life. He never let disagreements undermine good fellowship. And he never let his friendships compromise his beliefs.”

Mr. Murdoch said great journalism requires courage, commitment, tenacity, intelligence, and wit. If someone has three out of five, he can be a decent journalist. Breindel, he said, had all five.

In an aside, standing near Rupert and the Deputy Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation, Lachlan Murdoch, Mayor Bloomberg joked that the Post was “the only paper we read.” But then he quickly added, “I’m very ecumenical. It’s one of the seven best newspapers in the city.” Mr. Bloomberg had to leave early, and someone said the mayor was headed to Brooklyn. Mr. Bloomberg offered a similarly evenhanded explanation: “I’m off to visit one of the five best boroughs we have.”

Lachlan Murdoch spoke next, thanking Fox chairman Roger Ailes, seated in the audience. Mr. Murdoch described Ms. Rosett as reporter’s reporter and also a pundit’s pundit. Hard facts and sound judgments are the essence of good opinion journalism, he said.

Ms. Rosett spoke last, saying that in February 1998, a month before he died, Breindel wrote presciently about the U.N. in Iraq. His op-ed, headlined “A Victory for Appeasement,” concluded, regarding the U.N. efforts in the 1990s in Saddam’s Iraq, “the final chapter has yet to be written.” Many in the room, she said, had been writing that final chapter over the past two years by investigating the oil-for-food scandal, “which under U.N. Management became the biggest heist and fraud in history.” She said, “We have to hope that out of this scandal will come change for the better, a contribution to more honest institutions, so necessary.”

Ms. Rossett said to uncover any thing at the United Nations required the labor of multitudes, and there were a great many to thank. She apologized to many who deserved mention but she had to leave out in the interest of time. She first thanked the award committee, saying that Breindel “wrote with clarity and passion in the service of that vital element of any free society: the truth.”

She next thanked Cliff May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who “runs the only think tank to have assigned a beat reporter to this U.N. story,” and whom she described as having been her major source of material support, wise counsel, and takeout lunches in Washington; the Hudson Institute’s Herb London; and Nina Rosenwald, for their backing and encouragement – “especially the lunch two years ago at which Nina suggested it might in fact be worth sticking with the U.N. story just a little longer.”

Others she thanked included John Moody at Fox News; Fox News Executive Editor George Russell, “the only man in creation who has actually deciphered every piece of documentation available on Oil-for-Food.” She also thanked her father, Richard Rosett, “an economist who taught me that even at places like the U.N. markets matter” and her mother, “who knows almost everything else that matters.”

The pieces that earned Ms. Rosett the Breindel Award include “Oil-for-Terror,” published in the Wall Street Journal, and “The Oil for Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know, and When Did He Know It?” published in Commentary.

The latter title plays on the famous question Senator Baker raised in the Watergate hearings, a subject on the minds many attendees in the wake of the disclosure that W. Mark Felt was the anonymous source, Deep Throat, who aided Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In his earlier remarks, Mayor Bloomberg jokingly thanked cohost Lally Weymouth for never once divulging that he “was not and am not Deep Throat.”

The Knickerbocker polled a few attendees about this week’s disclosure. Roger Ailes said, “Anybody that goes into a Washington garage after midnight wanting to overthrow a government is probably nuts.” James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal said Mr. Felt, a protege of J. Edgar Hoover pardoned by Reagan, makes for “a very unlikely hero for the left.”

Asked about the journalistic legacy of Watergate, Robert Novak said a whole generation looked at Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein and saw that they became rich and famous. Mr. Novak recalled teaching a course not long after Watergate, and a number of journalism students “had stars in their eyes.” When they accumulated mortgage payments, he said, they went into more lucrative professions, such as public relations. Rich Lowry of the National Review said the intense press frenzy over Deep Throat was something of “a generational thing.”

Seen among the crowd were Abby Wisse, and her fiance, artist Ben Schachter, who are getting married June 26; the district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau; Harold Evans and Tina Brown; and Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. The award puts Ms. Rosett in good company: Previous winners include Mr. Henninger, Michael Kelly of the Atlantic Monthly (posthumously), Victor Davis Hanson, Jay Nordlinger, Tom Flannery, and Jeff Jacoby.