Soccer Dad: A m rosenthal

May 12, 2006

A m rosenthal

A M Rosenthal died this week. He had been editor of the New York Times. Later he was a columnist for the Times and later, the Daily News. I'll probably write more about him later, but I enjoyed his columns. They were often intemperate, but he highlighted outrages that the rest of the Times ignored; especially when it involved Jews.

The one column my wife and I recall was from July 23, 1993. It was called "What the Hasidim Know" and he issued this warning to Jews who weren't concerned enough about the Crown Heights riots of two years earlier

I do not understand why some Jews do not understand what is in the hearts of the Hasidim, or are silent. They would not tolerate, for a moment, police or mayoral failure against riots in their own neighborhoods. 911 would damn well work. There would be no sympathetic clucks for "root cause" rationalizations.

Are the Hasidim a little too Jewish for them? Maybe they think only a certain kind of Jew gets beaten up. Sweethearts, by you, you are Park Avenue, by your wife you are Park Avenue, but by an anti-Semite you are a Hasid.

His later years were filled with concern for Jews and Israel and I appreciated him for that.

UPDATE: In his tribute to Rosenthal, "Shoe Leather and Tears" (May 12, 2006) Thomas Friedman wrote

Many readers became aware of Abe only after he became a columnist. He was very conservative and supportive of right-wing parties in Israel. But let me tell you this: When he was editor, I reported for him from Israel and the Arab world for many years. I am sure I wrote things that gave him heartburn. But in all those years he never once complained about anything I wrote. I never knew his politics until he became a columnist. As editor, he was obsessed with keeping The Times ''straight,'' as he used to say, with no reporters' or editors' thumbs ever on the scale.

Actually, I believe that Rosenthal changed after he stepped down as editor. But it's an important point given that the NY Times has been accused by many, including Profs. Walt and Mearsheimer that the Times was pro-Israel because its editors were. (Yes, the editor in question was Max Frankel, Rosenthal's successor, but given Rosenthal's reputation this still stands as a rebuttal to the charge.)

Ironically, Rosenthal in a profile in 1992 ( The Late Blooming Of A.M. Rosenthal, Arthur J. Magida, Baltimore Jewish Times, Feb 21, 1992) made a similar comment about Friedman

"Then Tom wrote his book [From Beirut to Jerusalem]. In it, he said some things that surprised a few people, including me. He had deeper reservations and opinions about what the Israeli government had been doing than I thought. That makes me admire him even more for the fact that I didn't know that. And for the fact he did not travel these through the news columns of the New York Times."

I think that Rosenthal was being too generous to Friedman. His "deep reservations" very much colored his reporting.

What were AM Rosenthal's views about the Middle East when he edited the Times? I suppose that editorial can tell us part of the story.

For one there was the Fallout from Baghdad ( June 14, 1981 ) which lamented

It is no favor to Israel to keep admiring a military boldness that threatens to become a substitute for intrepid diplomacy. Its survival depends on more than valor and sacrifice. It depends on a tenable American position in the region and on validation of Mr. [Sadat]'s diplomacy, which the Israelis once held to be as ''irrational'' as their other neighbors'. Israel today is not nearly so desperate as Prime Minister Begin contends. A truly bold Israel would use this time of military superiority not to flaunt its power but to run more risks for accommodation, encouraging especially Palestinians to trade steps toward peace for hunks of territory.

Pretty typical of the NY Times.

However in his own column, Shall we wait and see (Feb 27, 1996) , Rosenthal wrote:

Menachem Begin faced the question in 1981 and Bill Clinton faces it now, one of the most difficult questions of national leadership.

On June 7, 1981, Israeli F-16 pilots bombed and smashed Saddam Hussein's first nuclear reactor, so badly that it had to be abandoned.

Denunciations rolled in from the Arab world and Europe, particularly from France, which had built the reactor for the Iraqis. From the U.S. too came outraged criticism. The New York Times's editorial voice was among the critics, calling the "sneak attack" an "act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression."

The Israeli raid set back Saddam's nuclear-weapons plans at least 10 years. Saddam's lost nuclear decade allowed the U.S. -- and the Arabs and the French too -- to make the decision to fight him when he invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia's oil.

Mr. Begin's objective was hardly to protect Iraq's Arab neighbors or their oil. He just wanted to make sure that the Israeli people were protected from the most dangerous of human beings -- a military dictator endowed with a record of instability, very bad judgment and a weapon of unspeakable horror. Israel had its own nuclear weapons. But Mr. Begin did not want to find out if Saddam Hussein was mad enough to use his first.

The Baltimore Jewish Times profile explains the discrepancy:

During his 17 years as the Times' top editorial executive, Mr. Rosenthal occasionally disagreed with the paper's editorials regarding the Middle East. He strenuously disagreed, for instance, with the paper's 1981 condemnation of Israel's attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor. But because of the Times' "church/state" policy that distinguished between editors who established its editorial policies and those, such as Abe Rosenthal, responsible for its news columns, Mr. Rosenthal did not complain to editorial writers.

I guess, then, that I was wrong to credit Rosenthal for The Jordan Door Slams Shut (April 17, 1983) which argued

The P.L.O. will prosper as a ''liberation'' fraternity but produce only ineffectual terror. And the Palestinian people will nurse a powerful grievance against them all.

Why are monarchs as shrewd as King Hussein and wealthy as King Fahd so beholden to the weak exile army of the P.L.O.? The unavoidable answer is that they choose to be beholden, for reasons of state. And as Daniel Pipes argues in the current Commentary, the reason must be that the legitimacy of Arab governments, particularly the most conservative, greatly depends on their appearing loyal to the one remaining pan-Arab cause.

I still can't imagine that any editor at the Times other than Rosenthal (or maybe Frankel) would read Commentary, much less recommend it. Still the editorial was useful in at least acknowledging that the PLO was less a revolutionary movement than a tool of the Arabs.

But regardless of his role as editor, A. M. Rosenthal deserves credit for the strong stands he took on behalf of Jews and Israel as columnist.

As Thomas Friedman concludes (for vastly different reasons that I do)