Jack Rosenthal — esteemed journalist, government official
Jack Rosenthal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, government official and civic leader who was the principal editor of a landmark 1968 federal report on urban riots that found an America moving “toward two societies, separate and unequal,” died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.
The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Holly Russell, said.
Mr. Rosenthal, the son of a refugee judge from Nazi Germany, merged multiple careers into a lifelong commitment to public service.
He was a spokesman and strategist for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the 1960s civil rights upheaval, and oversaw the editorial page of the New York Times, where he championed criminal justice reforms and spotlighted the challenges of an aging population, and the Times Magazine.
He later nurtured numerous civic ventures, including raising millions of dollars for victims of the 2001 World Trade Center attack as president of the New York Times Foundation.
Mr. Rosenthal was the principal editor of a 265-page report by the Kerner Commission, officially called the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, led by Gov. Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois and created by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the racial uprising in 1967. Rosenthal wrote the chapter titled “The Future of the Cities.”
Mr. Rosenthal was deputy editorial page editor of the Times when he won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1982, for distinguished editorial writing. His subjects ranged widely, reflecting a boundless curiosity and intellectual breadth.
Despite a players’ walkout, he clung to the illusion of baseball as “an amiable, ordered world contained within the neat geometry of a stadium.” He challenged a generally tolerated prejudice against fat people. (“The social pressure against obesity no doubt benefits the general health,” he wrote. “What’s troublesome is that we are all so humorless about it, so relentless, so determined to punish the overweight.”)
Mr. Rosenthal edited the editorial page from 1986-93, succeeding Max Frankel, who became the Times’ executive editor.
Frankel, who recruited him to the newspaper’s Washington bureau in 1969, said Mr. Rosenthal had “nourished countless talents among the staffs and contributors of the Times and at every turn gave voice to our shared liberal values.”
Jacob Rosenthal (he changed his name to Jack “to be more American,” he said) was born on June 30, 1935, in Tel Aviv to Manfred Rosenthal, a judge who became a bookkeeper after fleeing Nazi Germany, and the former Rachel Kaplan, a Lithuania native whom he had met while she was vacationing in the Middle East.
Jack was 3 when the family moved to the United States to join relatives in Portland, Ore., descendants of Jewish immigrants from Germany who had started a grocery store in California during the 19th century Gold Rush. His father became a judicial administrator for Multnomah County, Ore.
Mr. Rosenthal graduated in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard (where he was later a Kennedy Fellow at the Institute of Politics), and was hired by the Oregonian, where he had worked as a $1an-hour copy boy during high school. From there he was recruited to the Justice Department.
As a spokesman for Robert Kennedy, he brought a commitment to criminal justice reform and civil rights and a modicum of jocularity: When James Bennett retired as director of the Bureau of Prisons, for example, Mr. Rosenthal, for the retirement party, commissioned a cake with a file baked into it.
As president of the Times Foundation, he started the 9/11 Neediest Fund, which raised more than $60 million for thousands of families, and he incubated a number of nonprofits, including the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy.
He was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Philanthropies and a founder of ReServe, which has connected more than 2,600 adults 55 and older with fulltime jobs in government and nonprofit private agencies in 12 states.
In addition to his wife, Russell, a sculptor and former advertising agency executive, he is survived by two children, John Rosenthal and Annie Sindelar, both from an earlier marriage, to Marilyn Silver, which ended in divorce; two stepsons, Christopher and Andrew Russell; and six grandchildren.