A battling editor to the end
Harry M. Rosenfeld: 1929-2021
Newsroom leader, author remained First Amendment champion
Harry M. Rosenfeld, a child refugee from Nazi Germany whose six-decade career in journalism was dedicated to holding the powerful to account, died early Friday morning. He was 91.
The editor of the Times Union from 1978 to 1994, Rosenfeld remained active in the role of editor-at-large even after being hospitalized with COVID-19 in December, an illness that led to several months of declining health and reduced mobility. But his sharply crafted opinions continued to crackle over the line in conference-call meetings of the newspaper’s editorial board as recently as this week.
On one such call last month, a discussion of his grim prognosis was interrupted by Rosenfeld dialing in. Told by several slightly astonished members of the board that it was good to hear his voice, he replied, “It’s good to have a voice to be heard.”
His death was confirmed by his wife, Anne, who on Friday morning said that her husband’s life was in many ways defined by good luck: first in his family’s ability to escape Hitler’s regime, and in his decision to pursue a career so fitted to his passions and beliefs.
Times Union publisher and CEO George R. Hearst III called Rosenfeld “the conscience of good and fair journalism, always seeking the truth through rigorous inquiry and factual certainty. As a pioneer in investigative journalism, Harry set the bar high for countless others in his profession to do better and go farther in pursuit of the truth. Our company is forever grateful to Harry for his many years of service
to Hearst newspapers, and our thoughts are with his family.”
Rosenfeld came to Albany after overseeing perhaps the most significant political journalism of the 20th century: the Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal, reportage that exposed the misdeeds that led to the 1974 resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. As the Post’s managing editor for metro news, Rosenfeld was credited with making sure the sprawling story retained the sort of
relentless focus more associated with the crime beat.
Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher during Watergate, described him in her 1997 autobiography as “an oldstyle, tough, picturesque editor, and another real hero of Watergate for us.” In their best-selling account “All the President’s Men,” reporters Bob Woodward — a Rosenfeld hire — and Carl Bernstein compared Rosenfeld to a football coach — “pleading, yelling, ca
joling, working his facial expressions for instant effects — anger, satisfaction, concern.”
Leonard Downie, who served as the Post’s assistant managing editor under Rosenfeld beginning in 1974, called him “a proud and devoted newspaperman” to the end.
“After effectively editing foreign news in New York and at The Washington Post, Harry became a great local news editor in Washington and Albany,” said Downie, who served as the Post’s executive editor from 1991 to 2008. “He relentlessly drove The Post’s Watergate coverage and brought me into its editing. While we were very different in temperament, he was one of my most significant mentors, as he was for others.”
At the Post and throughout his four decades in Albany, Rosenfeld saw journalism’s key role as that of a watchdog checking the excesses of those in power — a role that, even in his final years, was based in an immigrant’s sense of debt to the country that had taken in his family as they faced mortal peril.
“I do not wear my acquired citizenship lightly. I tried to affirm my obligation as an American in my newspaper work,” Rosenfeld wrote in 2013’s “From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman,” the first of his two memoirs.
It was a theme he also noted during remarks in 1998 at a Holocaust remembrance service at Congregation Beth Emeth: “The values that I came to develop as an American and then as a journalist are buttressed by what I saw and felt as a child when the power of a hostile and hateful state overwhelmed us and nearly took our lives.”
A family escapes
Rosenfeld was born Hirsch Moritz Rosenfeld on Aug. 12, 1929, in Berlin, the son of Polish immigrants. His father was a furrier, a trade that he might well have passed along to his son but for the rising violence against Jewish people. But the family — including Harry and his sister, Rachel, who was eight years older — accelerated their plans to flee after Harry’s father was deported to Poland in an escalation of German anti-semitism. In his memoir, Rosenfeld recalled sheltering in the Polish embassy in Berlin during Kristallnacht, the violent November 1938 assault against Jews, and walking amid shattered store windows the next morning.
Five months later, the family sailed past the Statue of Liberty and set up a new home in the Bronx, where an uncle had lived for a decade. Rosenfeld assimilated quickly, refusing to speak any German so that he could pick up English, learning sports and hobbies typical of an American boy and soon becoming a lifelong Yankees fan.
His aptitude for journalism surfaced early: In the eighth grade, he became foreign editor of the school newspaper, which led him to scour the city tabloids for news that he would rewrite for his classmates.
He enrolled in Syracuse University to study journalism, and in the months between high school and college got hired as a shipping clerk at the New York Herald Tribune — which was to be the first of his three long-term professional homes.
Whenever he returned home from Syracuse, he saw Anne Hahn, the striking daughter of fellow Jewish immigrants, whom he had met at a dance while in high school. They were married in the Bronx in 1953, while Harry was an Army private. Decades later, he wrote of “my life’s major triumph, the one achievement that will be chiseled into my tombstone, that I was the husband of Anne.”
After two years of active duty — in Korea, his tasks were mostly typing and writing reports — Rosenfeld returned to the Herald
Tribune, then in its final decade of glory as a showcase for top-flight journalism. His course was set by an editor who advised him, “Reporters are a dime a dozen; good editors are hard to find.”
As his promotions came at the Herald Tribune — from news service editor to cable editor to foreign editor — Rosenfeld developed a reputation as a hard worker willing to tackle any assignment, even if it required confrontation with bosses or star reporters.
He stepped aside from newspapering only once — during a 1963 strike that closed all seven newspapers in New York City, when he landed a job writing for CBS News. When the strike ended after 114 days, Rosenfeld turned down a permanent job offer from CBS and returned to the Herald Tribune. But the strike wound up being the death blow for four of the newspapers, including the Herald Tribune.
His next move came at the invitation of Ben Bradlee, who had been hired as managing editor of The Washington Post with a charge from Graham to upgrade the newsroom. Rosenfeld came aboard as deputy foreign editor, at first working a night shift. He was soon promoted to foreign editor and dispatched on a tour of Post foreign bureaus worldwide — interrupted by two months of coverage in Vietnam, an experience that Rosenfeld felt would add to his credibility with the reporters he oversaw.
A metro story
His success at running foreign coverage convinced Bradlee, by then the newspaper’s executive editor, to promote Rosenfeld to lead the Post’s local coverage, which was the newsroom’s largest staff but consistently underperforming, in Bradlee’s view. It was also “a pot of stewing
cliques and rivalries,” Rosenfeld later observed, and his assignment was “to energize the local staff and accustom it to meeting higher standards.”
It was “trying ” work, he recalled. Asked early in his tenure by the publisher how his work was going, Rosenfeld replied, “I had a good day today: nobody cried.”
By 1972, though, Rosenfeld felt the staff known as “metro” was improving. When a seemingly minor crime, the burglary of an office in the Watergate complex along the Potomac River, erupted into a national scandal, Rosenfeld’s staff, including Woodward and Bernstein, landed some important early scoops. Rosenfeld insisted even as the story grew in reach and importance that the local reporters continue to handle it, rather than yielding it to the national reporting staff.
Bradlee’s embrace of Rosenfeld’s argument was critical. While other news organizations broke stories and contributed to the body of reporting on Watergate, no news outlet proved able to develop the source network — notably including Woodward’s confidential intelligence source nicknamed “Deep Throat” — to match the Post’s string of exclusive reports.
The coverage initially brought acrid denials from Nixon’s defenders and even jealous shrugs from competing journalists. But two years after the breakin, Nixon resigned in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office. “I came to recognize our perseverance in the face of opposition as the objective lesson for newspaper women and men,” Rosenfeld wrote.
After Nixon’s resignation, Rosenfeld felt a new assignment was in order. Bradlee suggested he take over as editor of the Trenton (N.J.) Times, then owned by the Post. Rosenfeld declined. Instead, he became the Post’s assistant managing editor for national news — leading the reporting staff that his metro reporters had beaten on the biggest national story of the decade. It was an unhappy assignment, with story choices and personnel pressures that brought Rosenfeld into conflict with Bradlee. Rosenfeld was sidelined to oversee the opinion pages and books coverage.
At the same time, the story of the Post’s Watergate coverage had attracted interest from Hollywood: “All the President’s Men,” featuring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward
I do not wear my acquired citizenship lightly. I tried to affirm my obligation as an American in my newspaper work.” Harry Rosenfeld, Times Union editor-at-large
and Bernstein and Jack Warden as Rosenfeld, was released to box-office success and critical acclaim in 1976.
Back to New York
Rosenfeld was ready for a new challenge when he got a call from Roger Grier, the publisher who had just been hired by Hearst to run the Times Union and its smaller afternoon sibling, the Knickerbocker News. “The papers cried out for improvement, and I was convinced I could help,” Rosenfeld said.
Still, after key roles at large daily newspapers in New York City and Washington, the move to Albany perplexed some friends. But Rosenfeld was eager to take charge of a newsroom, and the mission of a regional daily focused on investigative and enterprise reporting was also on his mind.
“Not only people in great cities were entitled to the benefits that vigorous journalism can provide,” he later wrote.
Rosenfeld ran both Albany papers until the closure of “The Knick” in 1988. (For a while in the mid-1980s, he also acted as editor of Hearst’s Los Angeles Herald-examiner, and commuted coast-tocoast to handle the multiple responsibilities.)
Rosenfeld set out to impose more rigorous journalistic standards with new hires, a newsroom ethics code, and a focus on watchdog reporting. It was Times Union reporting that uncovered corruption in the construction of the downtown arena that is now known, ironically, as the Times Union Center, leading to a 46-month prison term for the county executive, Jim Coyne.
Rob Brill, an editor who
started on the copy desk at the Times Union in 1985 and worked with Rosenfeld on his second memoir, “Battling Editor: The Albany Years,” said he was “fiercely dedicated to the best things that journalism was able to do, based on an enormous wealth of experience and intellect,” combined with a wry sense of humor that could “knock you back on your heels.”
Brill remembered Rosenfeld going through each day’s paper with a red pencil: “He was generous with praise, but he could let you know when it wasn’t as great as it could be . ... He could drive a truck through a pinhole in a story.”
Long after his retirement from full-time work in 1997, Rosenfeld contributed regular columns and remained an active participant in the editorial board’s deliberations. In the board’s meetings with public officials, he could be a probing questioner or scathing critic depending on the degree to which he thought the visitor was attempting to dodge a tough question or obfuscate on a matter of public concern. (“He had an incredible bull__ detector,” Brill said.)
He got the diagnosis of a positive COVID -19 test in early December just moments after a virtual meeting of the board, where he had argued persuasively for a tough editorial castigating President Donald Trump for his silence in the face of a Russian cybersecurity attack.
Rosenfeld’s hostility to Trump was rooted in both his reading of history and his personal experience. Shortly after the 2016 election, Rosenfeld wrote of “the striking congruities between the traits
and techniques” of Trump and Adolf Hitler. (It was an argument that Rosenfeld deployed during the editorial board deliberations that resulted in its call for state electors to reject Trump as unfit for office.)
Rosenfeld pointed to “Trump’s incessant attacks on the free American press, in the same words Hitler used — ‘the lying press’ — for its temerity in exposing his lies and his dubious, potentially illegal and unconstitutional activities. A free press is essential precisely to perform this function for the kind of rip-off artist personified by Donald Trump. Democratic regimes are endangered by their own shortcomings. Authoritarians first seek to intimidate the independent press.”
But despite all that he had witnessed and helped chronicle about his nation’s political misdeeds and periodic betrayals of its promise, Rosenfeld remained a patriot.
“Annie and I have buried our mothers and fathers in American soil; no longer Poles and Germans, they were Americans,” he wrote in the final paragraph of “From Kristallnacht to Watergate.” “‘Land where my fathers died’ now applies to us as much as to the nativeborn. America is my homeland, the place where I always breathed easiest and where, with luck, my last breath will be drawn.”
In addition to his wife, Rosenfeld is survived by his daughters Susan Wachter, Amy Kaufman and Stefanie Rosenfeld as well as seven grandchildren.
A public memorial service is planned, though details were still being worked out on Friday.