Joseph Lelyveld, Pulitzer winner, former top editor of The New York Times, 86
Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, who won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for his book “Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White,” died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Janny Scott, his partner of 19 years and a former Times reporter.
Cerebral and introspective, Mr. Lelyveld was for nearly four decades one of the most respected journalists in America, a globe-trotting adventurer who reported from Washington, Congo, India, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and London, winning acclaim for his prolific and perceptive articles.
Coming home, he rose up the Times’ editorial pyramid to its pinnacle, the executive editorship, arguably the most powerful post in American journalism. In his seven years at the helm, from 1994 to 2001, the Times climbed to record levels of revenue and profits; expanded its national and international readerships; introduced color photographs to the front page; created new sections; and ushered in the digital age with a Times website and round-the-clock news operations.
His staffs won multiple Pulitzer Prizes for reporting — on racial attitudes and contemporary life in America, federal tax loopholes, the work of the Supreme Court, drug corruption in Mexico, Taliban atrocities in Afghanistan, and the sale of technology to China, and for feature and deadline reporting. Seventeen members of his staffs were Pulitzer finalists.
Mr. Lelyveld retired a week before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In 2000, Mr. Lelyveld’s last full year as editor, the Times Co., driven by its flagship newspaper, recorded its best year in its history, amassing revenues of $3.5 billion, including $1 billion from advertising; and circulations of 1.1 million on weekdays and 1.7 million on Sundays. It owned The Boston Globe, 15 daily papers, and eight television stations. Fortune magazine ranked it No. 1 in the publishing industry in its list of the world’s most admired companies, and a top workplace for people of color and women.
Mr. Lelyveld’s reputation as a journalist was secure long before he wrote “Move Your Shadow” (1985). Exploring ordeals and absurdities under South Africa’s apartheid system of racial separation, the book was based on his two reporting tours in Johannesburg, the first in 1965-66, when he was expelled after 11 months by a government displeased with his work, and a second from 1980 to 1983.
He joined the Times as a copy boy in early 1962, handling chores for reporters and editors in the third-floor newsroom of its headquarters on West 43rd Street in Manhattan. He soon won notice on the radio-broadcast desk, crafting news bulletins for the Times-owned WQXR on the sunrise shift: eight newscasts and thousands of words a day — a sink-or-swim test of nerves and lucidity under pressure, with hourly deadlines to hone fast, accurate writing skills. In those days it was a starting gate for many who became Times reporters. In Mr. Lelyveld’s case, it was the beginning of an institutional climb that had more to do with skill, drive, and incisive intelligence than personal charm, in which some colleagues found him wanting.
Joseph Salem Lelyveld was born in Cincinnati on April 5, 1937, the oldest of three sons of Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld and Toby (Bookholtz) Lelyveld. His father was a Zionist and civil rights crusader who was beaten by white segregationists in 1964 while helping to register Black voters in Mississippi. He served congregations in Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Cleveland in Ohio, and in Omaha. Mr. Lelyveld recalled his parents as emotionally distant and their marriage as troubled, ending in divorce.
Mr. Lelyveld was a brilliant student, graduating from the elite Bronx High School of Science and then Harvard with high honors and a bachelor’s degree in English literature and history in 1958, followed by a master’s degree in American history in 1959. He earned another master’s, from Columbia’s journalism school, in 1960.
In 1959, he married Carolyn Fox, who pioneered New York City’s first program for children with AIDS, at the Bronx Hospital Daycare Center.
In addition to Scott, Mr. Lelyveld’s survivors include two daughters from his marriage, Amy and Nita Lelyveld, and a granddaughter.