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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient A.M. Rosenthal
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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient A.M. Rosenthal
A.M. Rosenthal
Presently Op-Ed columnist for The New York Daily News, and the former Executive Editor and Op-Ed Columnist of The New York Times , Mr. Rosenthal is a source you can trust to give you realities behind the news. His lecture topics are naturally the headline-making issues in the international and domestic arenas, with a special emphasis on the Middle East and China. His passion for the truth makes him a powerfully persuasive speaker.
Born in the Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, on May 2, 1922, he came to the United States with his family when he was a very small boy. He attended public schools in New York, from elementary school through DeWitt Clinton High School and then City College. He says the education at City was fine and the free tuition was only a little more than he could afford.
He floundered around until he was about eighteen and then one day walked into the office of the college newspaper, The Campus -- a four-page weekly -- and knew what he wanted to do with his life. He became editor of the paper, which led to a job as college correspondent for The Times. While he was a senior in college he got a job as a reporter on the staff of The Times and quit college at once. It took him about six years to make up the remaining credits and get his degree.
Mr. Rosenthal joined The Times in 1943. For two years he was a general assignment reporter in New York. In 1945, he was assigned -- on a two-week fill-in basis -- to The Times bureau at what was then the brand-new United Nations. The two weeks stretched on a bit -- to nine years. The U.N. developed in him a lust for foreign affairs and foreign places.
In 1954 he was assigned to India. He roamed about India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Ceylon for the next four years, with assignments to other places such as New Guinea and Vietnam interspersed.
The next assignment was Poland, in 1958. He lasted there a year and a half until he was expelled for "probing into the internal affairs" of the country and the Communist party. In 1960 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Poland.
After Poland came a year in Switzerland, which he found so utterly boring that he spent a lot of the time in Africa, including a stint covering the Congo war. Japan followed, an assignment that lasted until The Times called him back to become metropolitan editor in 1963.
He then became assistant managing editor in 1967, associate managing editor in 1968, managing editor in 1969 and executive editor in 1977. Under one title or another, he was in charge of daily news operations of The Times for about sixteen years and daily and Sunday operations for about ten.
During that time the paper went through major changes. The objective was to preserve the character and purpose of the paper but make it more attractive to the kind of readers that were its audience. The two-part paper became a four-part paper -- in effect, three papers a day. The New York Times full news report, a magazine with a changing focus every day, and Business Day, a full-fledged business newspaper were added during his tenure.
He has written two books and some 100 magazine articles. In addition to the Pulitzer, he has won several Overseas Press Club awards, Front Page prizes and a variety of other awards, degrees and decorations, including a special citation from the American Dairy Goat Association, which hangs on his wall.
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Medal History
