Harry M. Rosenfeld

Harry M. Rosenfeld (born August 12, 1929) is an American newspaper editor who was the editor in charge of local news at The Washington Post during the Richard Mattingly murder case[1] and the Watergate scandal. He oversaw the newspaper's coverage of Watergate and resisted efforts by the paper's national reporters to take over the story.[2] Though Post editor-in-chief Benjamin C. Bradlee gets most of the credit, managing editor Howard Simons and Rosenfeld worked most closely with reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on developing the story. Rosenfeld published a memoir including an account of his work at the Post in 2013.

Harry M. Rosenfeld
Born (1929-08-12) August 12, 1929
Berlin, Germany
OccupationNewspaper Editor
Spouse(s)Anne Hahn (m. 1953)
Websitewww.harryrosenfeldmemoir.com
Watergate scandal
Events
People

Life

Rosenfeld was born in Berlin but his Jewish family fled Nazi Germany when he was ten. The family settled in The Bronx, New York City and Rosenfeld learned to speak English devoid of a German accent. After graduating from Syracuse University, Rosenfeld was hired as an editor at New York Herald-Tribune. When it ceased publication circa 1967, Rosenfeld went to the Post, originally serving as night foreign editor.

When Rosenfeld moved to the Metro desk, Bob Woodward, recently discharged from the United States Navy and with no journalism experience, applied for a job and accepted a two-week trial without pay in August 1970.[3] When the trial was up, Woodward had written seventeen stories, not one of which was deemed publishable.[4] Rosenfeld told Woodward to get some experience elsewhere and come back in a year.[3] Woodward frequently scooped the Post at his new paper, the Montgomery County Sentinel, in the Washington suburbs, and kept phoning Rosenfeld for a job.[3] Rosenfeld hired him, right after Labor Day 1971.[3]

Rosenfeld fought to keep Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate story at the Metro desk instead of giving it to reporters at the National Desk. As noted by Roger Ebert in the 1976 Chicago Sun-Times: "The Watergate story started as a local story, not a national one, and it was a continuing thorn in the side of the Post's prestigious national staff as Woodward and Bernstein kept it as their own."[2]

Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in her memoirs describes him as "an old-style, tough, picturesque editor, and another real hero of Watergate for us. From the outset, he thought of the story as a very big local one, seeing it as something on which the Post's local staff could distinguish itself. He controlled the story before it regularly made page one of the paper, keeping it going on the front page of the metro section."[5] The Post's attention to detail and strict rules produced, in Rosenfeld words, "the longest-running newspaper stories with the least amount of errors that I have ever experienced or will ever experience."[6]

Woodward and Bernstein in their 1974 account of the Watergate investigation, All the President's Men, wrote Rosenfeld was "like a football coach. He prods his players . . . pleading, yelling, cajoling."

Rosenfeld insisted on publishing a story about John F. Kennedy's extramarital affair with Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, then learned he was demoted in the Washington Star.[7]

In 1978, Rosenfeld moved to Albany, New York and became editor of the Times Union and the now-defunct Knickerbocker News. He retired in 1996, becoming the Times Union's editor-at-large. Rosenfeld writes a weekly column for that paper which is published by other papers in the Hearst chain. He resides in Albany with his wife, Anne Hahn.[8]

In the 1976 film All the President's Men, Rosenfeld was played by Jack Warden.

In 2013, Rosenfeld wrote From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaper Man, a memoir of his childhood in 1930s Berlin under Nazi rule and his career path from the New York Herald-Tribune to the Washington Post.

Bibliography
  • Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. All the President's Men. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. (ISBN 0-671-21781-X)
  • Adrian Havill. Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993. ISBN 1-55972-172-3
  • Katharine Graham. Personal History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. ISBN 0-394-58585-2.
  • Rosenfeld, Harry. From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaper Man. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. ISBN 9781438449173
  • Rosenfeld, Harry (2018-12-28). "Battling Editor: The Albany Years". SUNY Press – via Google Books. ISBN 9781438473758

References
  1. Rosenfeld, Harry (2013-09-15). "From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman". SUNY Press. Retrieved 2020-02-19 – via Google Books.
  2. "All the President's Men". New York State Writers Institute. Retrieved 2020-02-19.
  3. Graham, Katharine (1997-02-19). "Personal History". A.A. Knopf. p. 461. Retrieved 2020-02-19 – via Google Books.
  4. Staff report (2018-01-12). "Watch: Washington Post's Bradlee, Graham describe hiring of Bob Woodward". Times Union. Retrieved 2020-02-19.
  5. Graham, Katharine (1997-02-19). "Personal History". A.A. Knopf. p. 462. Retrieved 2020-02-19 – via Google Books.
  6. Graham, Katharine (2017-12-12). "The Pentagon Papers: Making History at the Washington Post". Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Retrieved 2020-02-19 – via Google Books.
  7. Feldstein, Mark (2013-11-22). "'From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman' by Harry Rosenfeld". Washington Post. Retrieved 2020-02-19.
  8. Harry Rosenfeld Biography Page
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