Harry Rosenfeld obituary

He was the brusque, aggressive and highly-demanding editor of the Post’s metro (local news) section when five men were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington DC’s Watergate building in June 1972.

He supervised Bernstein and Woodward as they began doggedly to investigate what initially appeared a minor crime story. As its much wider political implications became apparent he stopped Bradlee taking it away from the two young reporters and giving it to more experienced journalists. “They’re hungry,” he told Bradlee. “You remember when you were hungry?” He pushed, steered, questioned, cautioned, overruled and, on occasion, staunchly defended his protégés against their detractors until Nixon finally became the first US president forced to resign.

Rosenfeld was “like a football coach. He prods his players . . . pleading, yelling, cajoling, pacing, working his facial expressions for instant effects — anger, satisfaction, concern,” Bernstein and Woodward wrote in All the President’s Men, their account of the Watergate saga. During the investigation “he hovered around the reporters’ typewriters as they wrote, passed them questions as they talked on the phone to sources, demanded to be briefed after they hung up or returned from a meeting”.

In his 2013 memoirs, From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman, Rosenfeld recalled how he was “part of a team that took a mediocre newspaper and elevated it to greatness”.

Hirsch Moritz Rosenfeld was born in Berlin in 1929, the second child of Polish parents, Sam and Esther. His father was a furrier, and although his shop was spared on Kristallnacht, Rosenfeld recalled walking over the shattered glass of other Jewish shops the next morning.

His parents had applied to emigrate to the US in 1934, but their application was not approved until March 1939 and they sailed for New York just in time to avoid the Holocaust. “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,” he said.

The family settled in the Bronx. Eager to assimilate, Rosenfeld spoke only English. After high school, where he worked for the student newspaper, he spent a summer working in the New York Herald Tribune’s mailroom before enrolling to study American literature at Syracuse University. He graduated in 1952 then spent two years in the US army, including a posting to Korea.

In 1953 he married Anne Hahn, a daughter of Jewish immigrants whom he had met at a high-school dance. They went on to have three daughters: Susan, Amy and Stefanie.

After he left the army the Herald Tribune offered him a full-time job and he rose to become its foreign editor. When a strike closed all New York’s papers for several months in 1963 he was offered a job in television but chose to return to the Herald Tribune until it closed for good three years later.

Bradlee then hired him as a deputy foreign editor of the Post, working night shifts. He was soon promoted to foreign editor, then in 1970 he was put in charge of the lacklustre metro section to raise its game.

Bow-tied and with thick-framed glass, Rosenfeld ate lunch at his desk to save time and drove his staff hard. He introduced a New York brashness to the Post’s staid coverage, once assigning six reporters to the story of a 14-year-old runaway whose boyfriend had bludgeoned her father to death with a crowbar while she watched.

When Woodward, freshly discharged from the US Navy, applied for a job he gave him a two-week trial during which he had not one story published. Rosenfeld told him to get experience elsewhere, so he went to work for the weekly Montgomery County Sentinel in suburban Washington, often scooping the Post and frequently telephoning Rosenfeld to ask for a job.

When Woodward called him at home, Rosenfeld slammed the phone down. His wife rebuked him: “You always complain that your reporters are not aggressive enough.” Within days Rosenfeld hired Woodward, and nine months later Woodward and Bernstein started investigating the Watergate break-in.

Rosenfeld’s reward for the Post’s Pulitzer prizewinning Watergate coverage (apart from being played by Jack Warden in the film of All the President’s Men) was promotion to assistant managing editor of the paper’s national staff, but his abrasive personality irritated Bradlee, a Harvard-educated Bostonian. “Rosenfeld, you spend your time sticking your thumb in my eye,” Bradlee once complained.

When Rosenfeld ran a story about John F Kennedy’s affair with Bradlee’s sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, years before, he was demoted. In 1978 he left the Post to become editor of the Times Union newspaper in the New York state capital of Albany. Rosenfeld remained editor until 1994, holding state officials to account, and he continued to write columns and play an active role at the paper until his death.

He was particularly scathing about a fellow New Yorker, Donald Trump. There were “striking congruities between the traits and techniques” of Trump and Adolf Hitler, he wrote, particularly 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”.

Harry Rosenfeld, journalist, was born on August 12, 1929. He died on July 16, 2021, aged 91