Abe meant that he followed his instincts. When something was wrong he felt it. Abe--or if you must, A. M. Rosenthal--had, and still does have, a visceral sense of ethics. His rules of conduct, journalistic or political, are not abstractions explored by people on foundation grants or earnestly debated at editors' conferences. The appropriate rules for Abe have been defined by his stomach, and they have always been highly demanding, especially on Abe himself.

As executive editor of the Times, he agonized over each issue of the paper. Good stories thrilled him, while bad stories depressed him, and a lone word used unfairly or inaccurately in a news article would set him off brooding. Sometimes then he would burst forth in wrath like an Old Testament prophet, although usually the wrath would be directed toward another editor and not toward a reporter. Abe could sink into gloom if he thought he had hurt a reporter's feelings. Occasionally he would rebuke a reporter too severely, and then be stricken by conscience. Six months or a year later, the reporter would find he had a better assignment than the one he had when he was rebuked.

I am writing out of my own experience at the Times, of course, and while I will try to be objective, I am not sure that I can be. I do have my biases. At the same time I understand that Abe is now 80, although I am not sure I believe it. He dresses better now than he once did, but otherwise he has changed hardly at all. He is still the most honorable man I have ever known, and the fact is I love him. But I must also tell you now that when I first met him, I did not like him very much. He could not stand me, either.

This was in the mid-1960s. Abe was back from a brilliant career overseas, and had become the Times's city editor. I was a deputy to Claude Sitton, the national editor. One day Abe passed on to Sitton a posthumous psychiatric study of Lee Harvey Oswald, and said it might be worth a story by the national desk. Sitton, in turn, passed the study on to me. I read it, dismissed it, and forgot about it. Abe, however, eventually followed up with Sitton, who referred him back to me.

I told Abe I had thrown the study away. He asked coldly why I had not sent him a memo about that. I said I had not thought it necessary. Abe's coldness turned to anger. He said I had not been "courteous," whereupon I got angry, too. I rose from my chair, and said I did not need a lesson in manners from him. We glared at each other like two kids in a playground, scuffling the dirt by the swings. Abe looked as if he might choke, but then he turned and walked away. We ignored each other after that, averting our eyes whenever we passed in the newsroom.

Indeed it was a while before we spoke. I had left the Times for Harper's magazine, but returned three years later. Abe by then was managing editor, and the Times was beginning a meta morphosis. Nonetheless the newsroom still looked the same: rows of gray steel desks on a gray linoleum floor; no pictures, plants or carpets. The linoleum floor was scarred by cigarette burns. The last spittoon had disappeared a few years back (the copyreader who used it had retired) and so had the last green eyeshade, but the general ethos still seemed to be 1940.

The picture, though, was deceptive. The city desk was now the metropolitan desk, and Arthur Gelb was metropolitan editor. He and Abe were best friends and closest colleagues, and together they were remaking the Times. I was assigned a desk in the second row, on the aisle, a few feet from the men's room. It was a lovely vantage point--in front of me the metropolitan desk and all the other important desks that made up the Times, and in back the rows and rows of other reporters in the newsroom. Everything was exposed, psyches in particular, and there was a new show every day. The temperature climbed after four P.M. as reporters banged away at typewriters and their body heat rose in the air. They scowled and sighed and murmured. I think it was the most impressive collection of talent ever to staff a newsroom. Young hungry reporters and old seasoned reporters made up an eclectic mix, joined only by their devotion to the Times and their disdain for its editors. There was nothing personal about this; good reporters disliked editors as a matter of course, and the better the reporter the more likely he was to show it. The legendary Homer Bigart sat at the first desk in the first row, and next to him sat Peter Kihss. Homer sat upright and sneered, while Peter bent over and muttered.

Meanwhile there was a morale problem. There was a morale problem at the Times, in fact, when I went there as a copyboy, and there was a morale problem when I eventually left the Times years later. Indeed unhappiness at the Times was almost a tradition. Many people there were talented, and many were ambitious, and the ones most talented and most ambitious were the ones most drenched with angst. They were unhappy because their abilities were unrecognized or their stories butchered, or their talents misdirected by the less able. The best of them, though, were unhappy because the Times was not what it should be.

Exactly what it should be was never quite clear, although people both inside and outside the paper wrestled for its soul every day. In the 70s and 80s, capturing the attention of the Times was thought to be important. Everyone agreed about that, especially the people in the newsroom. How a story was played and why, and whether the reporter was in anyone's hip pocket were matters of interest. You speculated, you wondered, you allowed your imagination to roam. You looked for intrigue, and in the best tradition of gossipy newsrooms you found it, even if you had to invent it.

I am going on about all this because I want you to know what Abe was facing as managing editor. There he was trying to make the Times more readable and less fustian, without sacrificing its standards. There he was trying to unify all of the Times's autonomous and semi-autonomous departments--its dukedoms, satrapies and fiefdoms, Gay Talese once called them--and have them speak as one. At the same time he had to deal with a newsroom full of often difficult and prickly people, including, of course, me.

We circled one another tentatively at first. That would change, although in the beginning we made one another nervous. Arthur Gelb, a considerate man, sometimes intervened to help us out. When Abe stepped down as executive editor years later, many publications ran stories about his tenure at the Times. I remember one in particular. I think it was in Newsweek. It said Abe had ruled the Times with an iron hand, and conducted a virtual reign of terror. In fact, you could make a case of sorts for the iron hand part--Abe did insist on high standards--but the rest of it was nonsense. Abe wanted his reporters to do the very best they could do, and he would tolerate all kinds of misbehavior to get them to do it. I am a case in point. I may not have been the most difficult person in that collection of touchy, exasperating and talented people in the newsroom. There was too much competition for me to have been that. But goodness knows I was often a trial to my editors, and I had to be handled with forbearance. Abe, however, put up with me, as he did with others just like me, often with acts of grace and kindness. I liked my years in the newsroom very much, and there never was a reign of terror. It was simply the invention of soreheads who resented Abe for reasons of their own.

As executive editor of the Times, Abe was certain to make enemies of course. The Times was powerful, and so was he, and that in itself was enough to annoy and even enrage many critics. But there were other provocations, too. Abe has always had an independent mind. This, I think, is the rarest of all possessions for people in politics, the media or any other area of public life, and while it may seem like a fine thing to have, it can impose a burden on its owner. Certainly it did with Abe. He often swam against the tide, which is never easy to do, anyway, and in his case could be even more difficult. Blame that on his stomach, and an independent mind.

Thus the story he wrote about the student protest at Columbia University in 1968: Abe was assistant managing editor then, and as such had no business writing any story at all. Indeed Clifton Daniel, the managing editor, tried to persuade him not to do the story, but Abe had made up his mind. Consequently he was there when Columbia president Grayson Kirk reclaimed his office after the police evicted the students who had occupied it. Abe's story described what Kirk saw:

"He wandered about the room. It was almost empty of furniture. The desks and chairs had been smashed, broken and shoved into adjoining rooms by the occupying students, who had just been led down the stairs, manacled and whistling, 'We shall overcome.'

"Dr. Kirk picked his way slowly through the dirty blankets, half eaten sandwiches, comic books and tin cans on his spattered green rugs...A policeman picked up a book on the floor and said, 'The whole world is in these books. How could they do this to these books?'"

The story ran on page one the next day, and immediately set off a controversy. Abe was denounced in the Village Voice and other publications; Columbia students demonstrated outside Punch Sulzberger's apartment, chanting "New York Times--print the truth." Perhaps Clifton Daniel had been right, and Abe should not have written the story. It created battle lines in an over-heated climate that would linger on for years. They were there in the three-part series the Washington Post ran on Abe's reign at the Times the same year he retired as executive editor. The Post, in its way, acknowledged that he was a giant. It would not have run a three-part series if he were not. But according to the Post, Abe had bent the rules of nonpartisan journalism. Just how he had bent them, however, was not clear. The Post offered no examples, just possibly because it could find none.

Anyway I have never asked Abe about the Columbia story, although I suspect I know why he wrote it. He wanted to know for his own sake what was going on; that was his independent mind. At the same time he was appalled by the half-eaten sandwiches, tin cans and comic books, especially the comic books; that was his stomach. I think the Times was all the healthier for having had Abe's values, and so was the whole world of journalism. Meanwhile I offer up now a quote from "The Paper's Papers," a book about the Times by the late Richard Shepard, a very dear man, who also loved Abe, but could still keep a clear view about him.

"Rosenthal's fanatical insistence on maintaining journalistic values, as evidenced in the archives, bordered on monomania. He chastised reporters, copy editors, senior editors, production executives and even the publisher when he scented a breach in the code he had adopted as the purest way to put out a newspaper." Chastising even the publisher! As I said at the top of this piece, Abe is the last of his kind, and they just don't make them like that any more. Meanwhile I still don't believe he's really 80.