What was your boyhood like?

When I was a boy I really didn't know what I was going to do until I was 18. I was very uncertain of myself, for various reasons. One was that I spent a couple of years in and out of hospitals for orthopedic reasons, and I walked around on crutches for a long time, and I couldn't see how anybody would ever want to hire me for anything. We were quite poor. I came from a working-class family, born in Canada. My father was a worker and a farmer and lots of other things. He came to the United States and could not make a living. He got a job as a painter, fell off a scaffold and died. And so we really didn't have any money. Now, no money does not mean that we were starving, but it meant that you had to work to go through college.

What were the early influences in your life?

I would say that one of the greatest influences on my life was: I was American. Because I was naturalized, which is a whole book in itself. But the fact that I was American really did shape me mother had enough courage to come to the New World. They came to Canada, but then they came to the United States. One of the things that shaped me was the knowledge of America as the free country. My mother used to call it the golden land. And I knew what it was.

You know, what it was, was you could get a job you would get one later. Nobody would ever arrest you, or beat you up beaten up a couple of times because I was a Jew. And I also knew, from my father and my mother, that not all countries were like this. Most countries, or certainly the countries they knew, were tyrannies. So when I come out for human rights, and I write about it and I get angry, I'm not talking in the abstract. I know that if I lived in a dictatorship, or anything approaching it, and I was the kind of person I am now, I would be in jail very quickly.

People say to me, "What do you care about human rights in China?" And they say, "Sudan they don't care. I feel very strongly that, for instance, the persecution of Christians has not been given enough recognition in the world Human Rights Watch. And it has not been given enough attention by Christians to their own people. I think the reason is that a lot of Americans and Europeans regard Asian and African Christians as kind of guest Christians, you know. And they don't take into account the strong possibility that one day, if a tyranny comes to their country, their Christianity may not save them any more than it saved dissident Germans. So I'm very moved by this. I mean I would be dead, Jew or no Jew, in a society that wouldn't let me speak or write or bitch or complain.

And what got you into journalism?

Journalism College, in the cellar, past little offices of college groups like the chess club. And there was this little room that was the office of the weekly paper of the students, called "The Campus." A fellow that I knew, Richard Cohen, stood in the doorway and called me in. He said, "Abe, come on in. Why don't you try out for the paper?" I didn't know that what he meant by "trying out" was to be kind of a little servant to everybody I walked in there and, I swear to you, the minute I crossed the threshold into this little hovel of a room with old papers on the floor, and saw the kids typing and smelled the ink, I said to myself, "This is a piano I can play."

I absolutely loved it. I mean, you know what it's like getting into journalism. Somebody gives you an assignment. You go out and you look into it, and you answer all the questions to get a story. And you put it in the paper. And you could look at it. Even if it was two paragraphs, you could look at it: They were your two paragraphs. I can still recite the first little story I had.

Then I became a college correspondent at The New York Times. The college correspondent covers the colleges and the whole Board of Higher Education and tries to get the stories into the paper they do, you get paid space rates, and you could make five, six, eight dollars a week.

I dealt with the third assistant city editor. And I asked him if I could please cover sermons, because they gave these sermons out to regular kids and there was real money in that. For every sermon I covered on a Sunday, I got three dollars.

But I had to pay a dime [for carfare] to get to the church and another dime to get back. And I didn't have enough courage to look away from the collection plate. Because, you know, I wasn't sure that God was a Jew. He might be a Catholic. I didn't have the social courage to say, "Sorry, I don't want to." So I had to put a quarter in.

I didn't like being assigned to St. Patrick's. Nice church wrong a quarter. [Laughs.] So what I got as my total take, after taxes, was now a buck and a half. Even I knew that's not so much. But for that dollar and a half I had my lunch. I couldn't afford much in the cafeteria, but I invented a rather tasty dish that only costs a nickel. I called it the mustard sandwich. Because you got mustard free and two slices of bread for a nickel. That's not bad. Eating mustard every day was a little dull, but I did. And I might have even had a quarter a week left over for something or other. Many years later, when I got an honorary doctorate at City College, somebody served me, as my lunch at this ceremony, a mustard sandwich. It was so sweet.

How did you get to cover the United Nations?

I got to cover the UN thanks to [Soviet Foreign Minister] Andrei Gromyko. I was not at the UN. I was a little reporter, a city reporter. But the city editor to cover Gromyko [who had walked out of a UN session the day before], what he was doing at the UN that day.

So I went over to the hotel where he was staying these days. I went to the information man and said, "Is Mr. Gromyko here?" He said "Yes." I said, "What floor is he on?" He said nine tell you that now. So I got in the elevator and I said ninth floor, And the elevator man took me up to the ninth floor and said Gromyko was over there. So I went over and rang the bell. And Mrs. Gromyko opened the door. And I said, "Is Mr. Gromyko here?" And he came. We chatted, and she made me a cup of coffee. He said, "I'm going over to the mission," the UN mission, which is two blocks away. We walked over to the mission, where a whole bunch of reporters, from all over, were waiting for him to come out so he would tell them where he's going He walked out [of the mission] and then God looked kindly on me. Mr. Gromyko got into a limousine and said he was going back [to the UN]. So everybody all ran off to Rockefeller Center [temporary home of the UN], but I, working for a morning newspaper, decided not to run off after them. And he got in his car and I saw a cab coming, and then I uttered the words that I never thought I would ever utter. I got in the taxi and I said, "Follow that car!" I swear to God, I said it.

And he went, sure enough, to Rockefeller Center. The car stopped for a minute, and then it drove on again. So I said again, "Keep following that car! I want to see where it's going."

I still don't know exactly why he did it, but he kept driving. He went around midtown, he went downtown, we went all around town in Manhattan, and I was sitting in the back of that taxi, making notes on what this guy is doing. Then finally he drove back to the mission. So I came back to the office and I reported it.

The Times loves maps, as you know. And the assistant managing editor was listening to me reporting. He said, "Get the map man down here." So they had a map on where Mr. Gromyko went to the East Side, down the West Side and then back. It was kind of a New York Timesy joke. It was a sensation. Nobody else had the story. The next morning, somebody said, "Keep that kid on the story." So I was the Gromyko man for at least 10 days. The next day I figured I'd do the same thing. So I go over to the hotel, go up to the ninth floor, ring the bell. Mrs. Gromyko comes out, and we walk down to the mission, where they were my pals. When we turned the corner to the mission, there were many more reporters. They saw me coming with him, and they'd had their asses creased by their bosses because this kid from The Times gets a story, The Times has a map, we don't little bastard!"

After two weeks [my editors] kind of liked what I was doing, and they said, "Keep him on there [at the UN] for a while. So I was there for eight or nine years.

Who and what makes a great editor?

I do not know. The last thing I wanted to be in the newspaper business was the man who pushed the coffee cart. The second last thing was an editor. That was because what appealed to me most was the dream of becoming a foreign correspondent. (It took me 11 years.) I would be free to write on all subjects that involve a country, which is all of them from culture and economics to sex. I would be free to travel the area of my assignment first one as correspondent for India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Ceylon and Bhutan.

As an editor, I would be the opposite of what I wanted to be. I would not write. I would not travel, and my home office would be me. As the years drew by, I began to pick up some ideas of what a good editor should be. I never thought of "greats" and it was a long time before I met one. A good editor of a paper he wants to work for joined and expand them.

On The New York Times, my job simply to expand and add new areas that the paper then lacked. Even more, it was to preserve and strengthen the character of the paper deeper and beyond the matters of news space and variety. The New York Times is far more flexible in writing and inventiveness than most of its readers and staff fully understand. I told every new staffer I hired the same thing: "Don't come here thinking you have to wear a buttoned vest every day. You were hired for your stories and potential. Forget all the tales of how tough and demanding the editors are. Of course they are. So is The Times and its readers."

You cannot change the basic journalistic character of the paper, and if you try, the editors will come down hard on you. I hope. Newspapers should be papers of fairness as far as their talents and energies carry them. That great principle is not much use if it is not broken down into journalistic rules and techniques and practiced every day, every issue. Otherwise they rust and mean nothing.

The subject of a story that is critical or could be detrimental, whether to a person or a company, is entitled to a reply. Reporters and editors must not constantly fall back on the excuse that he could not reach the people involved and let it go at that. Reporters have to go back and back and if the phone doesn't work, the doorbell might. Journalists have great power to injure people. The very printing of the story, even though it should be printed, can hurt them, guilty or not. Treat these people with how shall we put it Recently, a story about Billy Graham said that on a tape made with Nixon Graham had stated that he knew how to handle influential Jews without their even knowing what was going on. For instance, he said he was a good friend of Rosenthal. It was not true. I had met him once and had always been contemptuous of his tenderness toward dictatorships. The reporter never called me. I was furious. Oh, yes, I called him the next day. I expressed my opinion of his form of journalism. Oh, yes takes more than a publisher or executive editor who believes in fairness. It takes every reporter and editor on the paper. If some reporters do not have it in them it is the job of the editor handling the story to tell the reporter it did not meet the standards of the paper, so fix it publication.

How would you persuade young people to get into journalism?

I wouldn't try. I feel very strongly that anybody that wants to get into journalism must have a great lust for it. When I interviewed people for the job, I was interested in what they could bring to the newspaper investigative qualities, excellent writing, penetrating curiosity, knowledge of French and Mongolian or a sense of humor. The paper had three or four of everything should be doing, I often told him to go away and come back when he could tell me.

What were your three biggest mistakes, and how would you have overcome them?

What do you mean three? I can think only of one. I would have acted much more strongly on the Watergate story. I knew almost from the beginning that we were failing. If I had any doubts all I had to do was pick up The Washington Post that day. For the first time in my experience they were clobbering us. The story was in Washington and as the executive editor I was in New York. I should have moved myself to Washington after the first week of debacle and taken charge on the spot.