At the end of the day, he told The Earth Times, he left his office on West 43rd Street, walked to the corner of Seventh Avenue and turned south. Then, when he saw nothing but a gray cloud of smoke and ash where the World Trade Center had stood until that morning, "I suddenly got angry." He began to think seriously about what, in fact, he could do about the situation--which, as it turned out, was considerable.

Two years earlier Rosenthal had been named President of The New York Times Company Foundation, which, among other things, is in charge of the "Neediest Cases" fund appeal, an annual year-end campaign that has been a feature of the newspaper since 1911. Last year the appeal raised $8 million in contributions from readers and others, and distributed every cent of it, through a number of social service agencies, to New York people and families most in need of aid.

Surely, Rosenthal thought, many others New Yorkers will be in dire need of help as a result of the terror attack--the families of those who were killed, workers whose jobs vanished along with their offices, owners of small businesses in the downtown area. Why, he asked himself, couldn't the machinery already in place for the "Neediest Cases" fund--the post office box, the contacts with the social agencies, etc.--be used to raise money to help these people as well? "I decided that I was, by God, going to do it." The next morning, Sept. 12, he was conferring with lawyers and other executives at The Times to make sure his plan was do-able, "And by lunchtime we were up and running," he said.

>From the very beginning, the public response to the appeal was breathtaking. The 9-11 Fund collected $5 million in contributions the very first week. At last count the total was more than $51 million and still rising--far more that anyone could have imagined, Rosenthal said. And though that was a source of great satisfaction, it created problems as well.

"Originally," he continued, "we thought we would distribute the money through the seven established social service agencies we had worked with before," along with specialized agencies serving the police and fire departments, but they quickly became overwhelmed by the scope of the project and the "astonishing flow of money Š so enormous that the agencies couldn't spend it all."

Why were people willing to give so much of their money to The New York Times? That's a question that Rosenthal has given considerable thought. "We promised not to take out any administrative expenses," he said, "and we focused on helping the neediest."

It was decided to pass two-thirds of the money collected on to the agencies and to use the remaining third on "institutional ways to meet the needs of victims." Those ways were: job rescue, school enrichment, legal assistance and trauma treatment.

The need for the job rescue project was perhaps the most readily apparent. Some 500 businesses were either destroyed in the attack or were shut down because they were in the "frozen zone" surrounding Ground Zero, which meant that thousands of people stopped getting paychecks. "Eventually there will be government money" flowing to these people, Rosenthal said, "but they have to pay their bills right. They need straight-out grants--and they need them right away." Along with "need," he said, the fund also stresses "speed." "If you're going to help people, you've got to do it now."

With a commitment of $3 million, the fund set up a working partnership with the Downtown Alliance to expedite the project, which, with a strong assist from the Ford Foundation, "did a wonderful job," Rosenthal said, "and is still doing it. The school enrichment project, he said, grew out of the realization that, during and after the attack, schoolchildren in the downtown area--there are 16 public schools south of Canal Street--"saw the most horrible things. Many had to be evacuated, had to run for their lives." As a result, he added, these kids have a special need for security, structure and reassurance. Many also need to recover lost school time. To help meet those needs, the fund has put up more than $3.5 million to pay for after-school programs and therapeutic arts programs--the nature of which is to be decided by each school district.

The fund's legal assistance project is based on the need that victims of the attack and their families have for a variety of related legal services, which may involve the need for a death certificate, immigration troubles or dealing with a landlord. To help meet such needs, the fund has made grants of $300,000 each to the Legal Aid Society and Legal Services New York, which have agreed to provide lawyers to give the victims full service. In effect, said Rosenthal, they have created a full-service civil law firm for poor victims of 9-11, no matter where they live.

But of all the fund's activities, it is its trauma treatment initiative that Rosenthal says is "the one we're proudest of." He explained that there are thousands of people whose lives were directly affected by the attack--as survivors, as family members of people who lost their lives, as fugitives or as witnesses--and bear psychological scars as a result. Within six months, he added, some of those people will be showing the effects of that scarring, and many of them will require professional counseling. But there's another problem: "There is a real need for expert training in evidence-based trauma treatment," Rosenthal said, adding that some old-fashioned ideas about psychiatric trauma treatment "are toxic--they may make it even more difficult for the trauma victim to break free of its effects. But the right kind of treatment can be liberating."

And so, in addition to providing almost $3 million for direct treatment of trauma victims, group therapy, police and fire counseling and school-based treatment of children, the fund is putting up $7 million for a three-year program to train professionals in the latest techniques of trauma treatment. It helped form a consortium of the four leading trauma-treatment centers in New York, which have gathered 20 nationally recognized experts on the subject to provide two-week training sessions for 60 clinicians. All who graduate from the program will be paid half of their salary for one year, during which time they will teach what they have learned to hundreds of other therapists. "What this means," said Rosenthal, "is that there is going to be a permanent resource in the community. I feel like the luckiest person in New York"--to be associated with its creation. "It may sound odd to be saying this, considering the enormity of the tragedy, but this is the most thrilling thing that has ever happened to me."

Which is not to suggest that there has been any lack of thrills in Rosenthal's life. Among other things, he took part in the march on Selma, helped plan Robert Kennedy's funeral and received a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

A native of Tel Aviv, he grew up in Oregon and was a sportswriter for The Oregonian (of Portland) before going to work for Robert Kennedy, then the US Attorney General. After six years at Justice he moved to the State Department for a while, then, went off to Harvard for a degree in urban affairs- before returning to journalism in 1968, when he joined the staff of Life Magazine. The following year he was hired away by The New York Times, where he has been ever since.

He served as deputy Sunday editor, deputy editorial page editor, editorial page editor (for seven years) and editor of the Sunday magazine, before taking charge of the company foundation two years ago.

Yes, he said, he remembers well the day he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing--the first such prize for The Times in 60 years -but what he is doing now, he said "has been far more satisfying."