NYT editor discusses his father’s Communist past [Rosenthal]

RadarOnline (Charles Kaiser) via Hot Air ^ | Nov 6, 2007 | Bryan (Hot Air)

[beckett]

Charles Kaiser: Do you want to talk about your father’s unlikely party affiliation?
• Andrew Rosenthal: His communism?

• CK: Yes.
• AR: That was quite a revelation. My father was a member of the Communist Youth Party, or whatever it was called at the time.

• CK:This was a letter that you found from your aunt?
• AR: It was a letter from my aunt Ruth, who I never met, to her husband, George Watt, who was fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the Abraham Lincoln brigade. And they corresponded. She wrote one day that she had gone down to youth headquarters. Because it was “Sonny’s” first day as a party member.

• CK: And we’re sure Sonny was Abe?
• AR: There is no other Sonny. That was him.[Andy asked his father about this several times before he died, but Abe always refused to discuss it.]

[wardaddy]

Geez....and they claimed it was an anti-semitic witch hunt

obviously Abe changed thankfully some

[Broker]

David Horowitz has much in common with the lad.

[PAR35]

your father’s unlikely party affiliation?

Why would someone think it unlikely for a NYT editor to be found to have family ties to the communists.

[lilylangtree]

With the dirty, underhanded, miserable warlike tactics used by the Slimes to downgrade and demoralize our nation, this piece of information fits the profile of the Slimes.

[beckett]

The Wikipedia entry on Rosenthal makes no mention of any youthful communist affiliation, and I cannot recall any whisper of such a connection during Rosenthal's looooong public career at the NYT.

It certainly would have been a continuous thorn in his side had it ever been public knowledge, which leads me to believe that this so-called avatar of civic virtue, the pose most, if not all, newspaper editorialists adopt for themselves, deliberately suppressed and hid from the world a smelly little secret from his past.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The irony is lost on me. NYT is just like the Omaha, ah...

[Argus]

“Political activist” is the usual euphemism employed to connote a high profile commie.

[Lancey Howard]

Why would someone think it unlikely for a NYT editor to be found to have family ties to the communists.

My first thought, too.
Considering that the communists successfully infiltrated the State Department (where communists still linger) as well as Time Magazine as far back as the 1930s, why would anybody think that the New York Times was not an equally juicy target?

McCarthy was right all along.
The damage that these three institutions inflicted (and continue to inflict) on the United States of America is incalculable.

[Kevmo]

Why am I not surprised? I’m falling over in not-surprise.

[weegee]

How many editorials did he write condemning the “Communist witchhunts” much as CAIR does today?

[Zhang Fei]

Abe Rosenthal might have been a Party member once, but he grew out of it. By the 1980’s, he was a Reagan supporter. His opinion columns for the New York Times, under his byline, were pretty conservative, too. So much so that the Times eventually turfed these columns, and the veteran Timesman had to shop his column around outside of the New York Times. That was around the time I stopped reading the New York Times - its leftism had just gotten too pronounced for me.

[wardaddy]

Radical Son....a great book.

[beckett]

While I understand the sentiment of those on the thread who find themselves unsurprised by Rosenthal's communist affiliation, I'd like to make a point.

Neither Pinch Sulzburger, nor his dad Punch, ever joined the Communist Party. Russell Baker, Bob Herbert, Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Bill Keller, Max Frakel, Howell Raines, Jayson Blair, James Reston -- name any Times figure you like, any Executive Editor you like --- even Walter Duranty himself, were never members of the Communist Party, even in their youth. I'm quite sure Rosenthal, Executive Editor of the paper for nine years and an op-ed columnist for many more, will prove to be the only high ranking executive who ever was an actual member.

Even Evan Thomas, great grandson of Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas and now editor of Newsweek, never joined the Communist Party.

It is news.

[Hiddigeigei]

How do you know that none of these people you listed were party members?

[Yardstick]

Horowitz's The Politics of Bad Faith is less well known but shorter and even better IMO. It has some of his letters to and from his lefty friends as he was making his break with the movement. Oh man, it's powerful stuff. I can still remember where I was when I read it.

[Doctor Raoul]

Hey, all the NYT’ers deny they’re commies.