New York Times editor dies at 84

The award-winning journalist received the Medal of Freedom in 2002.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- A.M. "Abe" Rosenthal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who became chief editor of the New York Times and played a key role in modernizing the Gray Lady of American journalism for the new century, died May 10 at Mount Sinai medical center in Manhattan. He was 84 and had a major stroke two weeks ago.
Rosenthal's career at the Times spanned 55 years, from 1944, when he began as a cub reporter, to 1999, when he retired as the writer of "On My Mind," a column on the op-ed page. When he left the Times, he took his column to the New York Daily News and continued there until 2004.
In 2002, President Bush conferred on him the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, along with Katharine Graham, the late chairwoman of The Washington Post Co.
A perfectionist
A passionate, driven man, Rosenthal was ruthless in his pursuit of perfection as he saw it and was never entirely satisfied with his own work or that of others. He was a brilliant and visceral judge of the news. He had boundless curiosity about the world. He often viewed it with a sense of outrage -- at tyranny, at all forms of injustice and exploitation, at stupidity, incompetence and "unfairness."
His first big break came in 1946, when he got a two-week assignment to cover the United Nations. He stayed on the beat for eight years. His first foreign assignment was India, where he was posted in 1954. He later worked in Poland and Japan, but India retained a special fascination for him. He once traveled 1,500 rugged miles to have a dateline that read "At the Khyber Pass."
In 1963, Rosenthal was summoned to New York from Tokyo to become metropolitan editor. By 1969, he had become managing editor, and in 1977 he was named executive editor. For 17 years, until 1987, when he became an op-ed columnist, he was responsible for the news operation at the Times.