Hirsch Moritz "Harry" Rosenfeld (August 12, 1929July 16, 2021) was an American newspaper editor who was the editor in charge of local news at The Washington Post during the Richard Mattingly murder case and the Watergate scandal. He oversaw the newspaper's coverage of Watergate and resisted efforts by the paper's national reporters to take over the story. when his family took refuge in the Polish Embassy in Berlin. They first applied to immigrate to the United States in 1934. After being held up due to the quota system, the application was approved five years later in March 1939, when he was ten. The family settled in The Bronx, New York City just before the Holocaust and Rosenfeld learned to speak English devoid of a German accent. After graduating from Syracuse University in 1952, he served in the US Army for two years. He was hired as an editor at New York Herald-Tribune. When a strike halted all New York papers for several months in 1963 he was offered a job in television, although chose to return until it ceased publication circa 1966. He was then hired by the Post, initially serving night shifts as deputy foreign editor. When the trial was up, Woodward had written seventeen stories, not one of which was deemed publishable. Rosenfeld told Woodward to get some experience elsewhere and come back in a year.
Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in her memoirs describes him as "an old-style, tough, picturesque editor, and another real hero of Watergate for us. From the outset, he thought of the story as a very big local one, seeing it as something on which the Post's local staff could distinguish itself. He controlled the story before it regularly made page one of the paper, keeping it going on the front page of the metro section." The Posts attention to detail and strict rules produced, in Rosenfeld's words, "the longest-running newspaper stories with the least amount of errors that I have ever experienced or will ever experience."
In their 1974 account of the Watergate investigation titled All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein likened Rosenfeld to a football coach. They described how "he prods his players … pleading, yelling, cajoling." In the 1976 film All the President's Men, he was played by Jack Warden.
Later career
Rosenfeld left the Washington Post in 1978
Personal life and death
Rosenfeld married Anne Hahn in 1953. They remained married for 68 years until his death. Together, they had three children: Susan, Amy, and Stefanie.
Bibliography
- Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. All the President's Men. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. ()
- Adrian Havill. Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993.
- Katharine Graham. Personal History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. .
- Rosenfeld, Harry. From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaper Man. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013.