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A selfless journalist, a senseless death

By DAVID M. SHRIBMAN
Published January 10, 2006

David E. Rosenbaum was murdered while taking a walk after dinner. That's about the most horrible sentence you can type, and that's before you hear about what kind of a man he was: A gentle man who had a brutal ending. A thoughtful man struck down by the ultimate act of thoughtlessness. A man who taught others when to use"that" and when to use"which" only to be felled by that over which he had no control.

He went by R'baum or by David, and sometimes by Dave, but Mr. Rosenbaum, who was reared in Tampa and who died Sunday night at age 63 after an apparent Washington robbery, was known as a great reporter and a great mentor. His reporting feats for the New York Times were amply covered by the obituaries that ran in Monday's newspaper. He was at the crowded press table during the Watergate hearings and during the long mornings when Alan Greenspan testified before Congress in language that only David and a handful of others in the room (almost none of them elected officials) truly understood.

Three times he directed coverage of the New Hampshire primary. His tenure as a reporter and editor spanned two efforts to overhaul Social Security; both times David knew that the key to"reform," as everyone but David called it, were the economic assumptions brought to bear on the subject.

But what separated David from the great mass of great reporters is that he expended just as much patience with others - and by others I mean other reporters - as he did with his sources and with the forbidding documents he mined and with the meticulous copy he prepared under his own name. He was a journalist, to be sure, and he often said he was born to do that work. But the truth is that David, a selfless person who suffered a senseless death, was a born teacher.

His assailants could not have known that their victim on Gramercy Street in Northwest Washington had the sharpest eyes in the news business; if you were a young reporter and used "located" in a story, he'd tell you, quietly but firmly enough so that you would never forget, that the word was a transitive verb and often could be eliminated altogether. (He would not approve of the way that sentence ended; "eliminated altogether," he'd advise, was redundant.) If by some flight of fancy or haste you described a Nuclear Regulatory Commission action as"unprecedented," he'd counsel you that the word should be avoided at all costs.

The reason, he'd say, "is that it is nearly impossible to prove what the precedents are if you're not dealing with the law."

By now you've figured out that these are not random examples. They're from handwritten notes R'baum sent me 25 years ago.

David was my most loyal critic and booster, and he knew that he could not be the one without being the other, too. But I know I am not alone. He performed these roles - and for him they were the role of a lifetime, for he was the role model of a lifetime - for so many others.

I have in my hand the note he wrote me on Nov. 2, 1981, 17 days before he would take me to task over my sins involving the siren-words "located" and "unprecedented." He had had a quick look at the raw copy I'd submitted for a complicated story involving the disposition of the fortune of William F. Buckley Sr. The critique had six points, and when I received it I must have thought I had been indicted on six counts of a heinous crime. Here is the first one:

It would have been better to say "family members" and not just "family" to get around the problem of whether "family" is singular or plural and thus whether the pronoun should be "its" or "them." How many people in your life would care enough to teach a lesson like that? But not only to teach it, but also to have the sensitivity to tell a nervous 27-year-old (another redundancy, in my case at least) the following: "This is meant strictly as friendly advice and not as criticism. I and everyone else think you're doing a marvelous job." Marvelous, except of course, for the fact that I put two "l"s in "totaling" and got the formal name and the abbreviation of the Securities and Exchange Commission wrong. I never did those things again.

How I encountered such a man I cannot say for sure. I think he called me up after seeing something I'd written in a college publication and told me what I already knew: You should be a journalist. Thirty-two years ago I met him for the first time. He was covering the Watergate story, and it was a busy time; 68 days later the House Judiciary Committee would vote to impeach President Nixon. Somehow he had time to meet with a college sophomore who had dreams of doing what he was doing, with that Rosenbaum style and grace and that innate sense of fairness, plus the modesty that so rarely comes with worldliness. It was one thing to have had time for the lunch. It was another to have had time, in the middle of maybe the biggest political story of the 20th century, to write a letter - a full-page, single-spaced letter of recommendation - to Bob Stiff, who was editor of the Independent, once the afternoon sister of the St. Petersburg Times. It is still the kindest letter of recommendation I have ever received.

I didn't get that summer job, but I got others, eventually working with David himself. Every piece of copy I have written since that lunch a third of a century ago has had David Rosenbaum's fingerprints on it. Every piece, including this one.

- David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

[Last modified January 10, 2006, 11:27:06]