The crowd at the Society for Ethical Culture included former New York Times colleagues—Joe Lelyveld, Marcia Chambers, Linda Amster, Paul Goldberger, Mary Breasted, Mike Leahy, Clyde Haberman and Stephanie Lane; pundits like Katrina vanden Heuvel and Eric Alterman; 60's activists like Curtis Gans, and fellow white water adventurers like Carol Bellamy, Ellen Fleysher and Victor and Sarah Kovner.

The festivities began with a slide show (set to songs by the Rock Bottom Remainders) showing the writer-activist at every age, posing with everyone from Bill Clinton to Bill Moyers. The shot of her sporting a Fox News hat got the biggest laugh from the three hundred fans who had gathered to remember her.

Maya Angelou recalled how startled she was when she first met Molly and realized she was six feet tall.

“I knew she was white,” said Ms. Angelou. “I didn’t know she was so much white!” Nevertheless, Molly immediately dubbed the two of them “twins separated at birth.”

Ms. Angelou said there was only one source of frustration: every time she tried to introduce anyone to the magnificent Molly Ivins, she discovered that they were already old friends.

New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin remembered columns that could make you “laugh out loud”: “if a certain Congressman’s IQ dropped any further he’d have to be watered twice a day,” or the one about the Texas gubernatorial candidate who was “so afraid of getting AIDS while visiting San Francisco that when he was in the shower he wore shower caps on her feet.”

Mr. Trillin said her loyalty had “no bounds and no statute of limitations ... Reporters visiting Texas on a political story got from Molly not resentment about intrusion on her turf but a jolly welcome.”

Sitting in the audience, Joe Lelyveld echoed that memory: “She was just so incredibly generous,” said the former executive editor of the Times. “When I was writing a column for the Times magazine, she sent me a letter with the names of fifty people I should meet in Texas.”

Molly was my good friend for more than 30 years. When I moved to Paris a few years ago, Molly happened to be living there for a month. It was right after 9/11, and she insisted on meeting me on the street, outside my new apartment, to help me get five huge suitcases and a bicycle up the stairs. After coffee at a nearby cafe, she issued me one sleeping pill and sent me to bed for six hours. Then I met her on the Ile de la Cité for a magnificent Paris dinner. No one had had a warmer welcome since Americans troops reached the City of Light in 1944.

John Leonard described Ivins’ work as “an amphetamine rush of Rabelais, Mark Twain, Lily Tomlin, Lenny Bruce and Jeremiah - whether she was writing about George Bush, Clarence Thomas, country music or the White Trash Hall of Fame...Politics was the normal respiration of her intelligence. She never stopped being both funny and furious...The most important words she ever wrote were these:

Ivins was a digger and a thinker; she was fearless and selfless, and she was phenomenally focused. There were only three things she cared about: journalism, activism and friendship. And the way she kept the faith made her both a model and a reproach. A model because she lived to afflict the powerful and comfort the powerless; a reproach because she kept on writing and talking and fighting for the causes we had all embraced in the 1960's, long after most us had rechanneled our energies into much more selfish pursuits. “She gave her tired friends the goose to go on after we had abandoned hope,” said Mr. Leonard.

SHE EXCELLED AT THE MOST important test for every pundit: she was right more often about the vital issues of our time than almost any other columnist. This is how she warned against the consequences of a Bush presidency in the introduction to one of her books:

Calvin Trillin recalled Paul Krugman’s a column immediately after Ivins’ death. Mr. Krugman cited these examples of the Texan’s extraordinary prescience:

"So,” Mr. Krugman concluded, “Molly Ivins -- who didn't mingle with the great and famous, didn't have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East -- got almost everything right. Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do? With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong.”

The most poignant moments were provided by Eden Lipson, a former Times colleague and one of Ivins’ closest friends.

“A few years ago I finally realized that it was us, the cosmopolitan New Yorkers in the media capitol, with our literary and political gossip and hermetic chattering who were, in fact, provincial,” said Ms. Lipson. “ Molly was the one who saw America large and clear, who out-reported the mainstream media from Austin, who had a balanced and ultimately optimistic view of the world. Molly’s generosity was legendary, but in addition, she was brave. She went on book tours two and half times while on chemotherapy.”

Ms. Lipson was also diagnosed with cancer last year. Before it went into remission, Ivins came to visit her at the hospital. This is what she told her friend:

“Understanding mortality is entirely personal and won’t know it until you face it. The cancer will probably kill you in the end, but moving ahead, do as much as you can . . . until you can’t.”

“And then it’s okay to let go.”

It felt like practically everyone who has ever had a by-line had crowded into the sanctuary of Riverside Church Tuesday afternoon to say good-bye to David Halberstam, an author with the voice of a deity, the heft of a tight end, and a hardcover-track-record that was the envy of every writer in the room.

Halberstam was 73 when he died April 23^rd in a car crash in California, and dozens of people had experienced that news like a blow to the solar plexus. Jim Wooten was one of the many who had been so afflicted. “It was amazing,” Wooten said after Tuesday’s service. “There must have been fifty people there today who thought they were his best friend.”

Ben Bradlee headed a substantial contingent from The Washington Post, while Timesmen past and present in the audience included Bill Kovach, Anna Quindlen, Craig Whitney, Joe Lelyveld, Sam Roberts, Seymour Topping, Paul Goldberger, Frank Rich, Les Gelb and Gay Talese. Bob Caro sat way in the back, Michael Arlen spoke from the front, and Kati Martin, Nick Pileggi, Robert Sam Anson, Nora Ephron, Ken Auletta, Joan Didion, Gail Buckley, David Remnick, and Frances Fitzgerald were among the scores and scores of authors who helped to fill a thousand seats in the church.

The service seemed to be a sort of high water mark in the recent flood of mega memorials, although the one for Kitty Carlisle Hart, earlier in the day, was nearly twice as long. At Halberstam’s there was music from Paul Simon (who managed to make “Mrs. Robinson” sound mournful), as well as a song from the author’s neighbor, Peter Yarrow, and “America the Beautiful” from the magnificent choir of the Metropolitan Baptist church of Newark.

There was fine oratory from Congressman John Lewis; an e.e. cummings poem from Halberstam’s daughter, Julia, and thunder–actual thunder–when a fireman Halberstam had written about recalled 9/11, and again when Congressman Lewis described the early struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. Those celestial sound effects would have made Halberstam smile.

Neil Sheehan, the other giant of the Vietnam generation of journalists, first met Halberstam forty-five years ago in Saigon. Sheehan recalled one particularly astonishing display, when a Buddhist revolt made 4,000 words explode out of Halberstam’s manual typewriter in a single day. They filled up the lead story in the Times, a sidebar, a Man In The News, and an opinion piece for The News of the Week in Review. “The friendship that grew out of [our] partnership became one of the wondrous gifts of my life,” said Sheehan. When they first met, Halberstam had been twenty-eight, Sheehan, twenty-six. “As he entered the afternoon of his life, David became more sentimental, and he began to call me his little brother.”

Halberstam’s final book, The Coldest Winter, about the Korean War, will be published this fall, and his wife Jean believes it was one of his favorites. Ralph Hockley was a veteran of the Second Infantry Division in Korea, and he had met Halberstam five years ago, when he started the research for his last work. Hockley quoted one of Halberstam’s maxims, from the last speech the author gave before his death: “going out and interviewing people keeps you young.” And Hockley was another man still recovering from the trauma he felt when he learned of the author’s passing: “to my wife and me, David’s death was as great a shock as the death of President Kennedy.”

Gay Talese spoke last, and those who knew their history felt the poignancy of the moment. Talese and Halberstam had first met in 1961, when they were both still at the Times. There they discovered that the first Yankee game that each of them had attended as teenagers was the very same game: a Red Sox game, in 1949, in which Ted Williams had hit two home runs. Later, Gay and his wife Nan had been Halberstam’s landlords: they had rented him the apartment in the brownstone where the Taleses still live today. But the Talese-Halberstam friendship was ruptured when they both decided to write about the auto industry. Talese backed away, leaving the field to Halberstam, who then scored another bestseller with The Reckoning.

“I thought I couldn't lose Halberstam's friendship because of a little conflict over choosing subjects,” Talese told me after the service. “But he was determined to do that book on automobiles.”

“We never knew how to build the bridge back after ‘82,” Talese continued. “David’s brother Michael was shot around the same time [in 1980] and I told David in a letter, I think you're making me Michael. Michael was a competitive doctor ... and there was such competition between them ... And I told David I'm not going to be your brother ... I never felt competitive with David. I loved him; I always loved him. I never had a brother. I was hurt and he was very hurt.”

They remained estranged throughout the ‘80's. Finally, one day in 1990, Halberstam picked up the phone and called Talese to tell him he had tickets to the Yankees. “When he took me to Yankee stadium it was like going back to that game in 1949,” said Talese. “It was a different game–but it was also a Red Sox game.” Last year, they spent Thanksgiving together in Paris, and Halberstam traveled to Wales for the wedding of Talese’s daughter.

In his eulogy, Talese recalled that Halberstam always had the best questions: “Is Condoleezza Rice a better concert pianist or secretary of state? Will the Times ever get rid of Michiko?”–and those lines got the biggest laughs of the day.

Many speakers recalled Halberstam’s love of fishing. Talese ended with his friend’s own words about that pastime, from the introduction to a new book called, The Gigantic Book of Fishing Stories:

“In my day job I am the most skeptical of men in one of the most skeptical of professions in a world which regrettably holds out fewer and fewer dreams the older I get,” Halberstam wrote. “But on the water, fly rod in hand, my dreams never desert me; I can look out and even when the river water is murky and deep and running too fast, I can visualize a trout, always of goodly size, rising to my fly, or if it's a clear day in the Caribbean, I can see a handsome bonefish moving steadily on its anointed course toward our boat. At the last second breaking off the requisite two feet to hit my fly. On the water, as I am never without dreams, I am never without hope.”

At the dawn of the 21st century, gay life’s imprint on everyday life exploded as America embraced everything from the first gay mega-hit in prime-time television to the first gay Hollywood movie to capture universal acclaim—and collect $178 million at the box office.

When Will and Grace debuted in 1998, there was no indication that it might change the cultural landscape. As America’s first almost completely gay sitcom, it got off to a slow start, despite the presence of two straight women as two of the main characters. Even office workers in hip Manhattan were a little nervous about it: What would people think if they started to laugh at those jokes in front of the water cooler? But the quality of the humor gradually won them over. Beginning with its third season, the program attracted more than 17 million viewers every week, and it became the second-highest-rated sitcom among young adults for five years in a row. With the even more popular (and equally gay-friendly) Friends as its lead-in on Thursday nights, Will and Grace gradually appropriated a larger space in American pop culture than anything gay ever had before. Some critics carped that its characters were clichés, but many more decided that the show’s sharp writing placed it within the pantheon of great American sitcoms.

The success of Will and Grace opened the market up to all kinds of gay entertainment; it also gave a few celebrities the courage to finally proclaim who they really were. In 2002, Rosie O’Donnell confirmed one of the worst-kept secrets in show business when her autobiography revealed that she was a lesbian. Ellen DeGeneres had made the same revelation about herself on her own show, Ellen, five years earlier, but the mini-media event she created around her announcement (which included the cover of Time) was not enough to prevent the cancellation of her sitcom a year later. But her TV career began to take off again after she hosted the Emmy Awards following the attacks of 9/11.

She reminded the audience that they were supposed to go on with their lives as usual, because to do otherwise “is to let the terrorists win—and really, what would upset the Taliban more than a gay woman wearing a suit in front of a room full of Jews?” (Imagine someone saying that in prime time, 30 years ago.)

Will and Grace didn’t just change the landscape of American TV—by the end of its original run it had also been broadcast in more than 30 other countries, including France, Germany, Croatia, Pakistan, Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina. But just five months after its American debut, a new show started across the Atlantic which made Will and Grace look almost as tame as The Love Boat.

Created by veteran English television writer Russell T. Davies, Queer As Folk inspired a tsunami of criticism when it burst out from Britain’s Channel Four in 1999 with an opening episode which showed a 29-year-old man making very explicit love to a beautiful 15-year-old boy. The same installment featured the same 29-year-old at the birth of his son to a lesbian friend. After the 29-year-old bragged about his teenage conquest in front of the mother of his child, a woman friend observed: “So: You’ve both had a child this evening!”

The principal characters were young gay men in Manchester who were frankly sexual, extremely drug-friendly and never the least bit apologetic about any of it. Sarah Lyall of The New York Times called the show “an explosion of graphic language, male nudity and explicit sex guaranteed to offend as many people as it enthralled.” Gay activists were angered by the reinforcement of gay stereotypes (Mr. Davies called these critics “boneheaded, politically correct gay political fossils”) while straight viewers were squeamish with the reality that every gay adult begins life as a gay child. The fact that gay teenagers often seek out their first sexual experience with someone older was something else most people didn’t want to be reminded of in prime time.

From explicit gay sex on pay cable, it was a very short hop to the much tamer Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a show which argued that there were no shortcomings in a straight geek that couldn’t be cured by the superior savoir-faire of five gay tastemakers. (The show also marked the final reclamation of the previously pejorative word “queer” by the gay community.) In 2005, MTV Networks launched Logo, a Viacom-owned gay cable channel, which quickly made distribution deals with every major cable and satellite network. Suddenly, American kids in 25 million homes had access to gay programming whenever they wanted it—at least when their parents weren’t watching them.

WITH SO MUCH INCREASED VISIBILITY FOR EVERYTHING GAY, the world was primed for another cultural breakthrough. In 2006, there were nine big movies with gay themes or gay characters, but only one caused a sensation. Brokeback Mountain was an A-list Hollywood feature that presented two gay cowboys as a perfectly normal part of Wyoming in the 1960’s—and that depiction of these archetypes of American masculinity turned out to be revolutionary all by itself. It was also the first gay love story on film that felt so universal, the enthusiasm of the audience wasn’t dampened by the sexual orientation of the principals.

The kind of movie that would have caused an uproar 20 years earlier became newsworthy because it provoked hardly any attacks. “What if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot?” Frank Rich asked. There was almost “no controversy, no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right”—and the film won three Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

A crucial element in the movement’s steady progress was a simple matter of demographics: Since the 1960’s, every new generation of Americans has been more accepting of sexual diversity than the one before it. Although harassment of openly gay high-school students remains rampant, every year there is a growing number of young men and women who are coming out to their parents and their friends long before they reach college.

Besides exposing their peers to proud young gays and lesbians at an early age, these brash young men and women make another significant contribution. In many cases, the first gay people American adults meet are the gay classmates that their straight children bring home with them from high school.

“This has brought gay people into households all over America,” said Matt Coles, the head of the gay-rights project at the ACLU. “The important thing is not just knowing someone gay, but talking to someone who is gay. I think they’re having really important dialogues with their friends’ parents.”

GAY MARRIAGE GOT MORE ATTENTION THAN ANY OTHER issue, partly because it inspired the most vehement opposition. Some gay activists would have preferred to move more slowly on this hot-button subject, but two state courts bumped it to the front of the national agenda. In 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples were entitled to the same rights as heterosexual couples. Four months later, Governor Howard Dean signed a civil-union bill which made Vermont the first state in the union to give same-sex couples the same rights as married men and women—without calling it marriage.

In the spring of 2001, seven gay couples who had been denied marriage licenses in Massachusetts filed a lawsuit demanding the right to marry. Two and a half years later the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that the state constitution required marriage equality for same-sex couples. When the same court bolstered that ruling with another one early in 2004 that required the state legislature to enact full marriage rights for same-sex couples, it sparked a series of events that kept the issue at the top of the national agenda for the rest of the year.

Eight days after the second court decision in Massachusetts, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom decided that California’s constitution authorized him to immediately start marrying same-sex couples. Within days, more than 2,000 couples were issued marriage licenses, and newscasts all across the country were flooded with images of happy couples lined up on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall to formalize their relationships.

The California Supreme Court eventually invalidated all of those marriages, but the combination of the mayor’s edict and the Massachusetts decision triggered a firestorm of opposition from the religious right.

George Bush catered to his evangelical base by endorsing a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, 12 days after the marriages in San Francisco began.

In March, the House and Senate both held hearings on the proposed amendment, but it was defeated in the Senate by vote of 49 to 48. In May, 600 same-sex couples applied for marriage licenses the first day they were available in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, allies of the President petitioned to get state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage on the ballot in 11 states: Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah.

Conservatives argued that gay marriage threatened heterosexual unions, but no one ever offered a credible explanation of why that might be so. As gay Congressman Barney Frank asked when the debate first began to catch fire, if gay marriage were legalized, were married men across America “really going to smack themselves on the head, and say, ‘Wow! I could I have married a man!’”

Nevertheless, every one of those anti-gay-marriage amendments passed easily that November. And when voters were asked in a national exit poll which issue mattered most in deciding their vote for President, 22 percent chose “moral values” as their first choice. Those facts produced an instant consensus: Opposition to gay marriage had played a decisive role in George Bush’s re-election. But a closer examination of the election’s results revealed there was no hard evidence to support that notion.

Ethan Geto, the New York politico who began the fight for gay rights way back in 1970 in the Bronx, sat down in 2005 to examine what had really happened the previous November. He discovered that voters who cited “moral values” as their primary concern—who were then asked follow-up questions—cited everything from Janet Jackson’s breast-baring at the Super Bowl to “commercials selling products you don’t want your children to see” as the moral values they were talking about. For many evangelical Christians—the most reliable opponents of gay marriage—the main component of moral values was their antipathy to abortion.

Humphrey Taylor, the chairman of the Harris Interactive Poll, noted that when people were asked to say what they thought were the most important issues without prompting and without being shown a list, “the overwhelming majority of people mentioned the war on terror, Iraq, the economy, jobs, health care and education. Many people chose moral values [from a list] because it is the right thing to say.” And when a post-election poll by Zogby International asked “Which moral issue most influenced your vote?”, gay marriage came in last, at 9 percent, far behind the war in Iraq, at 42 percent.

On the question of whether the gay initiatives had helped to re-elect President Bush, Mr. Geto’s analysis was even more convincing. Only New Mexico and Iowa switched to Bush in 2004, and neither of them had anti-marriage proposals on the ballot. On the other hand, in three key swing states that did have gay-marriage initiatives—Michigan, Ohio and Oregon–Senator John Kerry (in 2004) outperformed Vice President Al Gore (in 2000) in all three. Although neither Mr. Gore nor Mr. Kerry carried the key state of Ohio, Mr. Kerry came two points closer to a win than Mr. Gore.

And according to Alan Abramowitz of Emory University, Mr. Bush’s share of the vote in states without the initiatives increased by 2.9 percent between 2000 and 2004, but only by 2.6 percent in the states that did have them.

WHILE THE TIDE AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE SEEMED TO BE prevailing at the polls, another wave was going in the opposite direction. Shortly after Vermont approved civil unions for gay couples, Tom Stoddard’s old dream of gay wedding announcements in The New York Times came true. On Aug. 18, 2002—nine years after Stoddard, a great gay activist, first lobbied for the change—the paper announced its “Weddings” pages would become “Weddings/Celebrations.” Two weeks later, the paper reported the union in Vermont of Daniel Gross and Steven Goldstein—the owner of a public-affairs consulting firm and a vice president of GE Capital. (When I sent Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. a note congratulating him on the change, he replied with one word: “Overdue.”)

Today more than 500 papers around the country print same-sex wedding announcements, including six in Alabama, 58 in California, seven in Maine and 31 in Texas.

A poll for the Pew Research Center found the number of Americans who “strongly opposed” gay marriage dropped sharply from 42 percent in 2004 to just 28 percent in 2006 (and just 25 percent among Americans younger than 29).

“I think that two generations from now it will be over,” said Mr. Coles of the ACLU—and gay marriage will become legal in America?! “Right now the states fall into four categories: One is Massachusetts, with marriage; four in the second category—Vermont, Connecticut, California and New Jersey—have strong domestic-partnership laws; Hawaii and Maine are in category three—with some significant legal protection; and then there is a fourth category of states that have non-discrimination laws.

“In 25 years, about 30 states will have either marriage or complete civil unions,” Mr. Coles continued, “and then the momentum for nationwide recognition will become pretty much irresistible. Most of the country’s corporate establishment will want it; because it will be too much of a pain in the ass for them, because their employees won’t work in states that don’t recognize them. They’ll be on our side.” (At the end of 2006, 138 major U.S. corporations got a rating of 100 percent from the Human Rights Campaign for the benefits and protections they had extended to their gay employees.)

AS AMERICA SEESAWED BACK AND FORTH ON THE QUESTION of gay marriage, one event was vastly more important than all the others in the fight for equal rights in the new millennium. It was yet another watershed which Stoddard had prophesied 20 years earlier.

Back in 1986, the United States Supreme Court had handed the gay movement its greatest defeat since its birth in the Stonewall riots of 1969 in Greenwich Village. Against the expectations of most court experts, it affirmed a Georgia law which prohibited sodomy between consenting adults inside their own homes. Writing for the 5-to-4 majority in Bowers v. Hardwick, Associate Justice Byron White asserted that to claim that a right to engage in sodomy was “‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious.” Stoddard called the case the movement’s “Dred Scott decision”—comparing it to the 1857 Supreme Court ruling which held that blacks were not citizens and therefore could be slaves. And Stoddard was certain that the fierce minority opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun would one day become the law of the land. Blackmun argued that the case was really about “the right most valued by civilized men,” which he identified “as the right to be let alone.”

A year after Bowers v. Hardwick, Ronald Reagan tried to move the court sharply to the right by nominating Robert Bork to be a Supreme Court Justice. After a fierce battle in the Senate, his nomination was rejected by a vote of 58 to 42. Anthony Kennedy was then nominated and confirmed for the same opening. Five years later, in 1992, Bill Clinton became the first President to be elected with the active support of the gay community. He then nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court, and the Senate confirmed them in 1993 and 1994, respectively. Together, these four events set the stage for the single greatest triumph of the gay-rights movement in America.

In 2002, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in the case of Lawrence v. Texas. The facts of the case were quite similar to Bowers v. Hardwick. As in the earlier case, two men—John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner—had been arrested inside a private home by a policeman who had discovered them in bed together. Gay-rights attorneys had been searching for the best case to bring before the court to overturn the Bowers v. Hardwick precedent, and Lawrence seemed to provide the perfect opportunity to do that. This time the challenge was to the anti-sodomy law in Texas.

On June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court issued the decision that every gay activist had been waiting for since the birth of the movement. The 6-to-3 decision was written by Justice Kennedy. The majority had been made possible by Justice Kennedy and the two justices appointed by Bill Clinton, the most gay-friendly President in history. This made it a triumph of politics, as well as common sense.

It overruled the Texas law in the broadest way possible. It also apologized for the Bowers v. Hardwick decision with unprecedented directness. Linda Greenhouse, the veteran Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, specified the singular importance of the decision: “A conservative Supreme Court has now identified the gay rights cause as a basic civil rights issue.”

The court had reversed itself many times on many other subjects, including segregation. But never before had it used such sweeping language to repudiate a previous precedent. “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “It ought not to remain binding precedent. Bowers v. Hardwick should be and now is overruled …. Its continuance as precedent demeans the lives of homosexual persons.”

To Mr. Coles, Lawrence was for gay people what Brown v. Board of Education had been for black people: the single most important legal event in the history of their struggle. With a stroke of the pen, the court had struck down all 13 of the remaining state laws which had made the way gay people make love a crime:

“Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.”

“It suffices for us to acknowledge that adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons. When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make this choice.”

“When homosexual conduct is made criminal by the law of the State, that declaration in and of itself is an invitation to subject homosexual persons to discrimination both in the public and in the private spheres.”

“The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government. ‘It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.’”

“Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.”

With this revolutionary opinion, Justice Kennedy had transformed the status of gay people forever. And he had done so in the wisest way possible: He had broadened the definition of liberty in America for everyone.

Whether you were studying the podium or the audience, the whole thing felt like a magnificent last hurrah. Up front were Ted Sorensen, Bill vanden Heuvel, Norman Mailer, Teddy Kennedy, Sean Wilentz, Lauren Bacall, Bill Clinton and Schlesinger children, stepchildren and grandchildren. Listening to them were the historian’s widow, Alexandra, as well as Frances Fitzgerald, Tom Brokaw, Hendrik Hertzberg, Bob Morgenthau, David Dinkins, Calvin Trillin, Carl Bernstein, Kevin and Gail Buckley, Ethel, Bobby Jr. and Kerry Kennedy, Sydney Blumenthal, Betsy Gotbaum, Osborn Elliott, Jimmy Greenfield, Nancy White Hector, Robert Caro, Patricia Bosworth, Mike Wallace and hundreds of other Democrats, almost all of them over 50.

Ted Sorensen, his eyesight failing, had to be escorted to the podium by Bill vanden Heuvel, but the audience was mesmerized. “Some asked whether he was compatible with the Kennedy White House fitness buffs,” Mr. Sorensen remembered, transporting everyone back to those fabled 1,000 days. “They did not understand Arthur’s role on White House track team: He was the designated javelin catcher.”

Norman Mailer, who needed two canes, said, “We had very little in common except we had a hell of a lot of respect for each other.” But they also shared a love of very tall women, which made them both members of the “small jockey club.”

Schlesinger’s stepson, Peter Allan, remembered trembling when he was summoned to the great man’s study after the boy’s headmaster had written home to complain about his bad behavior at prep school. The trembling ended when Arthur took out a red pen to correct all of the headmaster’s grammatical errors, before shoving the amended letter back in an envelope to return to its sender. Then he told Peter: “Behave better in class!”

“It was a wonderful, righteous funeral,” said Rick Hertzberg of The New Yorker, whose book was one of the thousands that Schlesinger had blurbed. “He did a wonderful job of it, too; the blurbs were not all exactly the same. It was like receiving darshan—that’s what Gandhi used to hand out. The thing that came through at that memorial was this unfailing joyfulness; he was really a marvel on every level.”

Carl Bernstein marveled: “They were a generation of leaders who were firm in their beliefs about what the American system and liberalism are about, and who spoke with an articulateness and humaneness that seems so absent from today’s debate. Sorensen and Bill vanden Heuvel—you sat there through the whole event saying, ‘Why don’t we have people like this today?’ What you saw was a shared ethos that is informed by Whitman as much as it is informed by more classic political philosophers. We are in a really terrible time in which the ahistoricism—particularly of the current administration—is catastrophic. If any of those folks have read history, they sure have forgotten it.”

Schlesinger was one of the two writers most responsible for burnishing the Kennedy legend; Teddy White—his neighbor on East 64th Street—was the other one. The Kennedys turned out in force to return the favor. Teddy recalled a crucial assist from Schlesinger when he first ran for the Senate from Massachusetts in 1962. After a Harvard law professor named Mark A. De Wolfe Howe denounced the candidate for having no qualification except unvarnished ambition, Schlesinger replied: “Relax, Mark. Ted’s a candidate for the United States Senate, not the faculty of Harvard Law School.”

Schlesinger was also a man who had attended at least 10,000 cocktail parties. “He loved all that, and I think that was irrespective of the politics of the people who were there,” said Ron Steel, who is Walter Lippmann’s biographer. “The social part was a big part of the memorial: It was a social event as much as a political event.”

Bill Clinton said he had been Schlesinger’s student from afar, reading The Age of Jackson and The Age of Roosevelt, and he recalled Lincoln’s speech from the same podium a century and a half ago. Both Lincoln and Schlesinger had worked hard for a “more perfect union,” said the former President.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz called Lincoln “Arthur’s kind of Republican” and said that Schlesinger “was the most formidable American historian of his generation.”

Mr. Wilentz remembered him as “generous, stylish, as full of wonder and energy as he was empty of self-importance …. But he would hate to see me and the rest of us here continue to be sad when there is so much work to do and so much life to live.”

Then Mr. Wilentz concluded: “Writing about the 1950’s—it could just as easily been the 1920’s or the 1880’s—Arthur, the historian of hope, said that ‘from the vantage point of the 60’s, the 50’s, instead of marking a stage in the decline and fall of the American republic,’ proved an interlude ‘in which the American people collected itself for greater exertions and higher splendors in the future.’

“So it was,” said Mr. Wilentz, “and so it will be.”

No more.

If the Bush administration has proven anything, it is that the Big Lie is just as effective today as it was 60 years ago.

One of the most egregious examples of this occurred a few days ago when Senator Hillary Clinton challenged Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over his constant optimism about Iraq. “I know you feel strongly about it,” she said, “but there’s a track record here. This is not 2002, 2003, 2004, ’5, when you appeared before this committee and made many comments and presented many assurances that have, frankly, proven to be unfulfilled.”

“Senator,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “I don’t think that’s true. I’ve never painted a rosy picture. I’ve been very measured in my words. And you’d have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I’ve been excessively optimistic.”

Oh, so homey, so Rumsfeld-esque—and so utterly absurd.

And yet this is how America’s leading news organizations covered this exchange:

The Washington Post and The New York Times didn’t quote this part of their exchange at all.

The Los Angeles Times said Mr. Rumsfeld “issued a point-by-point defense and insisted that he had not been overly positive about Iraq.”

The Associated Press and NBC Nightly News ended their stories with Mr. Rumsfeld’s denial and offered no rebuttal of it.

The CBS Evening News noted that Mr. Rumsfeld “disputed” Clinton’s contention that he had painted an overly rosy picture.

Chris Wallace reported on Fox News that “Rumsfeld gave as good as he got.”

Now it took me five minutes and three Google searches to produce a slew of evidence that the Defense Secretary was telling a whopper. Last December, The Washington Post reported that “Defense Secretary Rumsfeld today urged Americans to be more optimistic about the situation in Iraq, saying that people on the ground there have more optimistic views than what is being portrayed in the U.S. media.” Tim Russert quoted Senator Chuck Hagel on Meet the Press last year as saying “things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse,” to which Mr. Rumsfeld responded, “That’s just flat wrong. We are not losing in Iraq.” And so on.

It may be too much to ask these harried reporters to perform three Google searches on deadline. But Senator Clinton had actually anticipated that. After Mr. Rumsfeld spoke, she inserted into the record her own list to prove her point: seven quotes from Mr. Rumsfeld in front of Congressional committees—including “My impression is that the war was highly successful,” and “I do believe we’re on the right track”—and another six from press interviews. These included such memorable lines the following: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” And, of course, this one, in response to a question from Jim Lehrer in 2003 asking how American troops would be received in Iraq: “There is no question but that they would be welcomed.”

But none of the leading newspapers or networks offered a single one of these examples in their stories about the day’s hearing—or even mentioned the fact that Senator Clinton had submitted such a list.

Most of them also failed to challenge any of Mr. Rumsfeld’s other lies during the same appearance, including his claim that the number of troops on the ground “reflected the best judgment of the military commanders on the ground [and] their superiors.” (Actually, the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, told Congress before the war that “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be required for an occupation of Iraq” and was rewarded for his prescience with early retirement.)

On the Web, of course, it was a different story, with a number of prominent blogs reproducing Mrs. Clinton’s rebuttal in its entirety.

I am a diehard defender of the mainstream media. But it’s getting harder all the time to remain that way.

For two years, Jon Stewart’s “fake news” show has been the most reliable and the most sophisticated source for news about Iraq. That can only mean one thing: There are a whole lot of “important” reporters in Washington who have forgotten how to do their jobs.

Charles Kaiser is a press critic and the author of The Gay Metropolis. He is completing The Cost of Courage, about a French family that fought in the Resistance in Paris during World War II.

He was an up-from-the-bootstraps New York City immigrant, who suffered a crippling disease at 17 that remained a mystery in Harlem Hospital, until one of his sisters got him admitted as a charity case to the Mayo Clinic. There he was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, and underwent a series of operations that put him back on his feet. Four of his five sisters died before he was an adult.

He was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (and fifty years later, when Times sports reporter Robin Herman identified hockey player Phil Esposito as the most famous scion of that city, he was quick to correct her.) His family moved to the Bronx when he was a boy. He discovered journalism at City College, where he was the editor of the campus newspaper, and then the college correspondent for The Times. When I became his clerk in 1973, after a stint as the Columbia College correspondent, he told me that his first official act as metropolitan editor had been to raise the monthly stipend of the City College Correspondent to the amount paid to the Columbia reporter.

He was brilliant, arrogant, and incredibly insecure. He told a friend that during his first five years as the paper’s top editor, he came in every day expecting to be fired. But it turned out that Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger meant what he said in the inscription of a photo that was the first thing you saw when you entered Rosenthal’s office: “To all the years ahead.”

His nine years as a foreign correspondent in India, Poland, Switzerland and Japan earned him fan letters from young reporters like Gay Talese, and caught the attention of executive editor Turner Catledge, who lured him back to New York to be the metropolitan editor in 1963.

From then on, until he left the newsroom, Arthur Gelb was his indispensable deputy, spewing ideas like a volcano. Together, with some crucial help from Seymour Topping, they transformed the Times from an authoritative but stodgy two-section paper into the four-section powerhouse which revived its finances, without seriously compromising its commitment to hard news.

Rosenthal became managing editor in 1969, the year after Clay Felker started New York magazine. Later, Rosenthal bragged about stealing all of Clay’s ideas for service journalism, as he transformed the paper into a food-fashion-and-furniture-friendly outlet. But the Timesman never succumbed to other the temptations of the New Journalism.

“I admired him beyond measure because he took a principled position when it was unpopular and nobody else was taking it, and it saved The Times then,” Renata Adler said today, referring to Rosenthal’s commitment to fact. “He didn’t give in to what journalism was becoming … It was becoming many things that were wrong; but one was a vehicle for the vanity of the reporter. And he didn’t allow that. He also wanted reporting that could be substantiated in some way beyond ‘according to an anonymous official.’”

(In one of their periodic strokes of genius, Rosenthal and Mr. Gelb replaced film critic Bosley Crowther with Ms. Adler in 1968. She only stayed a year, but her copy revolutionized what became acceptable as cultural criticism in the newspaper.)

As editor of The Washington Post during most of Rosenthal’s tenure, Ben Bradlee was his principal competitor. “He gave the Times the best years that they ever had,” Mr. Bradlee said today. “By adding all those sections, he completed The Times; he presided over a real revolution in the paper; and they became as good as they thought they were. I wanted to beat his brains out, but he was a lovely guy, and I really liked him a lot.”

And while everyone remembers that The Times was badly beaten by Woodward and Bernstein during the first two years of Watergate, nearly everyone has forgotten that after Rosenthal hired Sy Hersh to cover the scandal, during the eight months before Nixon resigned, The Times matched The Post on the story, almost scoop for scoop.

Norm Pearlstine, who competed against Rosenthal as the editor of The Wall Street Journal, called him “the most brilliant, most important editor of my lifetime. And I say that despite the fact that the very strengths that Bob McFadden captured this morning also meant that some very talented people chose not work there—and I was the beneficiary of that. He combined extraordinary focus and dedication with immense intellectual curiosity. He so merged his own life with that of the paper, that he was intolerant of people who were unwilling to do the same. That probably meant that he lost some people that The Times wished they hadn’t lost--including some who went back after he left.”

When I worked for Mr. Pearlstine, he ran the most honest newspaper I have ever written for. But Rosenthal had the best news judgement of any editor I have ever known. Later on, Rosenthal’s fierce neo-conservatism became a hallmark of his Op-ed column, but his politics rarely affected the way he covered the news. (His personal lunch club—known informally as the “Rosenthal for President club”—consisted of Oz Elliot, Irving Kristol, Bill Buckley, Dick Clurman, Arthur Gelb, and Teddy White.

“The food at Buckley's was always delicious,” Mr. Gelb told me today. “But after a while I stopped going because one or two of the guests were so full of themselves that eventually I lost my appetite.”

Seymour Topping, who became managing editor when Rosenthal was promoted to executive editor, chaired all the page one news conferences. “From the early 70's right up to my retirement in 86, I never saw an example where his conservative bias influenced the play of the news,” Mr. Topping told me today.

That was the way in which he famously kept the newspaper: straight.

But he wasn’t above hyping, especially when he was the metropolitan editor. The story he promoted about thirty-eight witnesses ignoring the screams of Kitty Genovese when she was murdered was widely disputed by reporters who had actually investigated the scene on the day after the murder. They said that the victim had been pulled out of sight by her attacker, and most of her neighbors thought they were listening to a domestic dispute. Even The Times itself cast doubt on the story in a 3,000 word piece that ran in the City Section in 2004.

Rosenthal’s other problem was the way his close friendships with the rich and famous sometimes resulted in odd distortions of the newspaper’s standards. When John Leonard was the paper’s daily book critic, Rosenthal frequently edited him. And when Mr. Leonard panned a book by Rosenthal’s close friend, Betty Friedan, the frequency of Mr. Leonard’s reviews was suddenly cut in half.

No one received more special attention than Jerzy Kosinski, who accompanied Rosenthal on late night visits to some of the city’s more unusual venues. When the Village Voice suggested in 1982 that Mr. Kosinski might not have been the sole author of all of his novels, The Times responded with an unprecedented 6,500-word apologia for Mr. Kosinski, which started across the top of the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. Among other things, the odd article alleged that the piece in the Voice had been indirectly inspired by a smear campaign conducted by the Polish Communist government.

By then, I had left The Times to become the press critic at Newsweek. When I described The Times piece about Kosinski as “the most dramatic evidence to date” of Rosenthal’s willingness “to use the power of the Times to reward friends and punish enemies, Rosenthal’s reaction was beyond apoplexy, according to one of his assistants.

Rosenthal also had problems with gay people, though I never thought I was affected by that, because I was still firmly in the closet when I worked at The Times. Walter Clemons was not so lucky. When Clemons was clearly the best candidate to fill a slot as one of the paper’s daily book critics in 1970, Rosenthal passed over him after Christopher Lehmann-Haupt told the editor that Mr. Clemons was gay.

“I was outraged and hurt, and thought, What has this got to do with anything?” Clemons remembered.

On the other hand, when Rosenthal started dating Shirley Lord, the beauty editor at Vogue, more gay people entered his social circle, and he became more comfortable with them. In January, 1993, he even used his column to come out in favor of Bill Clinton’s short-lived proposal to allow gay people to serve openly in the military.

Rosenthal was famously quotable, although competing publications weren’t always smart enough to use his comments. When a Watergate tape revealed that Richard Nixon had said, “I don’t give a shit what happens, I want you all to stonewall it,” The Times printed shit for the first time, though only in the text of the tape, and not in the accompanying news story.

When a Newsweek reporter called Rosenthal to ask if this was a seismic change in the paper’s standards, he replied, “No. We’ll only take shit from the President.”

But the magazine never printed that.

Much more widely circulated was his reaction when it was revealed that Times reporter Laura Foreman had been sleeping with Pennsylvania state Sen. Henry J. "Buddy" Cianfrani, when she had been covering the politician for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I don’t care if my reporters are fucking elephants,” said Rosenthall, “as long as they aren’t covering the circus.” Then he fired Foreman.

Washington correspondent Steve Weisman was one of many Timesmen who remembered Rosenthal with affection yesterday. Shortly after Rosenthal became an op-ed columnist, he and his new wife, Shirley Lord, visited Weisman in India, a place Rosenthal had loved ever since he lived there as a correspondent.

Messrs. Weisman, Rosenthal and Ms. Lord went to the New Delhi train station at eleven o’clock at night. “It was just mobbed,” Mr. Weisman remembered, “with homeless people camped out, cooking their dinners with their families. It smelled of everything, and Abe just looked at it and said, ‘I love this.’ He just embraced things that people don’t embrace.”

After an overnight trip on the train, the party transferred to a car to go up into the mountains to interview the Dali Lama. “I say this with all affection,” said Mr. Weisman. “It was very sobering to be in the presence of two people who thought they were God.”

He was an up-from-the-bootstraps New York City immigrant, who suffered a crippling disease at 17 that remained a mystery in Harlem Hospital, until one of his sisters got him admitted as a charity case to the Mayo Clinic. There he was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, and underwent a series of operations that put him back on his feet. Four of his five sisters died before he was an adult.

He was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (and fifty years later, when Times sports reporter Robin Herman identified hockey player Phil Esposito as the most famous scion of that city, he was quick to correct her.) His family moved to the Bronx when he was a boy. He discovered journalism at City College, where he was the editor of the campus newspaper, and then the college correspondent for The Times. When I became his clerk in 1973, after a stint as the Columbia College correspondent, he told me that his first official act as metropolitan editor had been to raise the monthly stipend of the City College Correspondent to the amount paid to the Columbia reporter.

He was brilliant, arrogant, and incredibly insecure. He told a friend that during his first five years as the paper’s top editor, he came in every day expecting to be fired. But it turned out that Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger meant what he said in the inscription of a photo that was the first thing you saw when you entered Rosenthal’s office: “To all the years ahead.”

His nine years as a foreign correspondent in India, Poland, Switzerland and Japan earned him fan letters from young reporters like Gay Talese, and caught the attention of executive editor Turner Catledge, who lured him back to New York to be the metropolitan editor in 1963.

From then on, until he left the newsroom, Arthur Gelb was his indispensable deputy, spewing ideas like a volcano. Together, with some crucial help from Seymour Topping, they transformed the Times from an authoritative but stodgy two-section paper into the four-section powerhouse which revived its finances, without seriously compromising its commitment to hard news.

Rosenthal became managing editor in 1969, the year after Clay Felker started New York magazine. Later, Rosenthal bragged about stealing all of Clay’s ideas for service journalism, as he transformed the paper into a food-fashion-and-furniture-friendly outlet. But the Timesman never succumbed to other the temptations of the New Journalism.

“I admired him beyond measure because he took a principled position when it was unpopular and nobody else was taking it, and it saved The Times then,” Renata Adler said today, referring to Rosenthal’s commitment to fact. “He didn’t give in to what journalism was becoming … It was becoming many things that were wrong; but one was a vehicle for the vanity of the reporter. And he didn’t allow that. He also wanted reporting that could be substantiated in some way beyond ‘according to an anonymous official.’”

(In one of their periodic strokes of genius, Rosenthal and Mr. Gelb replaced film critic Bosley Crowther with Ms. Adler in 1968. She only stayed a year, but her copy revolutionized what became acceptable as cultural criticism in the newspaper.)

As editor of The Washington Post during most of Rosenthal’s tenure, Ben Bradlee was his principal competitor. “He gave the Times the best years that they ever had,” Mr. Bradlee said today. “By adding all those sections, he completed The Times; he presided over a real revolution in the paper; and they became as good as they thought they were. I wanted to beat his brains out, but he was a lovely guy, and I really liked him a lot.”

And while everyone remembers that The Times was badly beaten by Woodward and Bernstein during the first two years of Watergate, nearly everyone has forgotten that after Rosenthal hired Sy Hersh to cover the scandal, during the eight months before Nixon resigned, The Times matched The Post on the story, almost scoop for scoop.

Norm Pearlstine, who competed against Rosenthal as the editor of The Wall Street Journal, called him “the most brilliant, most important editor of my lifetime. And I say that despite the fact that the very strengths that Bob McFadden captured this morning also meant that some very talented people chose not work there—and I was the beneficiary of that. He combined extraordinary focus and dedication with immense intellectual curiosity. He so merged his own life with that of the paper, that he was intolerant of people who were unwilling to do the same. That probably meant that he lost some people that The Times wished they hadn’t lost--including some who went back after he left.”

When I worked for Mr. Pearlstine, he ran the most honest newspaper I have ever written for. But Rosenthal had the best news judgement of any editor I have ever known. Later on, Rosenthal’s fierce neo-conservatism became a hallmark of his Op-ed column, but his politics rarely affected the way he covered the news. (His personal lunch club—known informally as the “Rosenthal for President club”—consisted of Oz Elliot, Irving Kristol, Bill Buckley, Dick Clurman, Arthur Gelb, and Teddy White.

“The food at Buckley's was always delicious,” Mr. Gelb told me today. “But after a while I stopped going because one or two of the guests were so full of themselves that eventually I lost my appetite.”

Seymour Topping, who became managing editor when Rosenthal was promoted to executive editor, chaired all the page one news conferences. “From the early 70's right up to my retirement in 86, I never saw an example where his conservative bias influenced the play of the news,” Mr. Topping told me today.

That was the way in which he famously kept the newspaper: straight.

But he wasn’t above hyping, especially when he was the metropolitan editor. The story he promoted about thirty-eight witnesses ignoring the screams of Kitty Genovese when she was murdered was widely disputed by reporters who had actually investigated the scene on the day after the murder. They said that the victim had been pulled out of sight by her attacker, and most of her neighbors thought they were listening to a domestic dispute. Even The Times itself cast doubt on the story in a 3,000 word piece that ran in the City Section in 2004.

Rosenthal’s other problem was the way his close friendships with the rich and famous sometimes resulted in odd distortions of the newspaper’s standards. When John Leonard was the paper’s daily book critic, Rosenthal frequently edited him. And when Mr. Leonard panned a book by Rosenthal’s close friend, Betty Friedan, the frequency of Mr. Leonard’s reviews was suddenly cut in half.

No one received more special attention than Jerzy Kosinski, who accompanied Rosenthal on late night visits to some of the city’s more unusual venues. When the Village Voice suggested in 1982 that Mr. Kosinski might not have been the sole author of all of his novels, The Times responded with an unprecedented 6,500-word apologia for Mr. Kosinski, which started across the top of the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. Among other things, the odd article alleged that the piece in the Voice had been indirectly inspired by a smear campaign conducted by the Polish Communist government.

By then, I had left The Times to become the press critic at Newsweek. When I described The Times piece about Kosinski as “the most dramatic evidence to date” of Rosenthal’s willingness “to use the power of the Times to reward friends and punish enemies, Rosenthal’s reaction was beyond apoplexy, according to one of his assistants.

Rosenthal also had problems with gay people, though I never thought I was affected by that, because I was still firmly in the closet when I worked at The Times. Walter Clemons was not so lucky. When Clemons was clearly the best candidate to fill a slot as one of the paper’s daily book critics in 1970, Rosenthal passed over him after Christopher Lehmann-Haupt told the editor that Mr. Clemons was gay.

“I was outraged and hurt, and thought, What has this got to do with anything?” Clemons remembered.

On the other hand, when Rosenthal started dating Shirley Lord, the beauty editor at Vogue, more gay people entered his social circle, and he became more comfortable with them. In January, 1993, he even used his column to come out in favor of Bill Clinton’s short-lived proposal to allow gay people to serve openly in the military.

Rosenthal was famously quotable, although competing publications weren’t always smart enough to use his comments. When a Watergate tape revealed that Richard Nixon had said, “I don’t give a shit what happens, I want you all to stonewall it,” The Times printed shit for the first time, though only in the text of the tape, and not in the accompanying news story.

When a Newsweek reporter called Rosenthal to ask if this was a seismic change in the paper’s standards, he replied, “No. We’ll only take shit from the President.”

But the magazine never printed that.

Much more widely circulated was his reaction when it was revealed that Times reporter Laura Foreman had been sleeping with Pennsylvania state Sen. Henry J. "Buddy" Cianfrani, when she had been covering the politician for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I don’t care if my reporters are fucking elephants,” said Rosenthall, “as long as they aren’t covering the circus.” Then he fired Foreman.

Washington correspondent Steve Weisman was one of many Timesmen who remembered Rosenthal with affection yesterday. Shortly after Rosenthal became an op-ed columnist, he and his new wife, Shirley Lord, visited Weisman in India, a place Rosenthal had loved ever since he lived there as a correspondent.

Messrs. Weisman, Rosenthal and Ms. Lord went to the New Delhi train station at eleven o’clock at night. “It was just mobbed,” Mr. Weisman remembered, “with homeless people camped out, cooking their dinners with their families. It smelled of everything, and Abe just looked at it and said, ‘I love this.’ He just embraced things that people don’t embrace.”

After an overnight trip on the train, the party transferred to a car to go up into the mountains to interview the Dali Lama. “I say this with all affection,” said Mr. Weisman. “It was very sobering to be in the presence of two people who thought they were God.”

Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television , by Don Hewitt. Public Affairs, 272 pages, $26.

In his breezy new memoir, Don Hewitt informs us that, as a youngster, the journalist he most identified with was Hildy Johnson from The Front Page , the beguiling reporter in the best movie ever made about journalism. But for at least the first half of his career at CBS News, the person Mr. Hewitt most resembled was Hildy's boss, Walter Burns, the editor who would do anything to anyone to get a story.

When Mr. Hewitt found himself surrounded by the competition on a tug that was taking him to the wreckage of a plane that had crashed into the East River, he managed to charter the boat, steer it to the nearest dock and march his rivals down the gangplank. (When NBC retaliated by hiring its own, smaller boat, the skipper of Mr. Hewitt's tug "accidentally" rammed the competition.) During Khrushchev's visit to the Midwest in 1959, Mr. Hewitt came across an unmanned NBC remote truck parked on a dirt road near the farm. He immediately jumped in the driver's seat and headed into a nearby corn field, where he hoped to hide the truck-until suddenly he came to his senses. Four years later, when Dan Rather called him from Dallas to tell him that a man named Zapruder had apparently filmed John F. Kennedy's assassination, Mr. Hewitt instructed Mr. Rather to go to Zapruder's house, "sock him in the jaw, take his film to our affiliate in Dallas, copy it onto videotape, and let the CBS lawyers decide whether it could be sold or whether it was in the public domain." Mr. Rather thought that was a "great idea" and slammed down the phone, but Mr. Hewitt changed his mind a second later and called the eager rookie back to rescind the order for assault and robbery. Mr. Hewitt recalls that Mr. Rather was sorry he hadn't left before the second call came through.

A few months after his 45th birthday, when he had mellowed (a bit), Mr. Hewitt invented 60 Minutes , the most successful news hour in the history of television. Mr. Hewitt's guess is that it has netted CBS $2 billion since it first hit the air in 1968.

60 Minutes is the last remaining serious program from that halcyon era when network news divisions were still more interested in prestige than profits. Mr. Hewitt is good at offering pithy explanations for the present pathetic state of TV news-and for why we are unlikely ever to see again anything nearly as original as his signature program.

"The difference between then and now is that [the networks] were obliged to give something back in exchange for their public use of the airwaves. That was what the Federal Communications Commission demanded. So if news was a loss leader, that was the price of doing business." Broadcasting was once a sacred trust, but no one has taken that attitude "since Bill Paley of CBS, David Sarnoff of NBC and Leonard Goldenson of ABC passed from the scene."

Don Hewitt is smart enough to know that he and the rest of his seven-figure colleagues have become a big part of the problem-and clever enough to know that he should admit it. "Why aren't we broadcast journalists hollering about it? Because we want it both ways. We want the companies we work for to put back the wall the pioneers erected to separate news from entertainment, but we are not above climbing over the rubble each week to take an entertainment-size paycheck for broadcasting news.... Those of us who signed and re-signed during the Tisch era [when scores of jobs were eliminated from CBS News] are in no position to join the chorus." Mr. Hewitt knows that it "makes no sense for people like us to get all high and mighty about the corrupting influence of money in the news business when we ourselves are the beneficiaries of this newfound prosperity."

Of course, the only reason 60 Minutes is still allowed to exist (and even cover stories in foreign countries!) is that it remains one of the most profitable programs on television. It's never been broken, so no one's tried to fix it: "The broadcast has remained essentially unchanged since the very beginning. This is no accident. I have this crazy theory that we are the only thing in American life that still looks, feels, and smells the same as it always did. The supermarkets look different, the gas stations look different, the banks look different. But if you remember 60 Minutes as a kid, you'll feel an intimacy with it today."

The program has retained its distinctive personality in part because it's managed differently from every other magazine show on the air. Instead of Mr. Hewitt and his deputies dictating its content, all of the story ideas are generated from the bottom up, by its five full-time correspondents (and contributors Christiane Amanpour and Bob Simon) and their 20-odd producers.

Besides Hildy Johnson, Don Hewitt's other childhood hero was Julian Marsh, the Broadway producer in 42nd Street . That may explain why he has done a better job of maintaining an inherently precarious balance than most of his emulators: "There is a line that separates news biz from show biz. The trick is to walk up to that line, touch it with your toe, but don't cross it. If you don't go near it, you're going to lose your viewership or your readership. If you step over it, you'll lose your conscience. For more than thirty years, 60 Minutes has walked up to that line but never crossed it."

Why do I continue to admire a news program that flirts so frankly with "show biz"? After all, this is also the show that nearly disgraced itself in 1995 when it bowed to corporate pressure and gutted Mike Wallace's piece about a whistle blower from the tobacco industry-probably because Larry Tisch was nervous that the piece (and the lawsuit it might have provoked) had the potential to scuttle a planned merger with Westinghouse. (This saga happens to be the subject of one of the longest, most defensive and least convincing chapters of Don Hewitt's memoir.) It's a relatively rare lapse in the program's 33-year history, and it's not as serious as other recent journalistic felonies, including the wholly unwarranted prosecution of Wen Ho Lee by The New York Times . In the end, 60 Minutes retains our respect for the same reason The Times does: Its standards haven't declined quite as precipitously as those of the culture that surrounds it.

Charles Kaiser, author of The Gay Metropolis (Harcourt), is a former media critic for Newsweek.

Max Frankel. Random House, 546 pages, $29.95.

One of the many pleasures of Max Frankel's memoir is his account of

the 30-year war he fought with A.M. (Abe) Rosenthal over who would become

the top editor of The New York Times . In the end, they both won,

each in turn. But the blood spilled along the way had a profound effect on

the reporters who worked for them, and on the unsuspecting Times

reader as well.

The Times of My Life alternates between personal history,

national politics and international diplomacy–but always, it works its

way back to Max and Abe, Abe and Max.

Both men began writing for The Times before graduating from

college, and neither of them ever worked anywhere else. Right from the

start, Mr. Frankel, a Columbia University man, exuded a sense of

entitlement, while Mr. Rosenthal, a City College guy, often seemed

uncertain about his own legitimacy. Mr. Frankel easily adopted the

patrician air of his mentor, James Reston, while Mr. Rosenthal never really

managed to disguise his Bronx roots, even after living abroad. Mr. Frankel

preferred charm, Mr. Rosenthal, intimidation. In their most important

battle, in the mid-70's, it was the Bronx street fighter who triumphed

over the tweedy diplomatic correspondent. From 1976, Mr. Rosenthal served

10 years as executive editor, until publisher Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger

Sr., pushed him aside in favor of his perpetual competitor.

Times aficionados will discover a feast of new information about

the inner workings of the paper–more than any other book has provided

since Gay Talese's landmark 1969 history, The Kingdom and the

Power . But even readers indifferent to newsroom gossip will find plenty

to enjoy, beginning with the riveting story of young Max's escape, at

age 9, from Hitler's Germany.

Crossing back and forth between Germany and Poland, he and his mother

were separated from his father and seemingly stranded in Berlin–until

his indomitable mother dared to present herself at Gestapo headquarters and

beg for two exit visas. Incredibly, she succeeded. Again incredibly,

Max's father survived seven years in So-

viet labor camps and rejoined his family in New York on Columbus Day, in

1946.

Mr. Frankel writes that it was his status as a refugee–his

"outsiderhood"–which made him such a good reporter, and

occasionally that perspective produces really surprising conclusions.

"I have wondered all my life about my refusal to condemn all Germans

and mere Germanness," he writes, after describing a postwar visit to

the town in Saxony where he grew up. "I do not forgive acts of horror

or indifference to them. But I cannot believe that evil resides in the

genes or culture of any one people. The Germans who acquiesced in the

persecution of the Jews had more to fear than the many peoples elsewhere

who paid no attention. If there were such a thing as ethnic guilt, how

guilty are we Americans who feed off lands seized from an annihilated

people and partake of the wealth created by slaves? "

Sometimes the surprising shades into the unlikely, as for example with

an odd charge lodged against Punch Sulzberger. In the middle of what is

generally a warm and accurate portrait of his former boss (perhaps the most

consistently underrated newspaper publisher of his generation), Mr. Frankel

says Mr. Sulzberger insisted on endorsing Al D'Amato for re-election

in 1986 because the "demagogic hack had wormed his way into the

establishment's favor, running petty but profitable errands for New

York, including subsidies for its Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose

grateful chairman was Punch Sulzberger." In fact, Mr. Sulzberger did

not become chairman until the year after Mr. D'Amato's

re-election, and in any case Federal funds have never represented more than

a minuscule fraction of the museum's budget.

Mr. Frankel's personal history, especially the story of his boyhood

in Washington Heights, is generally more interesting than his geopolitical

judgments. But the parts that keep the book alive right to the end are

about The Times . When Punch Sulzberger's lawyers advised him

against publishing the Pentagon Papers, Mr. Rosenthal worried that he would

be forced to resign in protest. Then "Abe began recounting his shaky

personal finances, and leading us all into weary, fearful

hallucinations." A day later, Mr. Sulzberger reversed himself again,

and Mr. Frankel and Mr. Rosenthal joined in a rare common celebration.

Mr. Frankel was Washington bureau chief during Watergate, and he

concedes that he bungled that story, that The Times failed to match

a series of scoops by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in The Washington

Post in the fall of 1972. "We were too sluggish even after the

White House was implicated," Mr. Frankel writes. But he never mentions

the fact that after he moved to New York the following year, and Abe

Rosenthal assigned Seymour Hersh to the Watergate story in Washington,

The Times had nearly as many Watergate scoops as The Post .

Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Frankel were almost equally talented

correspondents. But when Sulzberger put them into head-to-head competition

in 1973, giving Mr. Frankel control of the Sunday department, including the

Magazine, the Book Review and the Week in Review, while Mr. Rosenthal

continued to run the rest of the news department as managing editor, Mr.

Rosenthal quickly showed his superiority as an infighter. Mr. Frankel

writes: "I … had to contend with the hostility of an obviously

competitive Abe Rosenthal … [who] resisted giving staff writers time

off from the Daily to pursue Magazine projects. He even told political

writers that he did not want to read ideas in the Week in Review that had

not first appeared in his Daily pages. Although he commanded a third-floor

division of 1,000, he treated our eighth-floor platoon of 100 as a threat

and repelled bids for cooperation. For all these reasons I staggered

through my term as Sunday editor." But many of Mr. Frankel's

blunders were entirely of his own making. He never appreciated the editing

talents of John Leonard, the last great editor of the Book Review, and at

Arts and Leisure he replaced the brilliant (and beloved) Seymour Peck with

a second-rate apparatchik.

Worst of all, he never understood that the competition between the

Sunday and Daily cultural departments could play a pivotal role in

preserving the high standards of the newspaper. Barely two years after

assuming control of the Sunday department, Mr. Frankel decided that his new

realm was "illogical and expensive," and "without much

redeeming journalistic value"–quite an indictment of what the

Magazine and Book Review came to look like under his direction. Mr.

Sulzberger evidently concurred; in 1976, he gave Mr. Rosenthal control of

the whole news department as executive editor. Mr. Frankel's

consolation prize was to become editor of the editorial page. "I

recoiled with envy of Abe, contempt for editorial writing, and genuine

alarm that there was little appreciation for my strategic

thinking."

Mr. Rosenthal proved that his unpredictable passions, combined with the

creativity of his unofficial deputy, Arthur Gelb, made him a more effective

editor than Mr. Frankel. But his brutal management style and his

willingness to use the culture pages to celebrate his friends and punish

his enemies led to his undoing. " The Times is in the same

position as the Jews," Bob Gottlieb remarked toward the end of the

Rosenthal years. "It's expected to behave better than everybody

else." Too often during his reign, Mr. Rosenthal failed to live up to

that expectation, and in 1986 Mr. Sulzberger replaced him with Mr. Frankel.

The publisher told his new editor "to break in my son Arthur as the

next publisher" and "make the newsroom a happy place

again."

Two of the worst things about the Rosenthal regime had been its

treatment of gay employees, who lived in terror of public exposure, and its

neglect of gay stories–both of which the publisher had acquiesced in.

Animated by his own memory of an earlier Holocaust, and strongly encouraged

by the publisher's son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who shared none of his

father's antipathy toward homosexuals, Mr. Frankel quickly moved to

increase the paper's coverage of AIDS and the gay community. He also

made it clear that no one would suffer any professional penalty if he or

she chose to come out of the closet. It's appropriate that Mr. Frankel

devotes an entire chapter to these changes: They were easily his most

important achievements as executive editor.

At various points in his book, Mr. Frankel calls Mr. Rosenthal

"self-promoting," "arbitrary, "willful,"

"volcanic" and "Lear-like." He pays tribute to Mr.

Rosenthal's "brilliant, instinctive news judgment," but adds

that "the trouble was that Abe displayed his angers and affections in

ways that often terrorized subordinates.… His infatuations with people

and causes were often transparent. He boasted of keeping the paper

'straight,' but his measuring rod was not."

Those judgments are deadly accurate. The gentler Max Frankel produced a

cleaner, fairer but also slightly flatter newspaper. In his eight years as

executive editor, he proved that he was a much more decent human being than

his nemesis. But Abe Rosenthal–at a huge cost to his

subordinates–was actually the more remarkable editor.

This wonderful history of a legendary photo agency should entertain almost everyone interested in photography or journalism-except for some of its prima donna subjects.

Russell Miller profiles Magnum-the glamorous, exceedingly ill-run photographers' cooperative-from its birth in the midst of postwar idealism in 1948 through successive financial crises and infamous annual meetings, where "photographers would literally throw tantrums, lie on the floor and drum their heels or bang spoons on the table."

But what makes the book so compelling is its mini-biographies of so many of the greatest photographers of modern times-and the fact that their lives intersected with just about every major event of the 20th century, from the Spanish Civil War (11 years before the agency was founded) through John F. Kennedy's funeral, the Six-Day War, Vietnam and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.

The founders were "the unlikeliest band of brothers imaginable": Robert Capa, a "swarthy Hungarian adventurer, notorious womanizer and incorrigible gambler" who took the "moment of death" picture of the execution of an anti-fascist soldier during the Spanish Civil War; Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French intellectual who gradually dominated "the photographic pantheon"; David Seymour, known to everyone as Chim, "a plump, owl-like Polish Jew" who was also a "gentle polyglot and epicurean"; and George Rodger, "a former public schoolboy who described himself as a dreamer and only drifted into photography as a means of saving the world."

"Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of a single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes," said Mr.

Cartier-Bresson, the only one of the four still living. This passion carried him all over the world, from China, where he found an elderly eunuch whose duty had been "to wrap the Emperor's favorite concubine, naked, in a length of red silk and carry her to the Emperor's bed," to the set of The Misfits in the Nevada desert, where he decided it was Marilyn Monroe's intelligence "that makes the actress not only a model but a real woman."

Mr. Miller traces the birth of modern photojournalism to the Popular Front in France in the 1930's, which was photographed by Seymour and Mr. Cartier-Bresson for magazines like the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung , a model for Life , which in turn would become one of Magnum's most reliable, if occasionally detested, customers. "Using small portable cameras and the streets as their studio," Mr. Miller writes, photojournalists "emerged to fill the demand for pictures showing what was happening and how people lived."

What set these men and women apart from their competitors, especially at the beginning, was their almost naïve idealism-the conviction, as photojournalist Leonard Freed put it, that "money was not the main objective."

"We had come out of the 30's and were looking for a better world," said Mr. Freed. "To be a photographer you have to be a child, always full of wonder.… Making a photograph only takes a moment of time, but then you spend the rest of your life figuring out what it means."

At the heart of their craft was the ability of these Magnum photographers to insinuate themselves into the lives of their subjects. Thus Eve Arnold was invited to witness Joan Crawford getting ready in the morning to go out in the evening: "Two masseuses would come from Elizabeth Arden to massage and polish her up, and she wanted me there to photograph it," Ms. Arnold remembered. "I got her lying on a table with a masseuse at her head and a masseuse at her feet. It really was quite extraordinary."

Later, Ms. Arnold was present when Marilyn Monroe asked a woman reporter if she minded if she brushed her hair while they talked.

"No, of course not," the reporter replied. When the journalist looked up, Monroe was "sitting there brushing her pubic hair."

Later, Ms. Arnold convinced Malcolm X to permit her to follow him around for two years, and she was often the only white face at Black Muslim rallies. "As I walked through the crowd they would polka-dot me with cigarette burns," said Ms. Arnold. "I learned to wear wool rather than cotton or silk, because wool doesn't burn."

Life magazine was reluctant to publish her pictures of Malcolm because "nobody knows who these people are," she recalled the editors saying. But Ms. Arnold pointed out that that was precisely what made her pictures newsworthy. She convinced them to run her story, but when the pictures were laid out, an editor noticed that the final shot appeared above an advertisement for Oreo cookies, with the line "The greatest chocolate cookie of them all." To the photographer's horror, Life pulled the pictures instead of the ad.

W. Eugene Smith was typical of the extraordinarily talented people whose idiosyncrasies often came close to bankrupting the agency they worked for. Smith got his first contract with Life in 1939 at the age of 21, and he shared his colleagues' belief in the power of his work to change the world. "Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph … can lure our senses into awareness," said Smith.

Eventually, Smith succumbed to his addictions to alcohol and Benzedrine (after borrowing $7,000 from Magnum). But in 1944, he was at the height of his powers when he covered the Pacific for Life , "producing some of the most powerful images of war ever to appear in the magazine," according to Mr. Miller.

"Each time I pressed the shutter release, it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the pictures might survive through the years," Smith recalled, "with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future, causing them caution and remembrance and realization." And while Smith insisted he "received no thrill" from war himself, he acknowledged its awful fascination: "Sensually, there is something magnificent and beautiful in war-the slow jogging of these damp, helmeted men against the eerie light of flares, the silhouette of smashed buildings, the flame-throwing tanks with a burst of spectrum, the sight of planes falling before patterns of long tracers, the twinkling of anti-aircraft fire-these are magnificent sights, until you think."

Passages like this make reading Magnum feel like the equivalent of watching a mesmerizing newsreel of the last six decades of the 20th century-a movie which includes the sights, sounds and even the smells of war.

In one of the book's many war scenes, Philip Jones Griffiths gives a spellbinding account of barely escaping death after an ambush by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. When an Australian doctor joined him on an elevator in his hotel a few hours after the photographer had been under attack, the doctor declared, "Oh God, you must have nearly been killed."

How did you know? the photographer asked.

"I can tell by your sweat," the doctor replied. "I know the smell of sweat produced by fear."