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Thirty-Eight Witnesses
The Kitty Genovese Case
A. M. Rosenthal
PREFACE BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
When A. M. Rosenthal died in May 2006 at the age of eighty-four, he left behind a career as notable for one striking gap as for its innumerable achievements. His journalistic record included winning a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Poland, defying the Nixon Administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, serving seventeen years as the executive editor of the New York Times, and, even after nominal retirement, writing opinion columns for both the Times and the Daily News. He produced one of the most significant ruminations on the Holocaust in his 1958 article, “No News From Auschwitz,” and in later years he championed human-rights issues from religious freedom in China to female circumcision in Africa.
Yet Abe Rosenthal, as everyone in his wake knew him, never wrote the book one might well have expected from a journalist of his caliber. He never wrote sweeping narrative non-fiction in the manner of Gay Talese, David Halberstam, and J. Anthony Lukas, among his younger colleagues on his Times. He never wrote an autobiography, as did Arthur Gelb and Max Frankel, his partner and successor, respectively, in the Times hierarchy. He never wrote a family history, as did Joseph Lelyveld, another executive editor, even though the events of Rosenthal’s childhood had tragedy on a Dickensian scale.
Like certain great reporters and editors, perhaps most, Abe operated on the biorhythms of the daily deadline. He was too restless, too driven, too curious to step off the treadmill for very long. As intelligent as he was, he fundamentally went with his instincts, and he wore his emotions flagrantly. He lacked the patience and maybe the introspection to pull back from the hurly-burly of human events long enough to grasp and render them in book form.
If you search a library catalogue for books written by “Rosenthal, A. M.,” you will find only six or seven titles listed, and several of those are anthologies of work by Times writers with Rosenthal credited as editor. The only real books that Abe left are, appropriately enough, books that rose directly out of breaking news stories that he oversaw as city editor, stories that came to possess him. One of those books, One More Victim, co-written with Arthur Gelb, explored the pathology of Jewish self-hate through the life and death of a young man named Daniel Burros, who tried to hide his actual identity by reinventing himself as a Ku Klux Klansman and neo-Nazi. The other book is the one you hold here, Thirty-Eight Witnesses, the story behind the Kitty Genovese murder case. Originally published in 1964, it remains fearsomely relevant today, a testament both to Rosenthal’s genius and journalism’s mission.
Even at the remove of more than forty years, the essential outlines of the crime remain familiar, an enduring part of our cultural vocabulary. Shortly after 3 A.M. on March 13, 1964, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Catherine (Kitty) Genovese was returning from her job at a tavern to her apartment in the middle-class neighborhood of Kew Gardens, Queens, when she was attacked by a man wielding a knife. Over the course of thirty-five minutes, the assailant stabbed her in three separate rounds of assault. She screamed for help repeatedly. Only after Genovese lay dying, three doors from her apartment house, did any of her neighbors call the police.
A certain myth has grown up around Rosenthal’s coverage of the Genovese case. Like many myths, it contains both truths and falsehoods. In this version of events, which Rosenthal neither created nor disputed, he was alone in seizing upon the passivity and apathy of the neighbors as the most salient part of the crime. It is true that the Times’s first article, a mere four paragraphs, said nothing about the neighbors other than that they “were awakened by her screams.” It is true that New York’s tabloids, the Post and the Daily News, indulged in the tawdry sport of blaming the victim, caricaturing Genovese as a “barmaid” who was “separated from her husband” and “ran with a fast crowd” while living in a “Bohemian section” of Queens. But it is also true that the Herald Tribune began its first-day story this way: “The neighbors had grandstand seats for the slaying of Kitty Genovese. And yet, when the pretty diminutive twenty-eight-year-old brunette called for help, she called in vain.”
It is possible, though not probable, that Rosenthal never saw the Herald Tribune’s account. Speaking from my own experience on the Times, even a generation later, the newspaper often suffered from an institutional arrogance that led it to disregard its competitors, to believe that news wasn’t really news until it appeared in the Good Gray Lady. Whatever the reason, Rosenthal seems to have been unaware of the earlier article on March 23, 1964, when he and Arthur Gelb had lunch near City Hall with Police Commissioner Michael Joseph Murphy. During the meal, Murphy told them, “That Queens story is something else.” A moment later, he uttered what any journalist would call “the telling detail”: thirty-eight. Thirty-eight people had witnessed the attack on Genovese and none had called the police. No sooner did Rosenthal return to the Times office than he assigned a reporter, Martin Gansberg, to report the story of those people.
You cannot appreciate Rosenthal’s decision without appreciating the man. The New York Times, circa 1964, was a newspaper that traditionally had been overseen by Southern gentlemen, written by Ivy League alumni, and copy-edited by Roman Catholics. It was deeply estranged from, almost embarrassed by, the Jewish heritage of its ruling families, the Ochs and Sulzbergers. Some of the Jews who rose up the reporting ranks chose to anglicize their names—Topolsky becoming Topping, Shapiro becoming Shepard. The less compliant sort, such as Abe Rosenthal and the labor reporter Abe Raskin, were assigned bylines with initials (A. M., A. H.) to efface their ethnicity.
Abe Rosenthal had grown up in the working-class Bronx, the son of a housepainter who had snuck across the border from Canada. During Abe’s childhood, he lost four of his five sisters to illness and his father to an accident on the job. Abe himself, stricken with osteomyelitis, lost use of his legs for a year and was cured only as the charity patient of a hospital. His life, suffused with tragedy and want, gave lie to every nostalgic cliché about Jewish immigration.
City College served as Abe’s ladder of upward mobility, fulfilling its renowned role as “the poor man’s Harvard.” He was writing for the Times while still an undergraduate. And when he went on to cover the world—heading the Times bureaus in Japan, India, Poland, and the United Nations—he never lost his ingrained affinity for the everyday people of New York City. By every account, while he did not initially welcome being appointed metropolitan editor, he dove into the position with characteristic passion. “Rosenthal wanted to touch the nerve of New York,” Gay Talese put it in his classic portrait of the Times, The Kingdom and the Power. “He wanted his staff to scratch beneath the surface and reveal something of the complexity and conflict of the city.”
Insider and outsider, native son and newcomer, Abe perceived what had changed both for better and ill in New York during his years abroad. He exercised his brain and he trusted his gut. The indifference of thirty-eight witnesses to a vicious murder ran against his former sense of the city—a place that for all its epic size remained personal and intimate at the neighborhood level, a place where it was impossible that a young woman’s cries for help could go unheeded. Precisely such willful ignorance had happened, however, and at Abe’s behest Martin Gansberg began knocking on doors to find out how and why. As Arthur Gelb points out in his memoir, City Room, Abe felt so invested in the subject that he personally line-edited the article.
There is no point in my distilling here what Gansberg wrote back on March 27, 1964, and what Abe himself wrote about it in a subsequent e
ssay for the New York Times Magazine. Those two pieces of journalism form the bulk of the book you are about to read, and they speak more than eloquently enough on their own behalf.
As a journalism professor as well as a journalist, though, I would like to say a few things about the larger meaning of what Rosenthal did. I find it instructive that the original publication of Thirty-Eight Witnesses occurred within a year of the release of Truman Capote’s book, In Cold Blood. Aspiring to create a new form he called the “non-fiction novel,” Capote wound up inspiring a narrower and less salutary genre, the true-crime book. Catalyzed by his example, multitudes of lesser writers went on to describe in titillating detail all manner of lurid crime, the more lurid and the more titillating the better. Most of those books—including, I would argue, Capote’s own—have grown smaller with time.
By no means Capote’s equal as a stylist, Rosenthal accomplished something more profound. He saw in crime something other than crime, a frozen moment of dramatic, disturbing societal change. The thirty-eight witnesses to Kitty Genovese’s murder served as the symbol for a new kind of anonymity and disengagement in urban life, a rent in the fabric, a default in the social contract. Sadly, those ruptures have not ever been fully repaired. A few years ago, an entire family in Baltimore was assassinated, burned alive in its home for having informed on local drug dealers to the police. Nobody came forward to say who had killed them.
In my fifteen years on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, I have played the city editor to hundreds of students covering New York’s neighborhoods in all their human pageantry. Most years, I have devoted the last month of the semester to an assignment I call “a crime and its consequences.” My aim is for these young journalists, tomorrow’s journalists, to learn the difference between merely reconstructing a heinous or grisly event and focusing on one that imparts some broader truth, some deeper understanding.
Doing so, I realize anew as I re-read Thirty-Eight Witnesses, my students and I all stand in Abe Rosenthal’s tradition, trying to be worthy.
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION TO PAPERBACK EDITION (1999)
Soon after I returned from years of reporting in far places and was beginning my work as a newspaper editor in New York City, I wrote a small book about a woman called Catherine Genovese.
I had never met her or anybody who had known her. I knew very little about her except that she was twenty-eight years old when I first heard her name, that she was an Italian American with a thin, serious face and worked tending bar in a middle-class neighborhood in the borough of Queens. Her parents were unhappy that she lived alone. They wanted her to live with them in their house in a suburb of New York City.
That was thirty-four years ago, as I write. Even now, I do not know a great deal more about her life. Her life was not the reason that I wrote about her, or that millions of people came to know her name and have never forgotten it, and that for more than three decades she has affected my life and work, which for most journalists are pretty much the same thing.
I was interested only in the manner of her dying. She died in the early hours of March 13, 1964, outside the small apartment house in Queens where she lived, as neighbors heard her scream her last half hour away and did nothing, nothing at all, to give her succor or even cry alarm.
Her death, not her life, has been written about all these years since it took place. It has been the subject of lectures and seminars in universities, of sermons in churches and synagogues, of several television dramas, and of at least ten plays. One opened in Los Angeles and another in Buenos Aires; other writers are working still on the story of Catherine Genovese. I know because they write to me. They seek some new insight from me, and I from them. We keep seeking, so strong is the memory of Catherine Genovese—the memory, that is, of the way of her dying.
Her name, once known only to her family and the people she served at the bar, has taken on instantly understood meaning to all who have heard it. The Kitty Genovese story, the Genovese case, has become both a quick, puffy cliché for apathy and cowardice about the suffering of others, and an intellectual and religious puzzlement: what does it mean to me?
To me, you, we. That is the power of the Genovese matter. It talks to us not about her, a subject that was barely of fleeting interest to us, but about ourselves, a subject never out of our minds.
Nor do we think much about the man who stabbed her to death and then lay down on her body to ejaculate. Even the neighbors who heard her scream and cry for life, who never walked down the stairs to help or even called the police, are not thought of as individuals but as a clump—the thirty-eight witnesses, we call them and always will—not this one and that one and the other, but the clump. The words mean callousness and cowardice beyond our comprehension; we say that.
The witnesses have not told us much about themselves. Why should they? Go away, get the hell away from my door, they told reporters. We know that they were perfectly ordinary people, skilled workers, tradesmen, people making a living, not bothering anybody, never known to be cruel or cowardly. If we did know more about some of them, would it tell us what we wanted to know, and was that the reason we will not allow the death of Catherine Genovese to escape us? I do not think so.
In the first days after I was involved in the Genovese case, I thought the question and answer were simple. Would I have helped her, at least picked up the phone, for heaven’s sake? All my friends and I were sure we would.
By the time I began the little book about her, I was making the questions a little harder on myself. Like the thirty-eight witnesses, had I ever turned away from a person who was in desperate need and whom I could have helped at no risk to myself? Yes, I had and said so with some satisfaction at being so candid and self-examining.
Years later I understood that neither I nor my friends had been giving the answers to more important questions, had never been willing even to pose them to ourselves. But I think we must have known these questions all the time, because they involved the way of the world, which was not acceptable, if we had to think about it.
In the years that have passed since her death, we have learned something, not much, about Catherine Genovese. I feel it impudently familiar to call her Kitty, which the papers always do; she died too hard and we do not know her well enough and never will.
We know that she worked at the bar at night, which the family, parents, brothers, and sister, did not like. Certainly if she had worked days, Winston Moseley would never have seen her when he was out in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964, hunting.
When the report of the murder of a woman on Austin Street came into the Times later the day she died, the Times gave it about the same amount of attention as it gave any murder in Queens those days—about four paragraphs. I was not even aware of the story; it was not important enough for my attention as metropolitan editor. An assistant handled that kind of thing and made the appropriate sign to a rewrite man: thumb and forefinger held up, a small space between them that meant keep it short.
I was trying to rediscover New York, where I had been brought up. I had returned less than seven months earlier. Physically, I had been away from New York City for about ten years. I spent that decade abroad as a foreign correspondent for the Times, first covering India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Ceylon from my base in New Delhi, occasionally being assigned to Vietnam, Malaysia, or New Guinea. Somebody on the foreign desk at the Times thought New Guinea must be near India—out there someplace.
I wrote mostly about India for four years. In 1958 I was sent to Poland to cover what was then Communist Eastern Europe. When the local dictator decided he had had enough of me and ordered me out after less than two years in Warsaw, I spent another two years in Western Europe and Africa. Then, back to Asia, for two more based in Japan.
Journalistically, I had been away eight years longer. Before going abroad I had lived in New York but had been assigned to cover the brand-new United Nations. My life had revolved around U.N. news, and
many of my friends were U.N. delegates or members of the international secretariat.
So when the paper asked me to return from Japan to New York and become metropolitan editor, I did not relish the idea at all. The Khyber Pass was my kind of story, I said, not the Bronx. But New York wanted to try me out as an editor and I submitted, figuring that after two or three years I would either get the London bureau as the reward for my sacrifice or run off again to India, India, India. It did not work out that way. I remained an editor, but always in my mind still king of the Khyber Pass.
In New York I set about doing what I would have done in any new foreign assignment: find out who ran the place and get to know them. I knew that had not been done much at the Times, where editors then stayed in the office as the receptacle for reporters’ ideas. But I was sure that the reporters would love the change—the editor, still in his heart a reporter like them, getting off his chair, getting to know the city, coming back with ideas himself. Wouldn’t that be great for everybody? They hated it, of course—didn’t I trust them, poking around their assignments?
Among the people I got to know was the police commissioner. One day at lunch near City Hall, when we were talking about police problems, he told me about neighbors who had not come to the help of a dying young woman. I said it sounded like a good story, which surprised him a little, the Times not being known as a great crime newspaper. The Times’s story about her death and the neighbors who heard her scream but did not help or call for help was picked up by the print and broadcast press around the world as a stunning example of apathy—other people’s apathy.
When I wrote the book, I did not know much about Winston Moseley either. I knew from the arrest record that he was going on thirty and made a good living as a technician on calculating machines. He supported his wife and children, a quiet, very neat man.
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