MURFREESBORO — From
the war-torn streets of Berlin to the monument-lined streets of Washington,
D.C., Harry Rosenfeld has been an eyewitness to history.
The survivor of Nazi Germany and former managing editor of The
Washington Post’s metro desk during the Watergate scandal will recall anecdotes
from his fascinating life in “From Kristallnacht to Watergate,” a free and open
event, at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 8, in the State Farm Lecture Hall of MTSU’s
Business and Aerospace Building.
Rosenfeld will discuss his memoirs with Gina Logue, producer
for the university’s Office of News and Media Relations and host of WMOT-FM’s
“MTSU On the Record.”
The son of a furrier, Rosenfeld was only 9 years old when his
father was rousted out of bed in the middle of the night by Nazi officials and
taken away on Oct. 28, 1938.
For three days, the family did not know whether Solomon
Rosenfeld was dead or alive. Finally, the elder Rosenfeld called from Warsaw to
say he and other Jews had been expelled to Poland, their country of origin.
Harry Rosenfeld also saw his family’s synagogue in Berlin
destroyed on Nov. 9, 1938. This time of rampant, coordinated destruction of
Jewish stores, temples and homes became known as Kristallnacht, “The Night of
Broken Glass.”
“We can read a thousand factual books about the Holocaust,
but we can viscerally understand the horror of the Holocaust only by
understanding the people who experienced it,” said Dr. Nancy Rupprecht, chairwoman
of the MTSU Holocaust Studies Committee and history professor.
In 1939, when
Harry was 10 years old, the
Rosenfeld family managed to make it to America. His journalism career began in
1948 as a shipping clerk in the syndicate department of the New York Herald
Tribune.
With the exception of U.S. Army service during the Korean
War and a brief stint writing for CBS News, Rosenfeld worked for the Herald
Tribune until the newsroom’s demise in 1966.
Initially hired for the night foreign desk at The Washington Post in 1966, Rosenfeld was transferred to the metro section in 1970.
As head of the metro desk, Rosenfeld’s instincts told him
that little-known reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were up to the
challenge of unearthing the facts about the Watergate scandal. It was
Rosenfeld’s job to keep them on course and make sure they were accurate.
Only in their 20s when burglars broke into the Democratic Party’s
national headquarters in 1972, Woodward and Bernstein’s reportage connected the
crime to other illegal activities and a cover-up that extended into the highest
levels of the federal government.
Ultimately, their revelations and those of other journalists
sparked congressional investigations and prompted President Richard Nixon to
announce his resignation in a televised address to the nation on Aug. 8, 1974.
“America was fortunate that a journalist as vigilant and
committed as Rosenfeld was at the helm of local news reporting when the
Watergate break-in occurred, initiating an investigation that truly fulfilled
the First Amendment mission of a free press,” said Ken Paulson, dean of MTSU’s
College of Mass Communication.
Following the Oct. 8 conversation, the audience is invited
to participate in a question-and-answer session.
Now editor-at-large for the Albany Times-Union, Rosenfeld
will autograph copies of his book, “From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of
a Newspaperman,” which Phillips Bookstore will have available for purchase.
Rosenfeld’s appearance at MTSU is sponsored by the University
Provost, the Holocaust Studies Committee, the College of Mass Communication,
the College of Liberal Arts and the University Honors College.
For more information, contact Logue at 615-898-5081 or
615-631-8322 or gina.logue@mtsu.edu.
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