A Great Vignette And Another

On Sidney Zion:-

I’ve already said that Sid had a love-hate relationship with the Times. Let me give an example.

In his last years at the Times, Sid got a tip that Judge Henry Friendly, then perhaps the preeminent appellate court judge in the country and prominently mentioned as a possible U.S. Supreme Court nominee, many years earlier failed to disqualify himself from ruling on a case in which he had a conflict of interest. Assured by Managing Editor Abe Rosenthal that if he got the goods the Times would print the piece, Sidney spent the next weeks definitively documenting the story.

But when the time came to print it, Rosenthal was overruled by James Reston, who was then running the paper. Reston summoned Zion into his 10th floor office, and from behind his imposing desk, explained that if Friendly actually received a Supreme Court nomination, the Times would run the story. But absent that, Reston was not about to run a piece that would cast a dark shadow on Friendly’s otherwise distinguished career.

“The difference between you and me, Mr. Zion,” Reston said, “is that you were brought up as a poor Jew on the scrappy streets of Passaic, New Jersey, whereas I was brought up in the Church of Scotland outside of Glasgow.” At this point, Sidney rudely interrupted. “I thought that the difference between us,” he said, “is you are sitting there, whereas I am sitting here.”

And one more:-

A few weeks before Sidney died, my friend Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I had dinner with him at Frankie and Johnnie’s, one of his favorite haunts, and wouldn’t you know it, we had a long and loud argument about Israel. It was two against one — or three against one, since the woman at the next table vociferously took objection to my point that not all those who objected to the settlements or Israel’s failure to honor Palestinian human and civil rights and liberties were “anti-Israel.” There were cries and gnashing of teeth, but had there not been, it wouldn’t have been Sid. And now the world is poorer without his furor.

Although he fasted on Yom Kippur and went to shul on the High Holidays, I never realized that Sidney, who fraternized with more than his share of mobsters, who spent too many evenings commuting between the bars at Gallagher’s, Frankie and Johnnie’s, and Elaine’s, was particularly religious. So I was surprised to learn at his funeral that his daily ritual included the laying of teffilin. According to the rabbi, “totafot,” the word the Torah uses to describe the teffilin, is either untranslatable or means “immovable.” Now that I think about it, I am no longer surprised. El Sid was definitely untranslatable, and he was certainly immovable.

Source:

Victor Navasky, a political columnist for Tablet Magazine, is a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review.



And by thw way, see Rafael Medoff's obit treatment.