For all the years Robert H. Phelps helped produce The New York Times, journalism was his religion. From his early days as a copy editor on its National Desk to his years of eminence as the News Editor of its Washington Bureau, he held firm in his faith that it was the world's leading newspaper, and he did all in his power to build on it and to inspire all others under his influence to do the same. Bob, as most of us addressed him (bp as he modestly signed his memos), was a contemporary of luminaries such as the beloved Eugene Roberts, Scottie Reston and Max Frankel, the feared Abe Rosenthal and Harrison Salisbury and brilliant reporters such as Neil Sheehan, Tad Szulc, Jim Naughton and Bill Beecher. Some of them shone brighter because of Bob behind them, nurturing, coaxing, and supporting, others because he stood up to them. It might have been due, though he doesn't say so, to his performance teamed with Frankel in coverage throughout one grim night of the sinking of the Andrea Doria that boosted him up the first rungs of the ladder to his own place among them.
But for many of us who worked with him or reported to him, Bob was himself an idol, the ideal editor, pushing his sub-editors to drag the ultimate effort out of writers and reporters, and pressing reporters to fill the holes in their stories, to find answers to questions they had failed to ask, and to seek further truths beyond their stories.
Here in God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at The New York Times, Phelps leaves no unanswered questions. Through his days at the center of some of the greatest news stories of our times, from the Andrea Doria to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, he steeps us in both the drama and the tensions of news gathering and news writing. Neither seeking aggrandizement, shunning embarrassment nor deferring to higher authority, he tells with spirit and insight a story of rivalry between the country's two most outstanding newspapers as well as inside stories of the continuing struggle for power at The Times
And finally, anyone who comes away dry-eyed from his final tribute to Betty, his adored wife, has never known the love of a good woman. There, near the end of the ninth decade of his life, as he continues his search for the comfort she found in her Roman Catholic faith, the hard-boiled editor's writing soars and lands with one of the most moving final lines readers will ever find in modern literature.
