Handing the Torch of Liberty to a Newspaperman

Peter Kann, who first met Lipsky in Vietnam, and later worked with him at theWall Street Journal, served as master of ceremonies, introducing six speakers who gave an affectionate mixture of toasts and roasts. They were Roger Hertog, Michael Steinhardt, and Tom Tisch, who were among the owners ofThe New York Sun;Philip Gourevitch, a writer for the New Yorker; Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal;and Amity Shlaes, a columnist for Bloomberg and Mr. Lipsky's wife.

Philip Gourevitch, the former editor of the Paris Review, told amusing anecdotes as a young reporter at the Forward. He came to the Forward offices having written a couple of book reviews. Mr. Lipsky told him, “My New York bureau chief just quit. Have you ever done any reporting?’ Mr. Gourevitch recalled his response: "I said "no'‘ and Lipsky said, 'Good! No bad habits.'”

Then he told of Lipsky's preference of attire for his reporters. “He believed that a newspaperman should wear a hat. And he had a relationship with a hat company over on Herald Square, and he sent me over there early on to buy a hat so that I could look like a proper newspaperman.

“So I went over there and bought this fabulous Borsalino, which to me spoke of great Italian style, and I came back to the office, and he said, ‘What is that thing on your head?’ and I said, ‘It’s the hat you bought for me.' He said, ‘No, no, no,’ and he went over to his office closet door and out tumbled a stack of hats. And he said, ‘Now, look,' and he brought out a ruler and measured the brim of my hat and he measured his hat, and he pointed out that the brim of his hat was at least half an inch smaller than my hat. And he said, ‘Now, you take that back and return that, because when you walk into a room with a guy and you say you’re from the Forward, we want him to know that you’re there to interview him and not to shoot him.”

He said to work for Mr. Lipsky is to believe you have the best job in the world, because Mr. Lipsky believes that being a newspaper reporter is the best job in the world. "Seth was my foreign editor when I was a correspondent in Asia for the Wall Street Journal and my first job for Seth was to go write a profile ofImelda Marcos. When I arrived at the hotel in the Philipines there was a telex waiting for me with three words: ‘Anecdotes, anecdotes, anecdotes.’

“Another lesson I learned from Seth was about sources. Seth was famous for knowing heads of state, finance ministers, opposition leaders, but I never really understood fully the breadth of Seth’s contacts until I was pursuing a story for him in southeast Asia on whether the Soviet Union had used biological weapons in the Vietnam War. “And as I was reporting, Seth said, ‘You really ought to talk to the former king of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk. And I said, ‘Seth, that would be good, but Sihanouk is in exile in North Korea.’ And Seth said, ‘Well, that’s right. I have his number. It’s 7.’ I said, 'What number?’ and he said, “Yeah, it’s 7.” He got it from a great journalist Nayan Chanda. So sure enough, I called the operator and said, 'I’d like to talk to Pyongyang, number 7.’ I got Sihanouk."

On the event committee were Henry Kissinger; Sir Harold Evans; Tina Brown; Schools Chancellor Joel Klein; Ira Stoll, editor and founder of futureofcapitalism.com; and newspaper publishers Donald Graham of theWashington Post, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., Arthur Sulzberger Jr. of the New York Times,and Mortimer Zuckerman of the New York Daily News.

Mr. Lipsky said that while he loves newspapers, what he loves most is pursuing a story. He entertained the crowd with a little-known tale of Zionist leader Theodore Herzl. "The truth is that his dream was to start a Jewish newspaper," Mr. Lipsky said. But after considering the proposition, he decided "to do something simpler, something easier. He thought, 'I'm going to start a Jewish state.'"