Arthur Spiegelman

Arthur was such a towering presence that it’s hard to remember what it felt like not to know him. For me, the Before Arthur era ended when Dave Nicholson introduced us in the New York newsroom in the fall of 1974, calling him simply “our best writer”. No one argued with that, and I could see why as I watched him playfully knock out a story on The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s blockbuster biography of Robert Moses - “a book as long as the Bible about a man named Moses”, as Art described it.

Thanks to his contacts with the Old Left I met the Rosenberg sons, Alger Hiss and - in death - Paul Robeson, whose wake Arthur and I attended in Harlem. The budget bean-counters of today would doubtless be appalled by the decision to double-staff (or even single-staff) such an event, but at that time our managers were either approving or oblivious ... in Mulligan’s or the Cordial Bar.

Arthur, like his office (“smoking room”) door, was always open - to breaking news, to the newcomers he welcomed and nurtured, to story ideas, even to new computer systems or style rules. Another titan of Reuters, his friend Ian Macdowall, once quoted the Roman writer Terence: “I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.” It was equally true of Arthur, and we loved him for it. ■