Former New York Times editor Rosenthal dies

WASHINGTON, May 11 (Reuters) A M Rosenthal, a former executive editor of the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, died yesterday, the paper said. He was 84.

He died at a Manhattan hospital two weeks after suffering a stroke, his son Andrew Rosenthal told the Times.

Rosenthal spent almost all of his 60-year career with the paper, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for international reporting and rising to become managing editor in 1969 and executive editor in 1977.

Rosenthal directed coverage of the paper's major news stories of the era, including the 1971 publication of articles based on the Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the United States was expanding the Vietnam War at a time when the U S public was being told otherwise, and the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974.

He retired in 1986 as he neared the mandatory retirement age of 65.

From 1987 until 1999, Rosenthal wrote a twice-weekly column for the Times, ''On My Mind,'' that dealt with a range of foreign and domestic topics.

He moved to the New York Daily News in 2000 where he wrote a weekly column until 2004.

REUTERS SRS RN1217