Times Journalist A Master Of Detail

David E. Rosenbaum, third from right, and his family on vacation in Vermont last year. (Family Photo)

David E. Rosenbaum was the kind of person who, without fail, would stop on the way home every Friday to buy a bouquet of flowers for his wife.

He was also the kind of person who would regularly rattle Washington decision makers with a hard-hitting analysis of the federal budget.

Rosenbaum, 63, died Sunday after suffering a brain injury during an apparent mugging Friday night near his home in the District. Just days before, he had retired from the New York Times, his professional home for 37 years. For all but three of those years, he was based in Washington, earning the kind of professional respect that most reporters can only dream of.

We all know that readers usually pay little attention to bylines. But reporters -- and a few specialists -- pay avid attention to the name of the writer at the top of story. After a while, you can discern a pattern in the reporter's craft. There are bylines that command respect, bylines that are unreliable and inaccurate, and bylines that are, well, simply mediocre.

"David E. Rosenbaum" was one of the gold standards of bylines, especially in the fields of economic and budget policymaking. He wrote with clarity and grace, without jargon or buzzwords. And he was clear-eyed and unswayed by the conventional wisdom of the day. You turned to his story knowing it would not be a waste of time. (If you were his competitor, as I once was on the budget beat, you turned to it filled with dread you had been scooped.)

In 1990, Rosenbaum shared the George Polk Award for his coverage of the battle over President George H.W. Bush's tax increase. Reading the coverage 16 years later, you can see a master at work. When the president released his budget in January, Rosenbaum detailed how he "proposed many of the same spending cuts Congress has rejected time and again" in a bet that the economy would improve and deficit forecasts could be met. When that bet failed and Bush was boxed into accepting a tax hike, Rosenbaum observed in November, "No one is even pretending that the changes will be much more permanent than a soap bubble."

Rosenbaum excelled in explaining the fine print in congressional bills, so much so that the New York Times for a period ran some of his articles with the moniker "The Fine Print" and an illustration of a magnifying glass. One memorable story showed how top officials at the Internal Revenue Service had figured out a way to sidestep new rules requiring that taxes be paid on the market value of free parking. He noted the agency officials had been scrambling "ever since it turned out late last year that the parking tax law, much to their astonishment, would apply to them."

Rosenbaum brought passion and deep understanding of complex issues to his work, said Philip Taubman, the Times' Washington bureau chief. "He could hold his own in jargony conversations with policymakers and then write prose that was lucid and clear so readers could understand it," he said.

"David always struck me as the consummate Washington journalist -- smart, erudite and highly skeptical in his dealings with members of Congress and their staffs," said Eric Pianin, who also covered the budget beat and is now a Post editor.

Rosenbaum was a genuinely nice person in a town filled with big egos and self-inflated reputations.

I first met him when I had just arrived in Washington in 1994, covering economic policy for Newsday. There are some big-name writers in this city who would not spend five minutes with a green reporter from a midsize paper, but Rosenbaum was always gracious and willing to provide insight and advice.

"I liked him so much and had so much fun chasing information alongside him that I had this bizarre reaction to getting beaten by him on stories: I'd find myself feeling happy for him instead of getting mad," said Dale Russakoff, a Post reporter who covered tax reform in the 1980s and who even adopted Rosenbaum's system for organizing notes.

Rosenbaum was a mentor to many reporters -- and he kept a lookout for potential talent. David Shribman, now executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, caught Rosenbaum's eye with an article he wrote in 1974 as a sophomore in a Dartmouth College magazine. Rosenbaum sent him a letter saying he should be a journalist -- and made time to have lunch with the 20-year-old at the height of the Watergate scandal.

It is a gesture Shribman never forgot. "There are scores of us who have spent the rest of our lives repaying what David did for us by doing the same for others," he said.

Robin Toner, a Washington correspondent for the Times, said he sent valentines every year to women in the bureau and he encouraged reporters never to take an assignment that put their careers ahead of their families. Rosenbaum doted on his two granddaughters, using a picture of them as the screen saver on his office computer.

"His family was the great joy in his life," Toner said. "He figured out the mystery of a full and balanced life in a profession that rarely seems to allow it."

"That is one of the cruelest things about this," Taubman said. After 37 years at the Times, "he could devote himself to his family. And the next thing, he's dead. It's just inconceivable."