a celebrated incident following Richard Nixon's failed bid for the California Governor's seat in 1962. In an attack on the press (during which he also famously remarked "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more"), Nixon accused the Los Angeles Times of bias against him but singled out Greenberg as "the only reporter on the Times that fits this thing, who wrote every word I said. He wrote it fairly. He wrote it objectively. Carl, despite whatever feelings he had, felt that he had an obligation to report the facts as he saw them," in response to which Greenberg proffered his resignation from the paper. His Times colleagues convinced him that he had no reason to resign. In an article in Time his ethics were explained in terms of his background as a police reporter: Why Nixon did not also disparage Carl Greenberg is perhaps partly explained by Greenberg's approach to political reporting. "He covers politics," says a colleague, "as if it were some sort of crime." Greenberg was, in fact, a police reporter before turning to political coverage, and on the precinct beat he learned a valuable lesson: that a police reporter, like a cop, has no business playing judge. He brought this conviction to the political scene, first for Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner and since 1961 for the Times. "I feel," says Greenberg, "that even if I hate a man, I have an honest responsibility to my readers to report what he said and did." The incident continued to be discussed also as an example in the shift in political discourse in the US press in the 1960s. In a 2007 radio interview Tom Brokaw, discussing his book Boom!: Voices of the Sixties Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today'', noted that "Carl was the one that Nixon singled out on that infamous news conference in which he said you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. And the only fair reporter, he said, was Carl. So you know, rhetoric did change. The politics didn't operate within the confines of smoke rooms anymore. You couldn't go to a few bosses and get the story. It was spread out across the landscape, and he was having a hard time keeping track of all that." References External links Genealogical website for the Greenberg family 1908 births 1984 deaths Writers from Boston Jewish American journalists American male journalists Journalists