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| Robert L. Bernstein | |
Robert L. Bernstein, longtime head of Random House and champion of "political dissent, freedom of expression and relief for oppressed peoples as the founder of Human Rights Watch," as the New York Times wrote, died yesterday. He was 96. The Times called him "a man of eclectic tastes with a passion for good books and noble causes."
Bernstein was head of Random House from 1966 to 1990, building it into one of the largest publishers in the world. During that time, the company published a range of American authors, including James A. Michener, Toni Morrison, William Styron, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, E.L. Doctorow and Robert Ludlum as well as authors from around the world. Among them were the Soviet dissidents Andrei D. Sakharov and Yelena G. Bonner and Czech author and dissident--and future president--Václav Havel. During the Bernstein era, Random House made major acquisitions, including Crown, Vintage, Ballantine, Fawcett and Schocken.
Bernstein had started his publishing career as an office boy at Simon & Schuster, and eventually became general sales manager. After being let go during a period of layoffs, he was hired by Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf as sales manager. In 1990, S.I. Newhouse, Jr., who had bought Random House in 1980, fired Bernstein because of fears about falling profits.
In many ways, human rights was Bernstein's major calling. The Times noted: "For years he had traveled widely to investigate and expose rights abuses, lobbied governments, raised funds and led fights against the repression of writers in the Soviet Union and other countries. Starting in 1978, he had also founded rights-monitoring groups--Helsinki Watch, Americas Watch, Asia Watch and others--that were merged in 1988 into Human Rights Watch."
He led Human Rights Watch for 20 years, retiring in 1998. In 2011, he founded and was chairman of Advancing Human Rights.
Bernstein's memoir, Speaking Freely: My Life in Publishing and Human Rights, written with Doug Merlino, was published by the New Press in 2016.