Rosenfeld was born in Berlin but his Jewish family fled Nazi Germany when he was ten. The family settled in The Bronx, New York City and Rosenfeld learned to speak English devoid of a German accent. After graduating from Syracuse University, Rosenfeld was hired as an editor at New York Herald-Tribune. When it ceased publication circa 1967, Rosenfeld went to the Post, originally serving as night foreign editor. When Rosenfeld moved to the Metro desk, Bob Woodward, recently discharged from the United States Navy and with no journalism experience, applied for a job and accepted a two-week trial without pay in August 1970. When the trial was up, Woodward had written seventeen stories, not one of which was deemed publishable. Rosenfeld told Woodward to get some experience elsewhere and come back in a year. Woodward frequently scooped the Post at his new paper, the Montgomery County Sentinel, in the Washington suburbs, and kept phoning Rosenfeld for a job. Rosenfeld hired him, right after Labor Day 1971. Rosenfeld fought to keep Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate story at the Metro desk instead of giving it to reporters at the National Desk. As noted by Roger Ebert in the 1976Chicago Sun-Times: "The Watergate story started as a local story, not a national one, and it was a continuing thorn in the side of the Post's prestigious national staff as Woodward and Bernstein kept it as their own." Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in her memoirs describes him as "an old-style, tough, picturesque editor, and another real hero of Watergate for us. From the outset, he thought of the story as a very big local one, seeing it as something on which the Post's local staff could distinguish itself. He controlled the story before it regularly made page one of the paper, keeping it going on the front page of the metro section." The Posts attention to detail and strict rules produced, in Rosenfeld words, "the longest-running newspaper stories with the least amount of errors that I have ever experienced or will ever experience." Woodward and Bernstein in their 1974 account of the Watergate investigation, All the President's Men, wrote Rosenfeld was "like a football coach. He prods his players... pleading, yelling, cajoling." Rosenfeld insisted on publishing a story about John F. Kennedy's extramarital affair with Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, then learned he was demoted in the Washington Star. In 1978, Rosenfeld moved to Albany, New York and became editor of the Times Union and the now-defunct Knickerbocker News. He retired in 1996, becoming the Times Union's editor-at-large. Rosenfeld writes a weekly column for that paper which is published by other papers in the Hearst chain. He resides in Albany with his wife, Anne Hahn. In the 1976 film All the President's Men, Rosenfeld was played by Jack Warden. In 2013, Rosenfeld wrote From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaper Man, a memoir of his childhood in 1930s Berlin under Nazi rule and his career path from the New York Herald-Tribune to the Washington Post.
