The family settled in The Bronx, New York City just before the Holocaust and Rosenfeld learned to speak English devoid of a German accent.
When a strike halted all New York papers for several months in 1963 he was offered a job in television, although chose to return until it ceased publication circa 1966.
[3] When Rosenfeld moved to the Metro desk at the Post, 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.
[7] Woodward frequently scooped the Post at his new paper, the Montgomery County Sentinel, in the Washington suburbs, and kept phoning Rosenfeld for a job.
"[2] 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.
"[9] The Post's attention to detail and strict rules produced, in Rosenfeld's words, "the longest-running newspaper stories with the least amount of errors that I have ever experienced or will ever experience.
[3][4] 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.
[3] The memoir detailed his childhood in 1930s Berlin under Nazi rule and his career path from the New York Herald-Tribune to The Washington Post.