While the summary’s blunt language angered Johnson, the report, released in February 1968, became a best-selling book and contributed to a national debate on race, especially after urban riots broke out again that April with the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Almost a half-century after the report was released, Mr. Rosenthal expressed regret that its prescriptions had only been partly realized. “All kinds of desegregation have occurred in sports, TV, entertainment, literature, but not in housing,” he said in July in an interview for this obituary.

“What if the Irish or the Jews had been unable to move out of their ghettos?” he continued. “We would not be an integrated society. We would be an association of cantons, which is still true for black America.”

Mr. Rosenthal was deputy editorial page editor of The Times when he won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1982, for distinguished editorial writing. His subjects ranged widely, reflecting a boundless curiosity and intellectual breadth.

Despite a players’ walkout, he clung to the illusion of baseball as “an amiable, ordered world contained within the neat geometry of a stadium.” He challenged a generally tolerated prejudice against fat people. (“The social pressure against obesity no doubt benefits the general health,” he wrote. “What’s troublesome is that we are all so humorless about it, so relentless, so determined to punish the overweight.”)

On one day he could write about gun control: “There is no cogent argument for permitting free access to handguns. People with a legitimate need for them should not balk for a moment at sensible controls. But cogency is not the problem; it is politics.”

On another day he might comment on the Reagan administration’s social services agenda: “To say ‘no entitlements,’ or ‘let the states do it,’ or ‘let the private sector do it’ is a barely varnished way of saying ‘Don’t do it.’ And that is not a war against inflation. It is a war against the poor.”