Robert Louis Bernstein (1923–2019) was an American publisher and human rights activist. He was an ardent defender of political dissidents and a leader in the development of the international human rights movement. He built Random House into the world’s largest publisher of general interest books.
Born in Manhattan, New York City, Bernstein attended Harvard College and completed work for a degree in American history in two and a half years. He received his degree only in 1944. He served in the Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1946.
After the war, Bernstein started working as an office boy with the Simon & Schuster publishing house and rose to become general sales manager by 1952. In 1956, he became joined Random House as a sales manager, becoming chief executive in 1967 and chairman in 1975. Under his leadership, Random House became an international publishing giant. Bernstein published many dissident authors, including Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Sharansky, Václav Havel, Jacobo Timerman, and Wei Jingsheng, as well as prominent writers William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, William Styron, James Michener, E.L. Doctorow, and Dr. Seuss.
Bernstein devoted his life to the defense of freedom of expression and the protection of victims of injustice and abuse throughout the world. He was the founder of Human Rights Watch, serving as its chair from 1978–98, and founding chair emeritus from 1999–2019.
Bernstein co-wrote the autobiography, Speaking Freely: My Life in Publishing and Human Rights (2016.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Robert L. Bernstein
Human rights are not a luxury, or something to be observed if they don’t conflict with some other priority, like peace or economic development. They are instead the key to achieving those things and anything else of urgent importance to the world.
—Robert L. Bernstein
Only intuition can protect you from the most dangerous individual of all, the articulate incompetent.
—Robert L. Bernstein
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