Max Frankel, Top Times Editor Who Led a Newspaper in Transition, Dies at 94

Max Frankel, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy and rose to pinnacles of American journalism as a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times and later as its executive editor during eight years of changing fortunes and technology, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.

His wife, Joyce Purnick, a former reporter and editor at The Times, confirmed the death.

Mr. Frankel landed in New York in 1940 without a word of English, a refugee in knickerbockers with European sensibilities for opera, art, languages and mathematics. But he found his calling in journalism, and it led to global news assignments, associations with world leaders, the pantheon of Pulitzer honorees and the editorships, successively, of The Times’s opinion pages and of its news coverage.

It thrust him, too, into the major events of his era — the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union — and into the Moscow of Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Havana of Fidel Castro, the Peking of Mao Zedong and the Washington of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

Accompanying Nixon to China in 1972 on a historic mission to establish contacts after decades of estrangement, Mr. Frankel, then chief of The Times’s Washington bureau, chronicled the president’s meetings with Mao and China’s premier, Chou En-lai, analyzed the news and, in Reporter’s Notebook pieces, took readers into the homes, factories and lives of a people who had been isolated since the 1949 Communist revolution.

He wrote 35,000 words and 24 articles in eight days in Shanghai, Peking (now Beijing) and Hangchow (Hangzhou), and won the 1973 Pulitzer for international reporting.

As executive editor of The Times from 1986 to 1994, Mr. Frankel presided over a newspaper in transition — financially, technologically and journalistically — after years of innovation and record growth in circulation, advertising and profitability. Despite readership gains on his watch, The Times lost advertisers and revenues in a long recession that began a year after he took over.

Instead of retrenching, and with the support of the publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Mr. Frankel expanded metropolitan and sports coverage; maintained world, national and business reporting levels; widened the reach of the national edition; introduced color to some sections; and changed the mission of the daily report, with a wider mix of news and feature articles, a less predictable front page and more interpretation and analysis of news that was widely available elsewhere, including on 24-hour cable news channels and on a nascent internet.

“I think Max’s legacy is that he changed the notion of what news is,” Tom Goldstein, a former Times reporter and a former dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said when Mr. Frankel retired in 2000. “It was much less tied to the events of the day.”

Mr. Frankel’s low-key management style contrasted starkly with that of his predecessor, A.M. Rosenthal, a brilliant but tempestuous editor who had ruled the newsroom for 17 years with innovative journalism that won prizes, readers and profits but also with relentless demands and stormy outbursts that exhausted the news staff and deflated its morale.

While some of his decisions were criticized, Mr. Frankel was widely credited with keeping a steady hand on the helm, raising morale, bringing more racial, ethnic and gender diversity to the staff and sustaining The Times’s traditional journalistic standards for fairness and accuracy.

Like most editors of his time, Mr. Frankel was a last shepherd of traditional print media. While computers had been used for writing, editing, transmissions and other news tasks for years, the vast technological advances of the internet that would change everything — websites, digital ads and subscriptions — were still over the horizon, and The Times, while eyeing the future, did not yet face the seismic challenges of the digital age. The Times made its debut online, with a website, in 1996, two years after Mr. Frankel stepped down.

Stocky and burgherish, Mr. Frankel looked like an Old World schoolmaster. Indeed, he brought a zest for learning to his work. He was a lifelong student of international affairs, politics, history and government; relished science and technology; understood statistics and budgets; spoke German, Polish and Yiddish; and was conversant with Russian, French and Spanish.

He also wrote with cleareyed realism, as in his Honolulu preview of Nixon’s China trip: “This is the improbable weekend, when the old Red-baiting American politician pays court to the old Maoist mandarins. This is the historic weekend, when the United States and China shed the habits of a generation of hostility and ignorance of each other. This is the enchanting weekend, when the very heart of the mysterious Orient will be laid bare and transmitted to American homes, live and in color.”

A Future Star

Mr. Frankel began writing for The Times, at 19, as a Columbia University campus correspondent and was hired as a reporter after graduating in 1952. He remained with the paper for the next 48 years — with time out for the Army from 1953 to 1955 — as a reporter and correspondent for 19 years, an editor for 21 years, and a columnist for The Times’s Sunday magazine for six years.

He started fast. On night rewrite, monitoring ship-to-shore radio reports, he captured the drama of the deadly 1956 collision of the liners Andrea Doria and Stockholm off Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. His account of seas flooding into the crushed bow of the Stockholm and lifeboat rescues that took 1,660 passengers and crew members off the listing Doria marked him as a future star.

He soon began covering political campaigns around the country, and later that year, at 26, he became a foreign correspondent, covering anti-Soviet rebellions in Eastern Europe. He fell into a pattern of Cold War reporting that made no pretense of objectivity. Like a combat correspondent touting his side’s war, he wrote unashamedly of “the free world,” of Polish and Hungarian “patriots” yearning for liberation but “crushed” by Soviet tanks.

In 1957, he was assigned to Moscow, where Western reporters were confined to a foreigners’ ghetto. Kept in line by threats of expulsion, they were reduced to relaying official Soviet pronouncements while injecting as much interpretation and skepticism as censors would allow.

Mr. Frankel was determined to break that routine, to expose repression and report sympathetically on Russian life. He found it all but impossible. Reporters had access to Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders at diplomatic receptions, but almost none to government officials or ordinary Russians. Travel was forbidden except to “open” areas, but visas took months, and the results were often disappointing.

He covered Van Cliburn’s renderings of Russian music; Boris Pasternak’s persecution after winning the Nobel Prize for his epic novel, “Dr. Zhivago”; and Vice President Nixon’s Moscow visit, with its famous “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev over rival social systems. But he lived in a cocoon of reporters and diplomats.

“Over a period of three years, my only real Soviet acquaintances would be Nikita Khrushchev, a few of his fellow Presidium members and a half-dozen Muscovites who dared to defy the unrelenting warnings against contact with foreigners,” Mr. Frankel wrote in a memoir, “The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times” (1999).

Mr. Frankel was assigned to Havana in 1960, a year after Castro overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. By then, Castro had dropped all pretense of aspiring to democracy. Mr. Frankel reported that Cuba had moved firmly into the Soviet orbit. Havana soon rescinded his working papers, and he left in early 1961.

After reporting briefly from the United Nations, Mr. Frankel joined The Times’s Washington bureau as one of the protégés — known as “Scotty’s boys” — of the charismatic bureau chief, James Reston. (Others included Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis and Russell Baker.) He was assigned to the diplomatic beat, covering the State Department and foreign policy.

In 1962, when Soviet missiles were detected in Cuba, he wrote many of the articles and analyses on a crisis that prompted an American blockade and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

As The Times’s White House correspondent from 1966 to 1968, Mr. Frankel covered the end of the Johnson administration, the political aspects of the escalating Vietnam War, the growing antiwar movement in the United States and President Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election.

In 1968, the publisher, Mr. Sulzberger, named Mr. Frankel the Washington bureau chief and chief Washington correspondent — dual titles that made him a reporter and a manager.

“I enjoyed the job of bureau chief, the license to apply myself to every sort of newspaper problem,” he said in his memoir. “How to train more blacks and Hispanics for reporting. How to get good photographs from dull congressional hearings. How to coordinate the coverage of legislation in Washington and its effects on the country.”

A Pivotal Memo

In 1971, The Times and the Nixon administration faced off over the Pentagon Papers, the purloined Defense Department history that revealed America’s secret involvement in the Vietnam War. Some lawyers for The Times opposed publication, warning that the publisher might face jail and the paper ruinous fines. Mr. Frankel wrote a pivotal memo that helped to change their minds, and it was later used in The Times’s successful defense of publication before the United States Supreme Court.

The Times lagged behind The Washington Post in covering the Watergate scandal. The bureau, Mr. Frankel acknowledged, was not focused on the police or local courts, where the case came to light, and it trailed consistently as disclosures of White House criminality led to Nixon’s resignation.

In 1973, Mr. Frankel gave up reporting and became an editor, returning to New York to take charge of the Sunday sections: The Times Magazine, The Book Review, Arts & Leisure and The Week in Review. In their separate dominions — Mr. Rosenthal as managing editor in command of the newsroom and Mr. Frankel in the Sunday department — they became rivals for the executive suite.

It was decided in 1976: All daily and Sunday news departments were merged under Mr. Rosenthal, who was named executive editor, and Mr. Frankel was named editor of the editorial page, succeeding John B. Oakes, the publisher’s cousin, who had been the editor for 15 years and was known for suffusing the opinion pages with his stridently liberal views.

For almost a decade, Mr. Frankel was the voice of The Times, writing its principal editorials, whose very anonymity conveyed the weight of the newspaper. He also supervised a dozen editorial writers, oversaw columns and opinion pieces on the Op-Ed page as well as letters to the editor, and conferred regularly with the publisher, whose views he largely shared and reflected in print.

Under Mr. Frankel, the pages took on a new tone and substance, challenging liberal as well as conservative dogmas. Editorials were less doctrinaire, more reflective. He replaced writers, bringing in outsiders from government and other fields to diversify a staff that had come mostly from the news department. But he recruited Soma Golden Behr, a Times reporter, to be the first woman to write editorials full time. He also held regular staff meetings to air ideas and test arguments.

“He set a constant example of integrity by insisting that all of us editorial writers, no matter how strongly we felt about an issue, had to give a fair account of the opposing view,” Jack Rosenthal, who was Mr. Frankel’s deputy, said in an interview for this obituary in 2007.

In 1986, the publisher announced Mr. Frankel’s appointment to succeed Mr. Rosenthal as the executive editor. In his first staff memo, he signaled a break from his predecessor’s era, saying “good fun” would be welcome in the newsroom again. It began with a surge of changes to diffuse authority and relax tensions.

He named new editors to news desks and gave them the authority to pick deputies, make major assignments and grant raises and promotions, all prerogatives Mr. Rosenthal had retained. While he controlled Page One, Mr. Frankel invited collegial discussions about the content and display of its articles and pictures, and he encouraged subordinates to make many news decisions without his oversight.

He also brought surprises to the front page. By featuring social and cultural trends and unconventional news — a rising hemline, a new country music sound and other “soft” news from the worlds of science, fashion or the arts — he added variety and lighter touches to the traditionally sober, politically-oriented page.

A year after Mr. Frankel became editor, the stock market crashed, touching off a recession and advertising cutbacks that limited Times budgets for most of his tenure. Advertising fell by almost half from 1987 to 1993, his last full year in charge; revenues faded from $1.64 billion to $1.53 billion, and profits fell from $160 million to $6 million. But circulation rose from 1.02 million on weekdays and 1.6 million on Sundays in 1986, to 1.17 million on weekdays and 1.78 million on Sundays in 1993.

Mr. Frankel hired and promoted more Black and Hispanic staff members, but acknowledged that racial diversification was fitful and slow. Women fared better. There were none on the masthead of news executives, or even in line to lead major departments in 1986. But during his tenure, women were hired in equal numbers with men, and filled more than a third of the professional jobs.

He demurred from same-sex marriage announcements, but lifted a ban on the term gay and assigned a gay reporter, Jeffrey Schmalz, to write about gay politics and AIDS (from which he died at 39.) The Times also began citing AIDS in obituaries as a cause of death, and in another bow to popular usage, began listing companions as survivors of the deceased.

The Times won 13 Pulitzer Prizes on Mr. Frankel’s watch. In 1993, a 10-part series, “Children of the Shadows,” examined the effects of racism and poverty on children and families in America. It did not win a Pulitzer, but Mr. Frankel called it the most important series of his editorship.

Mr. Frankel was widely criticized in 1991 when The Times profiled Patricia Bowman, who had accused William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of raping her in Palm Beach, Fla. As well as detailing her background, the article named her, called her an aggressive driver, said she had borne a child out of wedlock and quoted a woman anonymously as saying Ms. Bowan “had a little wild streak.” Readers and even staff members accused the paper of sexism.

Mr. Frankel called the uproar overblown, and said that identifying the accuser was justified because her name had been published elsewhere. But he said he understood why the article had been perceived as inflammatory and conceded that some details had not been necessary.

In 1994, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who became publisher in 1992, named Joseph Lelyveld, the managing editor, to succeed Mr. Frankel. After stepping down, he wrote a column, Word & Image, for the Sunday magazine until 2000.

Fleeing Germany

Max Frankel was born in Gera, Germany, on April 3, 1930, the only child of Jakob and Mary (Katz) Frankel, Jewish natives of Galicia with Polish passports. The family moved to Weissenfels, near Leipzig. The Frankels had a dry goods store, which lost half its trade when Hitler came to power in 1933 and ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses. Jews were later barred from professions, public places and citizenship.

In 1938, the Frankels were caught in a roundup of 15,000 Jews and deported to Poland. Separated in the chaos, Jakob wandered into Soviet territory, was arrested and sent to Siberia.

After two years of frustration, Mary Frankel obtained two visas for America. Mother and son crossed Europe and sailed from Rotterdam to New York. In 1940, they settled in a German-Jewish community in Washington Heights, in northern Manhattan. (His father joined them there after World War II.)

In months, the boy developed a passable English and eventually erased his European accent. At the High School of Music and Art, teachers were impressed with his singing, and he took leads in “H.M.S. Pinafore,” “The Mikado” and “Naughty Marietta” at summer camps. Others praised his art and math skills. English was his poorest subject, but his teacher, Elsie Herrmann, urged him to join her journalism class and work on the school newspaper, The Overtone. Eventually, he became editor.

Mr. Frankel was naturalized as a citizen in 1948. At Columbia College, he studied journalism, became editor of The Columbia Daily Spectator and was named The Times’s campus correspondent in 1949. While working full time as a Times reporter after graduating in 1952, he earned a master’s degree in government from Columbia in 1953. Drafted by the Army, he spent much of the next two years as a public information officer.

In 1956, he married Tobia Brown, an editor, writer and teacher. They had three children. His wife died in 1987. The next year, he married Ms. Purnick, The Times’s urban affairs correspondent and later an editorial writer, the metropolitan editor and a political columnist for the paper.

In addition to Ms. Purnick, Mr. Frankel is survived by his children from his first marriage — David Frankel, a filmmaker; Margot Frankel, an artist; and Jonathan Frankel, a broadcast journalist — and six grandchildren.

In retirement, Mr. Frankel continued to write book reviews, news analyses and magazine articles for The Times. Besides his memoir, he wrote: “High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis” (2004).

“Mr. Frankel brings it all back for those who lived it, but, more important, also for a generation who did not,” Richard C. Holbrooke, a former United States delegate to the United Nations, wrote in The Times Book Review.

Mr. Frankel also taught journalism and humanities courses at Columbia University and seminars on the press and the First Amendment at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

On Oct. 14, 1986, the day that Mr. Frankel took over as executive editor of The Times, he crafted a memo to the staff. It said:

“I bring only one commitment: that we remain a family newspaper in every sense. We are led by a family devoted to fearless reporting and peerless quality. We address a family of readers whose trust and devotion we must earn anew each morning. And though grown huge and multifaceted, we best serve those families by honoring our kinship to one another, in an exciting and creative but always collective enterprise.”