Max Frankel wrote himself a note after Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, told him over lunch on July 15, 1986, that he would be the newspaper’s next executive editor.
Mr. Sulzberger was aware of the anxiety that had gripped reporters and editors under the leadership of the outgoing editor, his old friend A.M. Rosenthal. He wanted Mr. Frankel to make the newsroom “a happy place again,” as he put it.
Mr. Frankel titled his note “EXEC ED: how it happened,” and in it, he detailed what he had heard: “mission: further raise quality of product; restore calm; make place content and creative and fun.”
In the months that followed, Mr. Frankel set out to transform a newsroom that had been traumatized under Mr. Rosenthal, however much it had been driven to achievement. He wandered the floor each morning, stopping by reporters’ desks to praise their articles, which he had read the night before (he had the first edition of The Times delivered to his home in Riverdale in the Bronx each evening). He appeared at a party of reporters and editors and stayed well after the sun went down. He reduced the size of Mr. Rosenthal’s office, which he had thought to be ostentatious.
Mr. Frankel liked to talk about himself as the “not Abe.” And being “not Abe” is surely part of the legacy of the man who served as executive editor from 1986 to 1994, and who died this week at the age of 94.
But it is only one part of his complicated and nuanced career. Mr. Frankel, a refugee immigrant from Nazi Germany, started reading The Times in his newly acquired English in his teens. He began working at The Times at the age of 19, as the Columbia University campus correspondent, beginning a career of reporting and editing that took him around the world and ended at the top of the newsroom. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his coverage of President Richard Nixon’s trip to China the year before.
When I looked back over the history of The Times for a book I wrote in 2023 — I interviewed Mr. Frankel many times, and reviewed his personal papers — I was struck by how he stands as one of the last members of the Old Guard. Even as the paper entered an era of vast transformation, he was steadfast in his defense tradition: What news is fit to print. How that news should be delivered to readers. The idea that reporters should solely gather and report the news, and had little to no say in the decisions of their editors.
As extraordinary a reporter as he was, Mr. Frankel seemingly missed the early signs that those traditions were beginning to crumble — or, if he sensed what was unfolding, he resisted the tide. At his direction, The Times tucked away, on an inside page, its story when Bill and Hillary Clinton appeared on 60 Minutes during the 1992 presidential campaign, and Mr. Clinton (falsely) denied the claim by Gennifer Flowers, a cabaret singer, that she had an extramarital affair with the candidate when he was governor of Arkansas.
He thought it unseemly for The Times to cover the private affairs of a public person, a news standard that was even then shifting below his feet. “I’m quite ashamed for my profession,” he told The Washington Post at the time.
Mr. Frankel also dismissed the glimmers of the technological revolution that would transform journalism, skeptical that one day, something might replace the print newspaper. “I must apologize for what seems to be a daily gripe about some new project of the company that I deem to be counterproductive,” he wrote Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who had succeeded his father as publisher, about a plan to fax each morning the media news from that day’s paper to 100 business executives. “I think this corporation has gone mad,” he wrote.
Mr. Frankel set off an uproar after he directed The Times, in defiance of journalistic custom, to publish the name of a woman who had accused William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of raping her. The idea that members of the newsroom would confront an executive editor on a news decision would have been unthinkable in an earlier era.
But it turned out to be an early sign of the changing dynamics of American newsrooms. The whole episode disturbed him — particularly how members of the newsroom shared what had taken place in their meeting with Mr. Frankel with outside reporters. (He never thought he had made a mistake in publishing the name.)
But at the same time, in many ways Mr. Frankel was an editor ahead of his time — or at least, ahead of The Times. He argued in support of using the honorific “Ms.” on the paper’s pages in a note to Punch Sulzberger, who was publisher, in 1974: before that, women were identified as either Miss or Mrs., conveying their marital status. A decade would pass before the paper finally adopted the policy. Mr. Frankel appointed the first woman to run the National desk, Soma Golden Behr. He tried, without much success, to diversify the overwhelmingly white newsroom by instructing editors to hire one Black reporter or editor for every white hire.
Mr. Frankel deplored what he saw as the paper’s failure under Mr. Rosenthal to cover the emergence of AIDS and its sweep through gay communities across the country. He set out to change that, ordering stories about the epidemic. When the reporter Jeffrey Schmalz confided in Mr. Frankel that he was gay and had AIDS, Mr. Frankel asked him to bring his particular perspective to covering the epidemic. And he lifted the ban on using the word “gay” in the news pages.
It would be inaccurate to say that Mr. Frankel fulfilled Mr. Sulzberger’s directive to make the newsroom a happy place. Newsrooms are never happy. Mr. Frankel was a less mercurial boss than Mr. Rosenthal, but he could be just as fearsome. Senior editors learned to send deputies to the front-page meetings, rather than face the withering interrogation that Mr. Frankel would subject them to as they pitched their stories.
Like many ambitious journalists, Mr. Frankel was at once supremely self-assured and plagued by self-doubt. He usually considered himself the smartest person in the room — and he was often right.
“I know that Max Frankel is an up and down man as far as personal moods and outlook are concerned,” Abe Rosenthal, of all people, wrote to Clifton Daniel, the managing editor, in 1967. “But I think that his story from Des Moines today shows us again that he is worth whatever trouble we have to take with him.” Mr. Rosenthal didn’t describe the article, but wrote: “Basically, he is a fine, talented newspaperman and at his best really one of the best in the business.”
Indeed, throughout his career, Max Frankel displayed a capacity for grace and easy humor, as he sought — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — to uphold the standards of the newspaper where he made his life.
“I have run out of any way to say to you how superb your work is,” Tom Wicker, the renowned Times journalist, wrote Mr. Frankel. Mr. Wicker sent that note in 1968, and it addressed Mr. Frankel’s White House coverage. But 57 years later, it seems a fitting tribute to Mr. Frankel’s entire career.
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