Max Frankel: A One-Newspaper Man

In 1964 Max Frankel was a young man in a hurry. He had spent 13 years at the New York Times, first as a campus correspondent at Columbia University, later as a rewrite man on the night desk, where in 1956 he had become a newsroom hero for doing a quick and compelling job on the sinking of the Andrea Doria. He had served in Vienna and Moscow before going to Washington to cover the State Department, the White House and the CIA. So when the position of Washington bureau chief opened up, Frankel coveted the post. When he lost out to Tom Wicker, Frankel resigned. “But, Max, think of the platform,” implored James Reston, the Times’s Washington columnist. “Can you really give up the platform?” Frankel withdrew his resignation. This child of the Times could not bring himself to leave his family.

Family means a lot to Frankel, whose patience, industry and craft have now won him the Times’s top slot. Max was born in Gera, Germany, in 1930, and the Gestapo expelled him and his parents in 1938. While he and his mother angled for an exit visa to the U.S., his father was arrested by the Soviets as a German spy and offered the choice of Soviet citizenship or 15 years’ hard labor in Siberia. He chose the latter and could not join his family, by then settled in Manhattan, until the late 1940s. Max’s own brood comprises his wife of 30 years, Tobia, and three children.

The Times can be a contentious family, and Frankel has proved he can play good daddy or stern father. In his five years as Washington bureau chief, a position he finally did get in 1968, “Max was the most humane editor,” recalls one Pulitzer prizewinner who worked for him. “It was a happy shop. Then he became the Sunday editor [in 1973] and grew fangs.” The incisors, apparently, were retractable; as editorial-page editor since 1977, Frankel earned a reputation for being fair and open-minded. He tempered the paper’s traditionally liberal editorial stance while solidifying the page’s influence. As TIME’s Thomas Griffith once put it, he modulated the page’s “Ugh, Big Chief Has Spoken” voice, leavening its ponderous eminence with impish wit (“Helsinki, Schmelsinki,” proclaimed a skeptical editorial on the 1975 human-rights accords). Now the family man can look back and thank Reston for his advice. Max Frankel stands on the highest step of the Times platform, possessor of one of the most powerful jobs in American journalism.