Max Frankel, former New York Times top editor, dies at 94

Former New York Times executive editor Max Frankel, a journalist who had integral roles with the paper for nearly half a century, died on Sunday in his New York City home, the newspaper reported. He was 94.

His tenure as executive editor between 1986 and 1994 led to the paper covering more city and sports news. According to a Times obituary, he also ushered in an era where diverse voices were included in the newsroom. He retired at the end of his executive editorship.

Frankel joined the Times in 1957 as a reporter covering the Soviet Union. He was charged with making sense of everyday people and their experiences under communism.

“Everything that was going on in Russia at that moment was of enormous interest, even going to the market or going to the movie house,” Frankel told NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling in 1999.

He mentioned how even though his reporting trip introduced him to the markets and the movie houses, his early days reporting in the Soviet Union acquainted him with leader Nikita Khrushchev more than anyone else.

Khrushchev “made it a point of showing up every two or three nights at an embassy party,” where foreign correspondents would pepper him with questions, Frankel said.

Frankel’s experiences covering tough and compelling leaders didn’t stop in Eastern Europe. He then went on to write stories about Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In 1973, Frankel earned the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for his coverage of President Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China.

He was born in Gera, Germany, on April 3, 1930, according to the Times. His family fled Nazi forces and landed in the United States in 1940.

In a 1999 interview with Diane Rehm, Frankel discussed what it felt like to immigrate from his European home and to find his “tribe” among Jewish people in the States.

“I come here and even in the midst of all this freedom, I’m expected to fight the battle for my tribe,” Frankel told Rehm in 1999. “And when Israel gets in trouble, I’m expected to stand up for them whether they’re right or wrong.”

In speaking with Rehm, Frankel revealed his views on objectivity in journalism.

“The ethic of the business is objectivity and fairness to all, but the inevitable experience that we have — the childhood loves and dangers and risks — they all go into your capacity to perceive, your capacity to judge,” he said.

His 1999 memoir, The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times, features Frankel reckoning with how his own experiences might color his journalism.

In the newsroom, he said he aimed to move away from the “stenographic notes of what the president said” and instead encouraged analysis. He did not encourage journalists to take a stance on what they believe or who they might vote for, he told Rehm.

After retirement, Frankel continued to write. In 2019, the Times published a Frankel opinion piece titled “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo,” where he alleged that the Trump campaign and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin “had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions.”

The Trump reelection campaign sued the Times for defamation in 2020. The Times fought the suit and it was dismissed in 2021.

Frankel married twice in his life, to Tobia Brown in the 1950s and to Joyce Purnick in the late 1980s, according to his Times obituary. He is survived by his children David Frankel, Margot Frankel and Jonathan Frankel.