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

Obituaries|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.