Max Frankel was born in Gera, Germany, but he and his family fled Nazi Germany in 1938. They crossed into the Soviet Union, where Jacob Frankel, his father, was arrested on suspicion of being a German spy and was given the choice of Soviet citizenship or a sentence of hard labor in Siberia. Because the family's intention was to reach the United States, Jacob refused citizenship and was sent to Siberia. Mary Frankel and her son Max arrived in the United States in 1940 and settled in New York City, where Jacob joined them after the war. Max had decided on a journalism career by the time he entered Columbia College, where he became editor of The Spectator, the student newspaper, and campus correspondent for The New York Times. He graduated from Columbia as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1952 and earned a master's degree in American government from Columbia the following year.
As chief of the Washington bureau of The New York Times, Frankel wrote analyses of Washington and foreign affairs. He won the George Polk Memorial Award for "best daily newspaper interpretation" of foreign affairs in 1970, and in 1972 he accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on his historic trip to China. He filed 24 stories and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for international reporting.
He moved to New York in 1976 to serve as Sunday editor when the newspaper's daily and Sunday staffs were merged. The Sunday edition then had a circulation of 1.4 million copies and Frankel had editorial control over the Book Review, the magazine, the Arts and Leisure, and Travel sections. He is credited with restyling and enlivening the Sunday edition.
He did similar restructuring when he became editorial page editor in 1977. He supervised 10 to 12 editorial writers and worked closely with the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and then his son, Arthur Jr. In 1986, when A.M. Rosenthal stepped down as executive editor, the highest-ranking news position, Frankel succeeded him. Under Frankel's leadership, the Times retained its position in the top ranks of journalism, winning Pulitzer Prizes in each of his years at the helm. In 1994, when he was approaching 65, Frankel turned the reigns over the Joseph Lelyveld, and became a columnist for the Times Sunday magazine, writing on communications and the media. After he relinquished the column, Frankel wrote several books, including a memoir, The Times of My Life and My Life With The Times in 1999, which was a bestseller, and High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 2004.
