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

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


Max Frankel in 1976, the year he was named editorial page editor. A calling in journalism led to global news assignments, associations with world leaders and the top position in The Times’s newsroom. … The New York Times

By Robert D. McFadden
March 23, 2025
Updated 3:33 p.m. ET

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.

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Mr. Frankel talked to the reporter Hedrick Smith at The Times’s Washington bureau in 1969. Mr. Frankel was the bureau chief and the chief Washington correspondent at the time. George Tames/The New York Times

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Mr. Frankel in 1959, when he was Moscow correspondent for The Times. American reporters there had to work under strict constraints by the Soviet authorities. Ben Martin/Getty Images

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Mr. Frankel took this photo while covering an exhibition of American products in Moscow in 1959. The event was the scene of the “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard M. Nixon and the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, which Mr. Frankel covered. Max Frankel/The New York Times

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Mr. Frankel, center, in the Times newsroom in June 1971 during the newspaper’s publication of the Pentagon papers. He was the chief Washington correspondent at the time. He and James Greenfield, the foreign editor, were speaking to the Washington correspondent Fred P. Graham, seated. Associated Press

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Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths. More about Robert D. McFadden