Max Frankel

This article is about the journalist Max Frankel. For the philologist, see Max Fränkel ; on the architect see Max Fraenkel .

Max Frankel (born April 3, 1930 in Gera ; originally Max Fränkel ) is an American journalist of German origin. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner and was editor-in-chief of the New York Times from 1986 to 1994 .

Life

Max Fränkel was born as the only son of a Jewish couple from Gera; however, the family moved to Weißenfels six months after his birth . In October 1938, the Frankel were by the Nazis as part of the so-called " Poland Action " (Frankel's father was the son of Galician immigrants) to Poland deported. In early 1939, the mother was allowed to return temporarily to Weißenfels, where she learned that the American embassy in Berlin had given her and her son Max the long-awaited entry into the United States. She then brought her son back to Germany, but was only able to obtain an exit permit from the Gestapo in February 1940 . On February 22, 1940, Max Frankel and his mother arrived in New York City .

In the United States, Frankel studied, as he was now called, at Columbia University , where he also wrote for the university newspaper Columbia Daily Spectator . From 1952 he worked for the New York Times . In the course of his career, he has worked as a correspondent in the White House , as head of the New York Times office in Washington, DC and as a foreign correspondent in Vienna , Havana and Moscow . In 1971 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1973 he received the Pulitzer Prize in the international reporting category for his reporting on President Richard Nixon's trip to the People's Republic of China in 1972. He gained further fame through a question to President Gerald Ford during the second televised debate in the 1976 presidential campaign in which he Ford spoke about US relations with the Soviet Union and his attitude towards the CSCE Final Act . Ford's cumbersome answer culminated in the sentence "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and under a Ford government there will never be" ( "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration." ) ; When Frankel asked again, he also stated that he did not believe that the Poles or Romanians, for example, felt ruled by the Soviet Union.

On November 1, 1986, Max Frankel became the executive editor of the New York Times, a position he held until 1994. His successor as editor-in-chief was Joseph Lelyveld . In later years he published two books: his autobiography The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times (1999) and High Noon in the Cold War (2004) on the Cuban Missile Crisis .

Fonts

• The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times. Random House, New York NY 1999, ISBN 0-679-44824-1 .
• High Noon in the Cold War. Kennedy, Krushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ballantine Books, New York NY 2004, ISBN 0-345-46505-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ pulitzer.org: Prize Winner 1973 .
2. ^ PBS .org: Transcript of the television debate on October 6, 1976 .

literature

• Werner Simsohn : Jews in Gera. Volume 2: Jewish Family Stories. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 1998, ISBN 3-89649-260-8 .

Web links

• Max Frankel at Random House