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Max Frankel wrote himself a note after Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, told him over lunch on July 15, 1986, that he would be the newspaper’s next executive editor.
Mr. Sulzberger was aware of the anxiety that had gripped reporters and editors under the leadership of the outgoing editor, his old friend A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal. He wanted Mr. Frankel to make the newsroom “a happy place again,” as he put it.
Mr. Frankel titled his note “EXEC ED: how it happened,” and in it, he detailed what he had heard: “mission: further raise quality of product; restore calm; make place content and creative and fun.”
In the months that followed, Mr. Frankel set out to transform a newsroom that had been traumatized under Mr. Rosenthal, however much it had been driven to achievement. He wandered the floor each morning, stopping by reporters’ desks to praise their articles, which he had read the night before (he had the first edition of The Times delivered to his home in Riverdale in the Bronx each evening). He appeared at a party of reporters and editors and stayed well after the sun went down. He reduced the size of Mr. Rosenthal’s office, which he had thought to be ostentatious.
Mr. Frankel liked to talk about himself as the “not Abe.” And being “not Abe” is surely part of the legacy of the man who served as executive editor from 1986 to 1994, and who died this week at the age of 94.
But it is only one part of his complicated and nuanced career. Mr. Frankel, a refugee immigrant from Nazi Germany, started reading The Times in his newly acquired English in his teens. He began working at The Times at the age of 19, as the Columbia University campus correspondent, beginning a career of reporting and editing that took him around the world and ended at the top of the newsroom. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his coverage of President Richard Nixon’s trip to China the year before.