Recently, The New York Times paid its last respects to one of its own, Max Frankel, the kind of on-the-go newsman who once gave journalists a good name.
Monitoring ship-to-shore radio, Frankel delivered gripping coverage of the Andrea Doria’s sinking in 1956. In Moscow, he caught Russian president Nikita Khrushchev and US president Richard Nixon sparring over Communism. From Havana, he covered Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s new regime until it tired of his dispatches and ousted him. The 35,000 words he sent home during Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China won a Pulitzer.
Max also ran the newsroom from 1986 to 1994. That’s where I first glimpsed him in action. I was a former “copygirl,” newly hired on the business desk. He was a towering figure and the most decent of men.
I recall one notable act of his not mentioned in the Times’s official, 3,100-word send-off that surely deserves to be part of Max’s legacy for what it says about journalism’s profound ability to shape a news story, amplifying some events and burying others.
It is an almost forgotten act of radical honesty that happened after Max retired from the Times in 2000, in which he turned his reporter’s eye back onto the paper that had given him half a century of golden opportunities.
As part of a retrospective, the Times commissioned for the 150th anniversary of its founding (on September 18, 1851) Max combed through archives from World War II to take a fresh look at how the “paper of record” had covered Nazi plans to eradicate European Jews during the Holocaust.
The retrospective, delayed by 9/11, ran instead on November 14, 2001, as a special 56-page supplement to the Wednesday paper. Max’s blistering findings were presented over 10 pages without whitewashing or excuses, under the headline: “Turning Away from the Holocaust.”
They began with this opening salvo: “And then there was failure: none greater than the staggering, staining failure of The New York Times to depict Hitler’s methodical extermination of the Jews of Europe as a horror beyond all other horrors in World War II – a Nazi war within the war crying out for illumination.”
With 9/11 still dominating the news, there was no teaser on that day’s front page specifically directing readers to this overdue reckoning with the past, just a small parenthetical plug from the executive editor in his introduction to the section. But a large subhead above Max’s article flashed one key takeaway for those too busy to dig in: “Although editors knew of Hitler’s extermination of Jews, they mostly hid the story on the inside pages,’’ it stated.
And, man, did Max have the goods. “Only six times,” he reported, in all the papers from 1939 to 1945, “in nearly six years of war coverage did the Times’s front page mention Jews as Hitler’s unique target for total annihilation,” and “only once was their fate the subject of a lead editorial.”
On one rare occasion when the editorial page did bother to weigh in, he noted that the appeal called for measures that would save “innocent people,” sidestepping the word “Jew.”
WWII coverage by the Times had drawn scorn before, but here, a highly respected insider, the paper’s former executive editor, was rolling up his sleeves in search for answers.
“How could it happen that the war on the Jews never qualified for such highlighted attention?” he asked with anguish. Surely, he wrote, the lack of curiosity or concern had to be “the century’s bitterest journalistic failure.”
Nor did he give top brass a pass for somehow failing to grasp the depth of the Nazis’ depravity or scope of the crime. To the contrary, he catalogued the Times’s persistent drowning of dispatches that detailed “the systematic murder of the Jews” in “dense inside pages” under the tiniest headlines.
Gobs of ghastly information were scattered in rival papers and throughout the Times’s report – just not where most Times readers were likely to see it. As a result, Max wrote, “the ordinary reader of its pages could hardly be blamed for failing to comprehend the enormity of the Nazis’ crime.”
Looking for factors that might explain this dereliction of duty, he pointed to government policies that opposed taking in Jewish refugees from Europe and the reluctance of the paper’s Jewish publisher at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to see the Times branded as a “Jewish” newspaper, expressly championing Jewish causes.
Max Frankel's work took him full circle
WHETHER MAX volunteered for this painstaking assignment or not, it took him full circle. Struck by the line in the Times’s obituary that Max had worked hard in his teens to erase his foreign accent, I realize now more than I did then just how close he himself had come to perishing along with much of European Jewry and that there were few people better equipped for this truth-telling expedition than he.
As he shared in his lively 1999 autobiography, The Times of My Life: And My Life With The Times, his early boyhood was rooted in Germany, just as Hitler came to power. Rounded up along with 15,000 other Jews, Max and his parents were deported to Poland in 1938, and his father was sent to Siberia until after the war.
Max was nine and unfamiliar with the English language when he and his mother arrived in New York on February 22, 1940, aboard the SS Volendam. At high school, a teacher convinced him that working on the school paper would improve his English, and he became its editor. At Columbia University, he covered the campus for The New York Times and joined its staff after graduation in 1952.
Max’s principled ability to step back 49 years later at the other end of that long, illustrious career and take an unflinching look at an institution he loved and ran – and the occasional failings of his profession – is a measure of his character. Journalism will never be perfect, but honest journalism is always worth fighting for.
The writer, a reporter and editor in Connecticut, spent much of her career at The New York Times, including the year she worked as a “copygirl.” Duties included ferrying articles on command around the newsroom, covering car crashes and other middle-of-the-night happenings, and running out to buy hot dogs for a previous executive editor. Since 2015, she has written for multiple publications, including The Wall Street Journal and Tablet.