Max Frankel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist who fled Nazi Germany as a child and covered some of the most critical stories of the 20th century, passed away Sunday at the age of 94.
Frankel passed in his home in Manhattan, New York. His son said he died from complications with bladder cancer.
A former leader at the New York Times, he ushered in the Pentagon Papers in 1971 into print. He covered President Richard Nixon’s China trip in 1972, earning him a Pulitzer Prize. He eventually moved on to lead the publication’s newsroom as their executive editor for nearly eight years.
Frankel arrived in the United States at nine years old as a Jewish refugee of Nazi Germany in 1940. Born in eastern Germany in 1930, he was expelled with his family to Poland by the Nazis in 1938 alongside thousands like his family. His father ended up in a Soviet gulag or labor camp, and his mother struggled to gain their exit permits before sailing to New York.
Between the years 1986 and 1994, Frankel served as the Times head honcho, paving the way for modern American journalism. His earliest experiences in life would impact his career as well as his life.
Years later, he said, “a piece of me never stopped being a refugee,” in an interview with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in 2011. The organization, along with others through the years, honored him in 2010 as one of the IRC’s “Refugees of Distinction.”
Frankel’s legacy
His lengthy journalistic career was foreshadowed by a struggle with written English until high school when a teacher assigned him nightly readings from the New Yorker magazine and put him on his school’s newspaper staff.
He will be remembered for his global news impact, associations with world leaders, and the major world events he covered. Among those included 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, according to the New York Times.
Frankel’s impact on the news industry will be remembered through generations.
