THE TIMES OF MY LIFE AND MY LIFE WITH THE TIMES: By Max Frankel; Random House; 432 pages; $29.95.
At the age of 25 in 1956, Max Frankel began a brilliant, four-decade career at The New York Times with an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time.Three months into his career, the cub reporter was working the "lobster shift," 8 p.m. to 3:20 a.m. on the rewrite desk, when the first panicky radio transmissions crackled in about the sinking of the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria. The Times' most junior reporter wrote a compelling story that rated a page-one byline and an Extra edition.
"Luck," is how he explains it now.
Four months later, when Hungary revolted against Soviet rule, Times editors decided to send Frankel to Vienna to help cover the story because, having been raised in Germany, he spoke German, and, heading for a possibly dangerous post, he was a bachelor (actually, he had just married, but they didn't know that).
Two months after that, the Soviet Union expelled the No. 2 man in The Times' Moscow bureau and refused visas to the next several senior reporters the paper nominated to replace him because they had written negative stories about the Soviets.
In frustration, The Times nominated Frankel. And since he hadn't been around long enough to offend Soviet sensibilities, he was accepted.
Less than a year into his career, Frankel had gone from covering neighborhood parades in Manhattan to military reviews in Red Square.
"Absolute dumb luck," he still says.
But it was also Frankel's talent as a "quick study," his ability to land on his feet in difficult situations -- learning Russian to cover Russia, Spanish to cover Cuba, wit and guile to cover Washington.
"That's the crazy business we're in," he says. "You get a story in the morning, and by evening you're an expert in it."
Frankel's career proceeded quickly after that, as he describes it in his new book, "The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times." From then until his retirement in 1994, he was The Times' Caribbean correspondent, U.N. reporter, White House correspondent, Washington bureau chief, Sunday editor, editorial page editor and executive editor. Retired now, he writes a bi-weekly column for The Times' magazine.
Along the way, Frankel has been in on the making of history -- President Richard Nixon's famous "kitchen debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro's revelations of his communist designs for Cuba's future, John F. Kennedy's agonizing over whether to risk war with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He has been courted by masters -- Castro pumping his hand and greeting him effusively as "mi amigo" upon their first meeting, Khrushchev waggling a friendly finger at him in Moscow briefings, President Lyndon Johnson giving him a personal tour of his bathroom, with built-in safe so he could peruse top secret documents while sitting on the toilet.
Heady stuff for a Jewish boy who fled Germany with his mother at age 10 just ahead of the Nazis.
"It's been remarkable," he says. "Especially to be there at the end of the Cold War to watch the Soviet Union collapse, when I'd seen it at its height."
One of Frankel's most compelling beats was Cuba, in the year after the triumph of Castro's revolution. Frankel brought his family to Miami in 1960, putting his pregnant wife and their 18-month-old son, David, in a garden apartment near the University of Miami and visiting them every other weekend from Havana.
From that assignment, Frankel provides a new perspective on why he thinks JFK made such disastrous decisions about Cuba. Kennedy's Cuba policies were "visceral, rather than logical," he says, possibly because of his visits to Cuba in the year before the revolution.
"He went not to study conditions there but to go whoring around Havana with Sen. George Smathers of Florida, a glib reactionary who, in his youth, had worked for and performed similar procuring missions for the senator's father, Joseph Kennedy."
Because of that, Frankel believes, Kennedy fell too much under the sway of hard-liners.
In adversarial situations, Frankel showed his mettle. In 1972, Nixon punished The Times for negative stories about him by allowing only one Times reporter on the plane on his famous trip to China, while other news organizations were granted several seats each.
Frankel responded by vowing not to sleep during the whole trip, and turned out 35,000 words of hard-hitting news and analysis in a week (enough to fill seven full pages of The Herald). It won him the Pulitzer Prize.
Throughout his book, Frankel speaks with searing candor about his colleagues (Arthur Krock, one-time Washington bureau chief, was "pompous"; Walter Duranty, who covered the Soviet Union for The Times, was "a brilliant but callous self-promoter" to the point that novelist and publisher Ward Just, in a review of Frankel's new book, detects the "whiff of the puritan about Max Frankel, and perhaps also the rustle of score-settling."
Frankel shrugs: "If it settles scores, so be it. If I'm going to write a book that's worth a damn, I've got to be honest."
After such a lifetime on the inside, Frankel might surprise readers with his assertion that one of journalism's most powerful attractions is how it lets him function in his most comfortable personal role as an outsider. An observer. A man who is secretly shy.
"I'm still shy. A press card is an incredible shield. A suit of armor. It allows you to pry, to ask impertinent questions."