The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times

New York, NY: Random House, 1999. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. x, 546 pages Illustrations. A Note About Quotes. Index. Inscribed by the author on the half title page. Inscription reads: For Joan & David. With great gratitude for great times and loving wishes for only good times! As Ever--Max April 1999. Frankel was born in Gera, Germany. He was an only child, and his family belonged to a Jewish minority in the area. Hitler came to power when Frankel was three years old. Frankel came to the United States in 1940. He attended Columbia College, and began part-time work for The New York Times in his sophomore year. He received his BA degree in 1952 and an MA in American government from Columbia in 1953. He joined The Times as a full-time reporter in 1952. He was sent overseas in November, 1956, to help cover stories arising from the Hungarian revolution. From 1957 to 1960 he was one of two Times correspondents in Moscow. He moved to Washington in 1961, where he became diplomatic correspondent in 1963 and White House correspondent in 1966. Frankel was chief Washington correspondent and head of the Washington bureau from 1968 to 1972, then Sunday editor of The Times until 1976, editor of the editorial page from 1977 to 1986 and executive editor from 1986 to 1994. He wrote a Times Magazine column on the media from 1995 until 2000. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for coverage of Richard Nixon's trip to the People's Republic of China. Frankel is the author of the book High Noon in the Cold War - Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Cuban Missiles Crisis and, also, his memoir, The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times. Derived from a Kirkus review: An honest, bracing memoir from one of the nation's most distinguished journalists. This is a tale of escape, assimilation, and success. Frankel, retired executive editor of the New York Times, fled as a child with his mother from Germany on one of the last visas issued by the US Embassy in Berlin after the outbreak of war. The visa was obtained because of the efforts of his mother, a kind of human Roadrunner adept at narrow escapes, who faced down the Nazis in feats of courage and wicked wit. His father went east through Siberian camps; surviving, he finally escaped Soviet anti-Semitism and bribed his way to New York. The son, scarcely daunted, took up newspaper work at Columbia University and never looked back. This critical, self-critical, and wise story of Frankel's life will also be catnip to those who wish to learn more of the internal history of the Times. In sharp portraits of those with whom he worked (James "Scotty" Reston and Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger among them), Frankel reveals much of the newspaper's role in events at which he had a ringside seat: Khrushchev's Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Pentagon Papers and its resulting path-breaking First Amendment defense, and Watergate. While not everyone will sympathize fully with Frankel's justifications for all the changes that have overtaken newsroom culture, his own paper, or American journalism-changes for which he was in part responsible-few will tire of his stories and reflections about them. And everyone will gain from his clear explanations of journalistic codes of reportage and behavior. While much of his chronicle concerns his professional life, one also gets a clear sense of Frankel the son, husband, and father-and of the principles, intelligence, and personality that eased his way along. Informative, thoughtful, delightful.