Max Fränkel

In this memoir, The New York Times's Max Frankel tells his life story the way he lived it - in tandem with the big news stories of our time. Max Frankel started to write for The New York Times as a student at Columbia in 1949, and during the next half century he held just about every important position on the paper - foreign correspondent, Washington bureau chief, editorials editor, and executive editor. When The Times of My Life begins, Max Frankel is a boy in Nazi Germany; we experience the terror of his wartime escape with his heroic mother, their immigrant lives in New York, and a teacher's inspired decision that he could belatedly learn to read English if he learned to write it. And so Max Frankel found his career. His book, like his life, moves through Hitler's Berlin, Khrushchev's Moscow, Castro's Havana, and the Washington of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. It reevaluates the Cold War and interweaves Frankel's personal and professional lives with the era's greatest stories, from Sputnik to the Pentagon Papers, from the building of the Berlin Wall to its collapse, all the while tracking the tensions of managing the world's greatest newspaper.

"High Noon in the Cold War captures the Cuban Missile Crisis in a new light, from inside the hearts and minds of the famous men who provoked and, in the nick of time, resolved the confrontation." "Using his personal memories of covering the conflict, and gathering evidence from recent records and new scholarship and testimony, Max Frankel corrects widely held misconceptions about the game of "nuclear chicken" played by John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962, when Soviet missiles were secretly planted in Cuba and aimed at the United States." "High Noon in the Cold War portrays an embattled young American president - not jaunty and callow as widely believed, but increasingly calm and statesmanlike - and a Russian ruler who was not only a "wily old peasant" but an insecure belligerent desperate to achieve credibility. Here, too, are forgotten heroes like John McCone, the conservative Republican CIA head whose intuition made him a crucial figure in White House debates." "In detailing the disastrous miscalculations of the two superpowers (the United States thought the Soviets would never deploy missiles to Cuba; the Soviets thought the United States would have to acquiesce) and how Kennedy and Khrushchev beat back hotheads in their own councils, this book chronicles the whole story of the scariest encounter of the Cold War."--BOOK JACKET.