Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane long advised staffers to read the New York Times, including me. Many would give him quizzical looks owing to the newspaper’s left lean, but that was part of his point.
Not only would reading it daily place libertarian Cato readers in the other team’s “huddle,” Crane recognized that the writers and columnists at the Times were very smart even if incorrect about certain things. He felt the Cato staff would learn from some really bright people while seeing through the slant, plus arguably the best way to understand your own thinking is to read that of the opposition.
It took about fourteen years for me to turn Crane’s advice into action, but in 2017 I finally got a subscription. Crane was and is right. The New York Times is easily my favorite read of the day, and this includes the Wall Street Journal. There’s an obvious slant at times, but there’s so much information and so much learning.
Has the reading brought on indoctrination into the big-government fold? If readers can detect it, please show me where. If anything, reading the Times has enhanced my pro-freedom, pro-market writing. If this is doubted, please purchase and read my 2021 book When Politicians Panicked. An economic case against the disastrous lockdowns, the endnotes in the book are dense with Times’ citations. Information gleaned from the New York Times substantially improved my relentlessly critical case against government at all levels.
New York Times obituaries are one of the best, most interesting aspects of the newspaper. In May of this year, I read the one for former Times editor, Max Frankel. It was a very interesting look at a fascinating life, and the obituary referenced Frankel’s memoirs. The Times of My Life, and My Life with The Times was published in 1999, Frankel died in 2025, but it’s never too late to read an excellent, always interesting book. Regardless of your ideological lean, Frankel’s memoirs will be an education. You will think and see things more clearly.
Better yet, it might cause you to get a Times subscription. You should. As he not unreasonably wrote toward the end of his book, the New York Times “reaches the most influential, interesting, and powerful people on earth,” and even if you disdain its editorial lean, “the paper’s daily package of news cannot be despised.” Precisely. Read the New York Times because you’ll know more.
Frankel was born in 1930, which means he came into the world right as Adolf Hitler was on the way up. It also means Frankel had lived more at a young age than most people decades old had. From a fairly well-to-do Jewish family in Weissenfels, Germany, the Frankels owned a shop in the town and were soon enough targets. What’s important about Hitler is that there was no certainty in the eyes of Germans that he would last. Frankel recalled that “Many expected the Nazis to fail and disappear in short order; they had promised too much, it was said.”
Though Max and his mother and father knew that Hitler and the Nazis were out to kill them and other Jews, Frankel’s stance on the German people and the Nazis was interesting. Some will despise it. Describing his mother’s point-of-view, he writes that “If the Germans were to blame for Hitler, she would ask, weren’t the Russian people to blame for Stalin?” In Frankel’s own controversial words, “the Germans who acquiesced to the persecution of the Jews had more to fear than the many peoples who paid no attention.”
Frankel’s view of collective guilt is that it’s overstated. And then there was the previously mentioned expectation among Jews in Germany that the Nazis wouldn’t last. Which is an allusion to the young German in Frankel seeing the Nazis march under his window with neighborhood kids, and Frankel weeping. He wanted to be a part of what he could not, and that wasn’t yet known as evil. It will be interesting to know what readers think.
The staying power of Hitler eventually had the Frankels in trouble, and racing for their lives into bureaucratic exit barrier after barrier. They decided New York would be their destination. They got to the U.S. in 1939, but after Frankel’s mother maneuvered mother and son around all sorts of obstacles that could have left them at the mercy of the Nazis.
Writing about their arrival at the Holland Tunnel on the way into New York City, Frankel writes of “no customs, not even a policeman’s salute.” Frankel added that the utter lack of significance of the signage at the Holland Tunnel was for him “a sure sign, and source, of America’s greatness.” He was talking about freedom.
I’m sorry, but this is important. So many will reduce giddiness about the arrival of immigrants to some kind of American-style “liberal” sensibility. Yes, too much reading of the New York Times. No. It’s more giddiness about the meaning of freedom, what the United States represents to the rest of the world. Why would we ever forfeit our status, and towering stature?
As for Frankel’s father, he wasn’t so fortunate. Separated from his family amid the effort to escape Germany, he wound up in Siberia in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the war, and stared death in the face more than once. Max and his mother waited seven years for him to arrive. These are tough people. People who love themselves enough to get to the U.S. are not the same as those who don’t. Within a month of Frankel’s father’s arrival in the U.S., he had his own business. It was Jacob Frankel: Suits, Dresses, Sundries.”
For college, Frankel attended Columbia and was on the staff of The Columbia Daily Spectator. This is notable given his eventual hiring at the New York Times. The college papers are feeders. This became more of a thing when Frankel was running the newspaper himself, and under self-imposed and societal pressure to increase minority representation at the newspaper. His comment is that “blacks do not attend college in the same proportion as whites, and even fewer have shown any interest in working on college newspapers, an important training ground for print reporters.”
What makes the race and gender discussion in the book most interesting is how far it’s moved ahead, or back, depending on your point of view. Asked about alleged male overrepresentation in a Washington Post interview, Frankel replied “I mean that if you are covering local teas, you’ve got more women on Page One than the Wall Street Journal.” The outcry in the Times newsroom was more substantial than within the public more broadly, which is seemingly the point. Such a comment in 2025 would be a “cancelable” offense, but it was just Frankel saying that the nature of the reporting had something to do with the reporters.
As for Patricia Bowman, the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape in 1991, the Times did a story on her in which it named her (this caused newsroom outcry even though other media had already done the same), plus the Times reporters found that in high school she was thought to have “a little wild streak,” that she’d had her driver’s license “suspended ten times in the last twelve years,” and that she “was known around Palm Beach for having ‘fun with the ne’er-do-wells in café society.” The report caused conflict with Frankel’s staff, but the view here is that it’s exactly these truths missing from reporting today. Readers know what’s being alluded to. And it’s much more than one incident. No one rates total belief just because of their gender. If reporting today could be as honest as it was in the 1990s, we would all be much better off.
About “diversity training” seminars that editors and managers had to attend, Frankel writes that many were delivered by “shameless charlatans.” He adds that “Their insistence that white managers needed special instruction to appreciate the talents and cultures of nonwhites was, of course, the ultimate double standard. Yet to avoid being branded as racist, we had to humor these peddlers of pop psychology and sit through their lectures about racial habits, mannerisms, and patterns of speech.”
Despite the aggravations, Frankel was still an expressed fan of “affirmative action.” This isn’t a critique. My view, expressed in lots and lots of op-eds after the Supreme Court’s 2023 verdict abolishing affirmative action, was that conservatives and the courts had crossed the line. If businesses and universities want to accept or hire for reasons other than academic merit, let them. Courts shouldn’t be dictating. Let the markets decide the good or bad of racial preferences or not. Leave businesses and universities alone, and don’t hide behind “they’re taking taxpayer money.” By that chicken-s—t analysis, every business, home, non-profit, university, or organization in America must have its hiring practices dictated by politicians. No thanks.
Frankel isn’t around to ask, but tied his support of affirmative action to what he deemed practical reasons. He writes, that “When three black men were severely beaten by whites in the streets of Howard Beach, causing one of them to be killed by a car as he sped across a highway, we soon felt the shortage of black reporters to help monitor the city’s tensions and enough black editors to help shape our judgements.” Ok, fine, but were the black reporters any more attuned to the realities of Howard Beach and the people affected by it than white reporters? Again, my view is that private businesses including the Times should hire whomever they want, but at the same time don’t always find the explanations given compelling.
More interesting than the diversity challenges Frankel faced were his thoughts on what was going on in the U.S., and the world after WWII. Red-baiting was very much a thing at the time, and it forced President Truman to extract “loyalty oaths” from federal officials. Frankel mocks the pretense of such an oath, as if it would shrink spies taking the oath from trampling on it. Are you listening, “age verification” advocates of the present? What a waste of time. What implied blame and liability shifting.
Frankel makes the important point that Republicans were “crediting the testimony of former communists who now gained fame and fortune by confessing that they had trafficked in American secrets and Soviet lies.” Which is an interesting way of looking at Whittaker Chambers. Was he a hero for outing Alger Hiss, or just an opportunist?
Frankel reported at the Spectator of George Kennan’s views that “the ‘witchhuntings’ of communists had dimmed considerably our understanding of the Russian people.” Amen. He adds that the red hunters didn’t distinguish between people who had flirted with communism in the 1930s, and those actively trying to aid the Soviet Union. This is important. Everyone should know why. Stupidity is a rite of passage, particularly in a rich country like ours that can afford it. The obsessive focus on the right with universities as alleged incubators of life long left wingers is so trite and silly. People grow up.
Easily most interesting is Frankel’s commentary on Nikita Kruschev, which emerged from his time at the Moscow bureau for the Times. About it, please keep in mind that Frankel wasn’t a fan of a Soviet Union that had been so brutal to his father. In his words, “I despised the Russians and sided passionately with their victims.” Yet he saw a side to Kruschev that hasn’t showed up in other accounts of him, including William Taubman’s lengthy biography. Some will disagree, but Frankel sensed a true reformer.
As he sees it, Kruschev believed his disdain for the rule of Stalin. That while he talked tough to Ike, Nixon and Kennedy to please the hardliners, he knew that the Soviet Union was a failure that could not keep pace with the U.S. Frankel writes that “Behind his mask for bluster, I thought I saw the face of decency.” He quotes Kruschev as saying “You can’t whip people into paradise.” Yes, that’s true. And it’s something Arthur Laffer would say.
What’s sad per Frankel via McGeorge Bundy, is that Ike knew what Kruschev knew, that Kruschev’s bluster masked deep insecurity about the Soviet Union’s position vis-à-vis the U.S., but that Ike sadly made this argument “only to himself.”
Which speaks to the shame of the red baiting each way. Frankel blames Republicans for it, but he’s also clear that John F. Kennedy made it a campaign issue against Richard Nixon in 1960 despite understanding any “missile gap” substantially favored the U.S. Frankel would presumably say that Kennedy’s stance had emerged from the Republican rhetoric about Democrats losing China. It was all so erroneous.
While living in Moscow, Frankel saw up close just how backwards the Soviet Union was. He writes of how “a breakfast of tea and pumpernickel required the investment of at least an hour and a half,” and that cooking in the Moscow apartment (obviously one of the good ones) required a hot plate in place of a stove, and in which “the wardrobe was our pantry, the toilet our garbage pail, the bathtub our dishwasher, and its wooden drip board our drying rack.”
About the people, he writes that “every Russian child could see that where there was no property there was only poverty; things that belonged to everyone were tended by no one.” Crucial here, and notwithstanding all the “news” meant to portray the U.S. in a bad light, the people knew. Frankel writes that “no amount of hostile propaganda could cure them of their veneration for America, its music, clothes, cosmetics, gadgets.” Yes, precisely.
Which is a reminder of how much history continues to repeat itself. To visit China in modern times is to see intense passion for all things American. McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Nike and other American businesses are everywhere, yet Americans who should know much better fear TikTok and its ability to turn Americans against the U.S.? We’re being so ridiculous. The Chinese can’t even convince their own people to hate us, yet we fear an app?
Back to Kruschev, Frankel believes that he most of all knew. This cannot be said enough. He writes of how Kruschev would spout the genius of markets to his comrades, and that he “delivered these homilies at Party meetings like a child displaying a new vocabulary.” That’s one reason he allowed the American kitchen exhibit in the 1950s. In Frankel’s words as he describes Krushev’s thinking, “what was fashionable in clothes and furniture, comrades, had to be determined at retail counters, not in the bowels of some Moscow ministry.”
Kruschev even grasped (quite unlike every politician and economist in the U.S.) that “money costs money,” that large dams on the Volga produced electricity, but at the cost of what? Yes, he understood tradeoffs.
Frankel adds that Kruschev and Ike both thought their hard-line generals full of it. In Ike’s case, he knew from the CIA’s U-2 planes that there was no substantive Soviet missile threat, but “he refused to humiliate them [the Soviets] further by disclosing their findings.”
To Mao, Kruschev said “we did not fight to live worse after the working class won power.” Again, there was knowledge of just how bad things had turned. Frankel’s implied point in all of this is that while Kruschev didn’t have the power to turn the Soviet Union into Hong Kong, there was the chance for him to greatly reduce military expenditure if the U.S. had merely acknowledged (perhaps quietly) what was obvious, and ceased its own buildup.
Frankel writes that “I considered Kruschev the most robust politician of my time,” to which critics will reply that this came from the editor of a newspaper that had once proudly employed Walter Duranty. Yet about Duranty, Frankel is up front that he was “a brilliant but callous self-promoter” who “invested his great reputation in energetic denials of the brutalities with which Stalin ‘collectivized’ agriculture,” and “probably unworthy of the honor” of a Pulitzer Prize.
On the matter of the Soviet Union, Frankel sides with Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge was a reporter for The Guardian (U.K.) in the 1930s, and it's from Muggeridge that we can draw lessons. Old and new. While initially a true believer a la Duranty, Muggeridge eventually realized that the Soviets were lavishing food on the foreigners while starving their own people.
Muggeridge saw what a fraud the whole Soviet concept was, but that was the point. Frankel cites him as saying that “These fellows are going to spread their influence across the globe and finish you off by the end of the century.” He was wrong there, but with some insight. Assuming an eventual Soviet victory, he added that “you may find some solace in the fact that once they’re done with you, they will have everywhere implemented ‘the American way of life.’” The Soviet people were miserable. To win a Cold War that had Muggeridge contemptuous of both superpowers, the Soviets were going to have to emerge from isolation economically, and this would reveal itself in American-style living. Thought of another way, the only risk to the American way of life is a lack of freedom in the U.S.
Which should have Americans thinking some more about TikTok, and their weird paranoia about it. Like the Soviets of old, the Chinese people plainly love the U.S. and all that it stands for. It’s hard to see why they would invade at great cost of blood and treasure to implement ‘the American way of Life.” History books will mock the alarmism of the China hawks in the way they do the Soviet and Japan hawks now. As is the case now with China, Frankel writes that “Americans were simply not ready to be reassured.” What was true then is true now vis-à-vis China, and that’s really sad.
After Moscow, Frankel was assigned to Havana. About Fidel Castro, Frankel writes that “By frightening the pants off American conservatives and charming them off American liberals, he embarrassed us all.” That sounds right. How were both sides so easily duped?
More important, Frankel asks what the freakout was over the missiles in the first place. No doubt they were 90 miles away, but the Soviets were so far behind us. And as it was, the Soviets had to tolerate U.S. bases literally miles from their border, including in Turkey and Iran. Frankel writes that “there’s no significance in these trivial distances.”
Frankel’s consistent point is that the Americans knew their own missile superiority, and so did the Soviets. Rather than all this silly brinksmanship that included Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile crisis, Frankel concludes that a “much more reliable guarantee of survival from nuclear war could be had by sending several hundred members of each country’s leading families to live as hostages in the rival capital.” Yes! Thousands of times over. Come to think of it, the Chinese presently do just this by sending their kids to the U.S. for education, yet paranoid conservatives and liberals still can’t get out of their own way.
Frankel ultimately concludes that Kruschev’s saber-rattling “was way more likely desperation” as he tried to mitigate with words (a big missile gap) what he couldn’t with war materiel. He adds that the Soviet missiles in Cuba “did not greatly diminish America’s strategic advantage.” Which is his way of saying that the U.S. likely missed a chance to give him a “win” that would position him for the reform of the Soviet Union that he very much wanted. Instead, Kruschev was pushed out in 1964, and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who thought nothing like him. Opportunity missed? It would be interesting to know what Frankel’s critics would say.
About JFK’s assassination, Frankel recalls in interesting fashion that only the newspapers of Great Britain plus Commonwealth countries accepted the Warren Commission’s verdict. Even more interesting is his explanation for why so few accepted the official story.
He asks readers to imagine that “Kruschev travels to the Republic of Georgia in his southland and is shot, we are told, by an anti-Communist recently returned from a thirty-month defection to the United States. The Soviet leader is immediately succeeded by Georgia’s leading politician. Before he can be questioned and tried, the assassin is himself killed two days later in the arms of his jailers in a Georgian police station in full view of the television audience.” Based on the story told, Frankel asks if we would believe from the Soviet Union “the bland assurances about a string of crazy coincidences or would we conjure a Kremlin conspiracy?”
The most important theme that Frankel kept returning to, and that I believe he’s right about, is the belief that refuses to die on the right that we risk losing our freedoms to a global rise of left-wingerism. Why? Why would we on the right feel that the genius of freedom and markets is so debatable to the world that the world might turn on us? Frankel puts it this way: “The idea that the whole world is tilting from right to left and threatening to bury the Americans in a Marxist avalanche is a dangerous delusion.” Yes! We haven’t just won, but we’re winning. Despite this, we continue to act paranoid about college professors, China, Russia, young people, Ivy Leaguers, and everyone else whom we portray as eager to turn us and others like us communist.
Sorry, but no chance. Communism’s abject stupidity is too visible to hide. Our way is too obvious to hide. So let’s stop taking freedom as a way of protecting it.
The parts of Frankel’s memoirs that cover Vietnam will be more familiar, but still interesting. David Halberstam reported that “The farther from Saigon, the farther one gets from official optimism.” Lamenting a war he felt he couldn’t win, LBJ told Frankel “Ho’s outlasted me.”
About the Times’s slant, Frankel makes the understandable comment that “opinions and prejudices of the consumers of news inevitably affects producers of the news.” Left-leaning types read the Times, so why report and opine as though they’re not who they are? As for the density of Ivy Leaguers inside the Times, Frankel asserts that “It is the insulation, not the education, of journalists that threatens to dull their experience of life and blind them, as it blinds privileged politicians, to injustice.”
Before ascending to the top of the newspaper's masthead, Frankel ran the editorial page. My sense is that there would have been lots of good information here Frankel’s memoir had been two-part, longer, or if he’d just made them about his time at the New York Times?
More writing here would have been available as I wanted him to address Ronald Reagan every bit as much as he did Ike, Kennedy, Nixon, and LBJ. Instead, we find that the editorial page was anti-Reagan, disdainful of the Reagan economy (if he were alive, I’d like to debate him there), pro-deregulation (railroads, airlines, banks), pro welfare in return for work, and anti-Ted Kennedy based on Chappaquiddick.
In Frankel’s case, his stance on Israel got him in trouble with fellow Jews. With this, how interesting once again to have him around now in sentient fashion to explain his views on the past and present. He described himself in the 1980s as “defiant of the majority of American Jews who believed that a people so horrendously victimized could ever do no wrong.”
What about Jews at the Times? Even though the Sulzbergers were Jewish, some made more of an effort to hide it then, as was common. Frankel writes that Arthur Sulzberger “never put a Jew in the showcase” [think top editor position and positions] even after WWII. Obviously that changed in time as Frankel, A.M. Rosenthal and others indicate. Which is a happy sign. There’s a tendency to say anti Semitism is worse than ever. Read Frankel’s book to see why that’s not true.
Really, everything is better. It’s worth remembering. In addition to the more evident and accepted anti-Semitism that formerly prevailed, even among Jews, Frankel cites a Time Magazine description of homosexuality in 1966 as “a pernicious sickness.” As late as the 1980s, doctors were quick to put latex gloves on ahead of dealing with AIDS patients. They didn’t do the same with cancer patients.
Yes, say it over and over again that things are getting better all the time. Frankel knows why. Thinking about Lenin and Stalin, he writes that “you cannot preserve an irrational order with reason. Either smash disaffection or watch the order crumble.” The old ways are done, and they died due to their evident irrationality. This isn’t an ideological statement, but it is a call to the American right to open its eyes to the happy truth that freedom and markets have won. And it wasn’t even close.
Frankel’s spectacular book, though written by someone left leaning, will most improve right-leaning readers by showing them why everything isn't so awful. In doing so, it will hopefully encourage them to finally act like they’re in the end zone. And relax while there.
