THE TIMES OF MY LIFE.

• Author: McPherson, Harry C. Jr.
• Position: Review

THE TIMES OF MY LIFE by Max Frankel Random House, $2995

Max Frankel's autobiography is a combination of virtues.

One is the story of a refugee from Nazi Germany, saved by his mother's guile and tenacity in finding cracks in the wall of totalitarian anti-Semitism. One is the tale of an ambitious reporter's rise from re-write man to foreign correspondent, to Washington bureau chief, and ultimately to the top editorial job of The New York Times. Another is the astute recollection of many critical events and personalities in the last half-century. Finally, The Times of My Life is a mature analysis of the standards, methods, and purposes of modern journalism.

It can and will be enjoyed on each of these levels. One example of his ability to limn a major figure, in this case one he knew from close range:

"I considered Khrushchev the most robust politician of my time. He was the first Soviet ruler with the wit and courage to expose himself to his own people and to the world; the first to rule using his own name instead of a pretentious nom de guerre, like Lenin and Stalin; the first to call off class warfare; the first to leave his domestic enemies alive; and the first to deny that war with the capitalist West was inevitable. Even Khrushchev's demagoguery betrayed a peculiar honesty. When angered, he could bang his shoe at the United Nations and threaten to push Russia's abstract artists bare-assed into clumps of nettles. But he also told off the Chinese, warning a bellicose Mao Zedong that to hurry into the next world is not recommended, since no one has ever come back to tell us that life is better there."

For journalists and consumer-savants of the press, his account of the evolution of standards in news-gathering and writing is especially valuable. "The Times was slow to shake the old habits of `responsible reporting,'" he writes, "which often meant little more than deferring to officials in positions of responsibility." When Frankel and his mentor in Washington, Scotty Reston, drew conclusions from a variety of unrevealed sources, weighing these on a scale of probability fashioned by their experience, New York wanted to attach some legitimating phrase to them, such as "officials (or at least, `observers') said." It took persistence to break the habit. In time, "even our misnamed `paper of record' was reporting events from an independent vantage."

Independent, but not infallible. "Newspapers flatter themselves by pretending that they produce...