Rebecca's Interview with Max Frankel

Author of The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times

One morning I opened up my eMail & there was this charming "thank you" in response to my review of his memoir The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times. Max Frankel graciously agreed to an Interview.
 
Max :
Warm thanks for your generous and kind response to my book. It means a lot to an author to touch a reader so.

best wishes
 
Rebecca :
Many thanks for your kudos. I'm thrilled that you found my review of your book. As I wrote in a couple of Editorials on Authors - I am awed & amused when writers of the high word act make contact with me!

I would enjoy asking you some questions that cropped up as I was reading I've been interviewing authors via eMail & publishing them in our weekly eZine in the form of eInterviews. Would you have the time for that?
 
Max :
I'll be glad to answer two or three questions, but no lengthy interview please. I'm on to other things. Thanks.
 
Rebecca :
In composing your memoirs you must have had to examine this life you were given. Did you feel you were directed or simply took the opportunities as they opened up before you & which of those was the most challenging?
 
Max :
As my memoir suggests, in looking backward I find that I was, in a sense, "directed" by circumstance into a more-than-usual awareness of the world, into a close acquaintance with totalitarian regimes, with a refugee's appreciation of America and democracy and many other life-shaping experiences. But I also found that accidental encounters along the way shaped my choices of a career and my lucky opportunities.

Obviously, in retrospect, my chance to work inside The New York Times beginning in my sophomore year at college proved to be the most challenging and also most rewarding of my many opportunities.
 
Rebecca :
As you have lived much of your professional life during the Cold War "in the land of the enemy", how did that color your sense of being an American, your friendships abroad & your sense of being an outsider looking in?
 
Max :
The premise of this question is mistaken. I lived among Soviet "enemies" for only three years, and in Castro's Cuba for only six months. But they were crucial years in my career because they required me to study totalitarian societies at close range, and to examine their hold on -- and service to -- people whose underlying aspirations and human natures were different from those of peoples lucky enough to live in freedom.

I felt very American during those years, not the outside observer I later became living in the United States but as a critical student of our own values and society.

I believe I was helped in studying our own country by the fact that I had experienced, as both a child and later a reporter, societies with drastically different value systems.
 
Rebecca :
There has been much discussion of late about the advent of the Internet & its relation to the dissemination of news; because of your years in print journalism, what are your views of this new medium in that relationship?
 
Max :
There's no predicting the effect the Internet will have on print journalism. At the moment, it has both enhanced and injured the print press to a slight extent: enhanced because it has considerably improved the techniques of research and fact-gathering; injured because it has drained off energies, talents and some advertising revenue.

But the ultimate question is whether the Web will replace many newspapers, steal the bulk of their advertising and also their "readers" or at least force print newspapers to change themselves into electronic packages.

My guess is that new forms of distributing journalistic reports -- by wireless transmissions to electronic tablets and to print-out papers in the home -- will gradually diminish the number of successful printed newspapers. But the new forms will take time to mature and will never fully replace all printed newspapers and magazines.
 
Rebecca :
You wrote that you're on to other things, will that take the shape of another book or have other opportunities come to the fore & could you share those?
 
Max :
I'm concentrating now on my column in The Times's Magazine, on my reading, and looking ahead to other ventures that should not be discussed until they are fully formed.
 
Rebecca :
As you notice there are 4 questions rather than 2 or 3; as a journalist I'm sure you can appreciate my pushing for more rather than less & as an Editor I don't want to be accused of not getting the whole story or as much of it as I can!

Thank you for your time.

Do check out Max Frankel's memoir & my full review of it, which is our Spotlight this week.

(Published June 18, 2000)