Max Frankel who fled Nazi Germany as a boy and rose to pinnacles of American journalism as a Pulitzer Prize-wining correspondent for The New York Times and later as its executive editor, died on March 23 at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.

He found his calling in journalism, and it led to global news assignments and the major events of his era — the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union — and into the Moscow of Nikita Khrushchev, the Havana of Fidel Castro the Peking of Mao Zedong, and the Washington of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

Accompanying Nixon to China in 1972 on a historic mission to establish contacts after decades of estrangement, Mr. Frankel chronicled the president’s meetings with Mao and China’s premier, Chou En-lai, analyzed the news and, in Reporter’s Notebook pieces, took readers into the homes, factories and lives of a people who had been isolated since the 1949 Communist revolution. He wrote 35,000 words and 24 articles in eight days in Shanghai, Peking and Hangchow, and won the 1973 Pulitzer for international reporting.

Mr. Frankel’s achievements and innovations at The Times are detailed in an impressive and well-earned two-page spread in the March 24 issue of the paper. Space here does not allow a complete retelling. This publication encourages readers to seek out the obituary and read his inspiring story.

[As a one-time reporter and editor for a group of community newspapers, whose major assignment area covered not the world, but a mere one square mile in Westchester County, I was drawn to the truth of a statement made by Mr. Frankel to his staff, and proven by this writer’s own experience: “We address a family of readers whose trust and devotion we must earn anew each morning.” SMB]