Earlier this year, Ms. Greenhouse retired from the Times after she took a $300,000 buyout from the paper. (She was one of the roughly 100 Times staffers that left the paper this year due to job cuts.)

In the interview, Ms. Greenhouse also has plenty to say about former executive editor Max Frankel. Back in the late 1980s, Ms. Greenhouse attended a N.O.W. rally in Washington; she did it without a press credential and she got in a lot of trouble for it!

She blames Mr. Frankel:

High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Max Frankel. Ballantine Books, 206 pages, $23.95.

All of us, even those born after he died, can still see and hear him, brushing his thick chestnut mane, punching the air with a finger, displaying his self-deprecatory wit at a press conference. In word-association games, the response to "charisma" is "John F. Kennedy." Though historians place him in the middle of the pack of Presidents—judging him too cold a warrior, timid on civil rights, ineffective with Congress, reckless and immoral in encouraging so many women to go all the way with J.F.K.—to most Americans he’s one of A.E. Housman’s "lads that will die in their glory and never be old." Imagining a second term that never was, biographer Robert Dallek declares Kennedy a statesman who "spoke to the country’s better angels."

Thurston Clarke agrees. In Ask Not, he claims that Kennedy, not Theodore Sorenson, was the "stonemaker and mason" of the inaugural address, one of the great orations by a 20th-century politician. To deny Kennedy full credit "diminishes his legacy and weakens his claim on the hearts and minds of future generations."

In his fascinating, almost hour-by-hour narrative of the run-up to the inaugural, Mr. Clarke unearths a gold mine for Kennedy fact-fetishists. Next to the dour minks of Mamie Eisenhower and Pat Nixon, he writes, Jackie’s Oleg Cassini outfit, a fawn-colored coat with sable at the collar and a pillbox hat, was a "more daring departure from the norm than her husband’s address." Among many other nuggets: daiquiri and Heineken were Jack’s beverages of choice; Nancy Hanschman (later Dickerson), the first female television anchor, once dated the man she interviewed at the inauguration; Kennedy wore long underwear so that he could shed his top coat on that frigid day; Rose Kennedy railed at her row-end seat because it kept her out of the photographs; Eleanor Roosevelt sat below with the diplomatic corps rather than be within shouting distance of Joseph P. Kennedy, whom she loathed; Tip O’Neill sneaked a crony onto the dais, to the chagrin of the President, who had micro-managed the event.

To establish Kennedy as the "principal architect" of the inaugural address, Mr. Clarke dissects every scrap of available evidence. He doesn’t deny that Mr. Sorenson submitted several drafts; nor that Kennedy used suggestions by Adlai Stevenson, Gore Vidal and John Kenneth Galbraith ("Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate"). But Kennedy’s dictation to Evelyn Lincoln (during a flight to Palm Beach on Jan. 10, 1961), in which he departed significantly from the text that Mr. Sorenson had furnished, as well as the evolution of his "Ask not … " master sentence from his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention to his inaugural address, has convinced Mr. Clarke that the President-elect wrote most of the memorable phrases he uttered 10 days later.

Mr. Clarke acknowledges that the intellectual intimacy between Kennedy and Mr. Sorenson makes it difficult to know who was responsible for which phrases in any given speech. The inaugural may not be an exception. Kennedy was an accomplished stylist; he certainly made many changes to the drafts he reviewed. But if it’s reasonable to assume that Kennedy was familiar with Cicero’ s admonition, "You should do something for your country once in a while instead of always thinking about what your country can do for you," isn’t it equally reasonable to conclude that Mr. Sorenson knew about it, too? Burned by charges that Mr. Sorenson had ghostwritten Profiles in Courage, Kennedy went out of his way to convince reporters that he himself had written the inaugural. With a strong will to believe (Kennedy, he repeats, "had not just dictated, but had lived the words"), Mr. Clarke pushes aside questions about the documentary record he left behind—or destroyed.

It doesn’t really matter. Ask Not provides compelling evidence that Kennedy, at his best, was a poet laureate of politics with few peers among the Presidents. As Mr. Sorenson has said, Kennedy "decided on every word and, more importantly, on every idea" for a speech that inspired a generation and continues to be quoted 40 years after it was delivered. That’s not an insubstantial legacy.

Kennedy’s reputation, of course, rests most heavily on his handling of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the subject of Max Frankel’s mistitled High Noon in the Cold War. For Mr. Frankel, who reported on it for The New York Times, the missile crisis was a "macho crisis," a standoff between two powerful men whose fear of weakness begat belligerence. Aware of the massive military superiority of the United States, Khrushchev remained restless and impetuous. Still smarting from the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the tongue-lashing Khrushchev gave him in Vienna, Kennedy failed to understand that his rival’s approach was "defensive, even isolationist." When he learned that camouflaged among Cuba’s palm trees were Soviet missiles with a range of 1,100 to 2,200 miles, Kennedy exclaimed, "He can’t do that to me."

The crisis, Mr. Frankel insists, did not bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. Kennedy and Khrushchev were responsible, rational, intelligent leaders, firmly in charge of their governments and determined to avoid a war. When his prediction that the Americans "will make a fuss, make more of a fuss, and then accept" the missiles came a cropper, Khrushchev ordered that nuclear weapons not be used even if Cuba was invaded. He didn’t challenge the U.S. blockade or retaliate in Berlin, as Kennedy feared, or threaten bases in Turkey. After he gave his impulse to take out the missiles a reality check, Kennedy rejected the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs for an invasion of Cuba. If we "do what they want us to do," he told Ken O’Donnell, "none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong." Instead, Kennedy ordered a blockade—actually, a "quarantine" aimed only at offensive weapons. A show of strength and determination, it provided time for negotiations. To close the deal, we now know, Kennedy promised Khrushchev that if the Soviets removed their offensive weapons from Cuba, he would withdraw Jupiter missiles from Turkey within five months. By keeping the swap a secret, he preserved the appearance of a totally triumphant United States. In 1962, Mr. Frankel recalls, he "never fully appreciated the extent of Kennedy’s statesmanlike restraint in steering his team to a diplomatic resolution."

Both leaders found it useful to argue that the Cuban missile crisis had been high noon in the Cold War. Embattled at home (he was forced to resign in October 1964), Khrushchev insisted that, almost singlehandedly, he had saved the world from a nuclear holocaust. For Kennedy, making the other guy blink while rescuing humanity from the brink was evidence of leadership at its best. Journalists, scholars and screenwriters, Mr. Frankel concludes, "gladly exploited such hyperbole, practicing a literary brinksmanship about the nearness of the brink to enhance the drama of their renderings of the affair."

Are they wrong? "By temperament and predicament," Mr. Frankel acknowledges,Khrushchevand Kennedy brought on the Cuban missile crisis. That their prudence, pragmatism and decisiveness helped resolve it—that they were determined, even if "conventional" war broke out, to step back from the brink—doesn’t mean that they could or would have done so under different circumstances. Accident, miscalculation and mischief often change the dynamic in a crisis, mocking the firmest intentions. How reliably prudent was the volatile, possibly manic-depressive Khrushchev? What if Castro, who was convinced that an American invasion was imminent, had launched a preemptive attack on the U.S. base at Guantánamo? What if the Russian commanders, who had already shot down one U-2 spy plane, downed several more? What if Cuban exiles had entered the fray? Would Kennedy still have bucked the Joint Chiefs and the hawks in the U.S. Congress—many of them in his own party? Can we be as confident as Professor John L. Gaddis, whose authority Mr. Frankel enlists, that the "macho" Kennedy "probably would have backed down, in public if necessary, whatever the domestic political damage might have been"?

There’s a consensus among those who’ve written about the missile crisis that Kennedy managed it with consummate skill and that Khrushchev, who may not have known when to hold ’em, did know when to fold ’em. But no matter what Max Frankel tells you, it was a close, close call.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

"We've had a marvelous weekend," said the silver-haired Mr. Raines, after guests requested the staff turn down a Rufus Wainwright piano ballad playing in the background.

The groom, known to be most comfortable in a fully stocked fly-fishing vest, wore a dapper white dinner jacket, a black neck tie and handkerchief, and black dress pants.

"I want to toast to my family, Krystyna's family, especially her parents, Henryk and Zofia, for entrusting her to me," Mr. Raines continued. "I will assure you and them that I understand what a lucky man I am, and I will treasure her and we will be together for the rest of our lives."

On Mr. Raines' arm was the new Ms. Raines. The former Ms. Stachowiak, a blue-eyed brunette who spent the early 1990's as a Washington correspondent for the English-language Warsaw Voice , wore strappy white sandals and a shiny, backless white silk gown that revealed the small curve of her abdomen and porcelain-perfect shoulder blades.

Times Sunday Styles writer Alex Kuczynski-who wore a leopard-print skirt and was there with her husband, Charles Stevenson-said the bride's dress was made by Monique Lhuillier.

"She's the same designer who made my dress," said the recently wed Ms. Kuczynski. "I loved it so much I had two made!"

Mr. and Ms. Raines met, appropriately enough, at The Times . In 1996, Ms. Raines-who recently left her job as the executive consultant at the public-relations firm Coltrin & Associates-brought a client, Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski, to meet with The Times ' editorial board, then helmed by Mr. Raines, the editorial-page editor, Women's Wear Daily reported in January. The couple live together in Greenwich Village, and have a second home together in Pennsylvania. Mr. Raines proposed during a vacation in Paris on Dec. 20, 2002.

Though Mr. Raines has been aggressively remaking The Times since becoming executive editor in September 2001, lately he's been behaving very much like a man in love. He recently invited his newsroom staff to join him on Valentine's Day for cake and chocolate kisses.

Mr. Raines is hardly the first to be struck by Cupid while ensconced at the newspaper.

"The Times newsroom has always been a very romantic place," said former Times managing editor Arthur Gelb, who wore a charcoal-gray jacket, gray cardigan and wavy-striped tie to the affair. "I've seen generations of editors and reporters find love in and outside the newsroom. I myself fell for an 18-year-old copy girl and later married her."

Asked to rank the Raines-Stachowiak marriage in the line of nuptials he's seen since coming to The Times in 1944, Mr. Gelb said: "In terms of joy? As high as you could place it. Howell and Krystyna are truly in love."

Besides the members of their families, the "regrets-only" party attracted an impressive roster of the city's power elite. Political guests included Senator Charles Schumer, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the latter of whom arrived with bodyguards, but sans necktie. Media heavies included NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and CBS anchor Dan Rather, as well as PBS interviewer Charlie Rose.

"I'm a sucker for love," said Mr. Rose, who was there with his girlfriend, Amanda Burden, the chair of the city planning commission.

The Times was also very well represented. Guests from West 43rd included publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., managing editor Gerald Boyd, assistant managing editor Michael Oreskes, editorial-page writer Brent Staples, Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson, and former executive editors Abe Rosenthal and Max Frankel. Well-known bylines in attendance included Mr. Frankel's wife, Metro Matters columnist Joyce Purnick, former theater critic and Op-Ed page columnist Frank Rich-now the paper's associate editor-national correspondent Rick Bragg and book critic Michiko Kakutani.

Also among the 300-odd of guests in attendance at the reception-which was held inside Ilo, the Bryant Park Hotel's sleek, modern restaurant (the name means "joyous state of being" in Finnish)-was Grady Hutchinson, who first met a 7-year-old Mr. Raines when she came to work as a housekeeper in his family's home in Birmingham, Ala.

Mr. Raines made Ms. Hutchinson famous through a 1992 Times magazine profile which also netted its author the Pulitzer Prize.

"The picture in The Times didn't do me justice," she told The Observer . "I'm prettier in person."

Ms. Hutchinson, who currently works in hospitality at a Fairfield, Ala., hospital, attended the reception with her grandson, a student in forensics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She was generous in her praise of the new Ms. Raines, whom she met when Mr. Raines brought her to Alabama to meet his family.

"I think she is a lovely woman," Ms. Hutchinson said. "He loves her, and I think she's good for him."

According to Ms. Hutchinson, Mr. Raines was always something of a romantic.

"As a child, he would always write little poems and stories," she said.

Around her, the party continued merrily. It had kicked off around 6 and was a happy if mild-mannered affair. Dancing there wasn't, but the conversation was loud and plentiful. The food was abundant. Jammed on the restaurant's two levels-which were separated by a perpetually blocked staircase-was a wait staff offering up mini crab cakes, salmon tartines, egg salad topped with caviar, and foie gras–filled wontons.

The guests dressed for a party, not black-tie formality. The men mostly wore dark suits and ties; the women favored cocktail dresses. Fish fashions were in evidence-a tribute to the groom. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who attended the party with his wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, is a fishing buddy of Mr. Raines', and he wore a red fish-patterned tie.

"Then again, all his ties have fish on them," Ms. Kennedy said of her husband's taste.

The bride and groom's wedding announcement appeared in that morning's Sunday Times , without a photograph.

Ms. Raines-who, like her new husband, was married once and divorced-spent much of the night meeting guests and trying gracefully to avoid stepping on her elegant gown. As the evening wound down, she was asked if she thought marriage might lead to a kinder, gentler era at Howell Raines' Times .

"I don't know about a new era," Ms. Raines said. "But I know this is going to be a happy marriage."

His departure from the venerable institution follows that of Mr. Rosenthal, his predecessor as executive editor and career-long nemesis. Mr. Rosenthal left last November, and moved on to the Daily News .

Mr. Frankel, 70, said he was unsure of what the future may hold for him. For now, he said, he plans to take the summer off, relax in Fire Island, and, according to his wife, Joyce Purnick, a columnist for The Times ' Metro Section, visit his 1 1/2-year-old granddaughter Julia in Los Angeles.

"I'm available for some longer-term projects," Mr. Frankel said. "I'm also going to be in touch with some young people again, which I haven't been since I was an editor, so I may want to do some teaching or mentoring somewhere, but nothing is set."

Mr. Frankel, whose contract with The Times would have expired at the end of the year, said he and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. mutually agreed to break the contract earlier than planned. "This was going to be the last year ... and I normally take a summer break," Mr. Frankel said. "We suddenly realized it was foolish to come back in October for two months, so, we just moved up the date." He added that he might take some individual assignments from the Times Magazine in the future.

Mr. Frankel's career at The Times started in 1952, while he was still an undergraduate at Columbia University and was hired as a staff reporter. His big break came in 1956, when he happened to be on night rewrite duty and news of a collision between two ships, the Andrea Doria and Stockholm , came into the Times newsroom. His writing of the next day's lead story earned the 26-year-old an assignment to the Vienna bureau to cover the Hungarian revolution.

Mr. Frankel later went on to be Sunday editor, editorial page editor and, finally, executive editor in 1986. During his term–generally considered the post-Abe Rosenthal glasnost period–he brightened the paper's staid voice and tried to make the pages more reader-friendly. After he left, he published a well-reviewed memoir in 1999, The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times, notable for its take-no-prisoners attitude toward Mr. Rosenthal. The chapter in which Mr. Frankel takes over the top job is titled "Not-Abe."

Mr. Rosenthal immediately retaliated with a series of combative quotes. The two men went into grizzled-warrior mode in print, having an open-air gun battle for anyone who cared to watch.

Of his most recent job at The Times , Mr. Frankel said it was time to give up his Word & Image column, in which he examined the media. "This column, as much as I enjoyed it, was quite a burden, so I feel quite liberated," he said. "It just takes a hold of your life, this kind of a column, obsessively reading the papers and worrying about what the next one will be about. George Bernard Shaw had a column and he gave it up in his 20's and he was asked why and he said, 'Well, it's like standing under a windmill, no sooner have you ducked one blade than the next one comes down.'"

The eight-page advertisement for Contentville that ran in New York 's July 17 issue describes an idyllic land, starting with the image on the first page suggesting a quiet Vermont town. The lengthy ad copy tucked inside promises a bounty of information–small-run academic titles, television transcripts or magazine articles, for the most part instantly downloadable–for a small price. The caption asks, "What Kind of Place Is This?"

We thought we'd log on to find out.

Contentville comes in two parts. The first attempts to pay the bills by selling stuff. There's nine categories of buyable content, including magazines, books, speeches and transcripts. Its highly touted Cross-Content Search simply means a search for Richard Nixon will pull up any item for sale that mentions Richard Nixon in its description, whether that is Merriam-Webster's Biographical Dictionary ($20.96), a transcript of the first televised debate between Nixon and John F. Kennedy ($1.95) or the Last Will and Testament of Richard Nixon ($2.95).

Of course, particularly with the popular historical documents (which tend not to be copyrighted), it's hard to imagine many people paying nearly three bucks for the former president's will when a search for "Last Will and Testament of Richard Nixon" in the search engine Google.com pulls it up for free.

Part two of Contentville consists of columns from a slew of experts about what they read and what they think is good. These reports can be interesting. Keith Olbermann, an anchor for Fox Sports News, for instance, ranks as No. 1 a sports periodical few outside the sports industry have probably heard of: Sports Business Daily , an e-mail and fax newsletter which collects the reporting and commentary of dozens of media outlets. Novelist Sherman Alexie writes, "What I look for in a magazine article is either humor or white-trash people killing each other." He urges Contentville readers to check out Rolling Stone 's interview of Julia Roberts, but to steer clear of books by Richard Ford because "one time he had the most arrogant blurb on the cover of somebody's first novel."

Concerns that Contentville's investors, which include CBS, NBC, Ingram Book Group, Microsoft and Primedia, might taint its critics don't seem to have materialized. Yet.

In the "Trove" section of the site, there's an eclectic mix of self-described "notable magazine articles," available free. There can be found a poem from the Winter 2000 issue of Poetry ; a funny piece on NBA player Vince Carter's growing popularity as an Internet search engine term from Toronto's quirky Saturday Night , and a touching piece entitled "To keep busy after my son Chris's arrest for murder ... " from a North Carolina monthly. Then there's "Un-Easy Bear" from Bowhunter , which begins, "After all those lean years, I asked for just one good evening of bear hunting–and got it."

But, yes, you guessed it, Bowhunter is published by Primedia, which publishes New York , which ran the eight-page ad. Said Brill Media spokeswoman Cindy Rosenthal: "Primedia and other partners have invested a combination of cash and services, including advertising, that may or may not include those pages."

Off the Record can be reached by e-mail at gsnyder@observer.com.

Max Frankel. Random House, 546 pages, $29.95.

One of the many pleasures of Max Frankel's memoir is his account of

the 30-year war he fought with A.M. (Abe) Rosenthal over who would become

the top editor of The New York Times . In the end, they both won,

each in turn. But the blood spilled along the way had a profound effect on

the reporters who worked for them, and on the unsuspecting Times

reader as well.

The Times of My Life alternates between personal history,

national politics and international diplomacy–but always, it works its

way back to Max and Abe, Abe and Max.

Both men began writing for The Times before graduating from

college, and neither of them ever worked anywhere else. Right from the

start, Mr. Frankel, a Columbia University man, exuded a sense of

entitlement, while Mr. Rosenthal, a City College guy, often seemed

uncertain about his own legitimacy. Mr. Frankel easily adopted the

patrician air of his mentor, James Reston, while Mr. Rosenthal never really

managed to disguise his Bronx roots, even after living abroad. Mr. Frankel

preferred charm, Mr. Rosenthal, intimidation. In their most important

battle, in the mid-70's, it was the Bronx street fighter who triumphed

over the tweedy diplomatic correspondent. From 1976, Mr. Rosenthal served

10 years as executive editor, until publisher Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger

Sr., pushed him aside in favor of his perpetual competitor.

Times aficionados will discover a feast of new information about

the inner workings of the paper–more than any other book has provided

since Gay Talese's landmark 1969 history, The Kingdom and the

Power . But even readers indifferent to newsroom gossip will find plenty

to enjoy, beginning with the riveting story of young Max's escape, at

age 9, from Hitler's Germany.

Crossing back and forth between Germany and Poland, he and his mother

were separated from his father and seemingly stranded in Berlin–until

his indomitable mother dared to present herself at Gestapo headquarters and

beg for two exit visas. Incredibly, she succeeded. Again incredibly,

Max's father survived seven years in So-

viet labor camps and rejoined his family in New York on Columbus Day, in

1946.

Mr. Frankel writes that it was his status as a refugee–his

"outsiderhood"–which made him such a good reporter, and

occasionally that perspective produces really surprising conclusions.

"I have wondered all my life about my refusal to condemn all Germans

and mere Germanness," he writes, after describing a postwar visit to

the town in Saxony where he grew up. "I do not forgive acts of horror

or indifference to them. But I cannot believe that evil resides in the

genes or culture of any one people. The Germans who acquiesced in the

persecution of the Jews had more to fear than the many peoples elsewhere

who paid no attention. If there were such a thing as ethnic guilt, how

guilty are we Americans who feed off lands seized from an annihilated

people and partake of the wealth created by slaves? "

Sometimes the surprising shades into the unlikely, as for example with

an odd charge lodged against Punch Sulzberger. In the middle of what is

generally a warm and accurate portrait of his former boss (perhaps the most

consistently underrated newspaper publisher of his generation), Mr. Frankel

says Mr. Sulzberger insisted on endorsing Al D'Amato for re-election

in 1986 because the "demagogic hack had wormed his way into the

establishment's favor, running petty but profitable errands for New

York, including subsidies for its Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose

grateful chairman was Punch Sulzberger." In fact, Mr. Sulzberger did

not become chairman until the year after Mr. D'Amato's

re-election, and in any case Federal funds have never represented more than

a minuscule fraction of the museum's budget.

Mr. Frankel's personal history, especially the story of his boyhood

in Washington Heights, is generally more interesting than his geopolitical

judgments. But the parts that keep the book alive right to the end are

about The Times . When Punch Sulzberger's lawyers advised him

against publishing the Pentagon Papers, Mr. Rosenthal worried that he would

be forced to resign in protest. Then "Abe began recounting his shaky

personal finances, and leading us all into weary, fearful

hallucinations." A day later, Mr. Sulzberger reversed himself again,

and Mr. Frankel and Mr. Rosenthal joined in a rare common celebration.

Mr. Frankel was Washington bureau chief during Watergate, and he

concedes that he bungled that story, that The Times failed to match

a series of scoops by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in The Washington

Post in the fall of 1972. "We were too sluggish even after the

White House was implicated," Mr. Frankel writes. But he never mentions

the fact that after he moved to New York the following year, and Abe

Rosenthal assigned Seymour Hersh to the Watergate story in Washington,

The Times had nearly as many Watergate scoops as The Post .

Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Frankel were almost equally talented

correspondents. But when Sulzberger put them into head-to-head competition

in 1973, giving Mr. Frankel control of the Sunday department, including the

Magazine, the Book Review and the Week in Review, while Mr. Rosenthal

continued to run the rest of the news department as managing editor, Mr.

Rosenthal quickly showed his superiority as an infighter. Mr. Frankel

writes: "I … had to contend with the hostility of an obviously

competitive Abe Rosenthal … [who] resisted giving staff writers time

off from the Daily to pursue Magazine projects. He even told political

writers that he did not want to read ideas in the Week in Review that had

not first appeared in his Daily pages. Although he commanded a third-floor

division of 1,000, he treated our eighth-floor platoon of 100 as a threat

and repelled bids for cooperation. For all these reasons I staggered

through my term as Sunday editor." But many of Mr. Frankel's

blunders were entirely of his own making. He never appreciated the editing

talents of John Leonard, the last great editor of the Book Review, and at

Arts and Leisure he replaced the brilliant (and beloved) Seymour Peck with

a second-rate apparatchik.

Worst of all, he never understood that the competition between the

Sunday and Daily cultural departments could play a pivotal role in

preserving the high standards of the newspaper. Barely two years after

assuming control of the Sunday department, Mr. Frankel decided that his new

realm was "illogical and expensive," and "without much

redeeming journalistic value"–quite an indictment of what the

Magazine and Book Review came to look like under his direction. Mr.

Sulzberger evidently concurred; in 1976, he gave Mr. Rosenthal control of

the whole news department as executive editor. Mr. Frankel's

consolation prize was to become editor of the editorial page. "I

recoiled with envy of Abe, contempt for editorial writing, and genuine

alarm that there was little appreciation for my strategic

thinking."

Mr. Rosenthal proved that his unpredictable passions, combined with the

creativity of his unofficial deputy, Arthur Gelb, made him a more effective

editor than Mr. Frankel. But his brutal management style and his

willingness to use the culture pages to celebrate his friends and punish

his enemies led to his undoing. " The Times is in the same

position as the Jews," Bob Gottlieb remarked toward the end of the

Rosenthal years. "It's expected to behave better than everybody

else." Too often during his reign, Mr. Rosenthal failed to live up to

that expectation, and in 1986 Mr. Sulzberger replaced him with Mr. Frankel.

The publisher told his new editor "to break in my son Arthur as the

next publisher" and "make the newsroom a happy place

again."

Two of the worst things about the Rosenthal regime had been its

treatment of gay employees, who lived in terror of public exposure, and its

neglect of gay stories–both of which the publisher had acquiesced in.

Animated by his own memory of an earlier Holocaust, and strongly encouraged

by the publisher's son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who shared none of his

father's antipathy toward homosexuals, Mr. Frankel quickly moved to

increase the paper's coverage of AIDS and the gay community. He also

made it clear that no one would suffer any professional penalty if he or

she chose to come out of the closet. It's appropriate that Mr. Frankel

devotes an entire chapter to these changes: They were easily his most

important achievements as executive editor.

At various points in his book, Mr. Frankel calls Mr. Rosenthal

"self-promoting," "arbitrary, "willful,"

"volcanic" and "Lear-like." He pays tribute to Mr.

Rosenthal's "brilliant, instinctive news judgment," but adds

that "the trouble was that Abe displayed his angers and affections in

ways that often terrorized subordinates.… His infatuations with people

and causes were often transparent. He boasted of keeping the paper

'straight,' but his measuring rod was not."

Those judgments are deadly accurate. The gentler Max Frankel produced a

cleaner, fairer but also slightly flatter newspaper. In his eight years as

executive editor, he proved that he was a much more decent human being than

his nemesis. But Abe Rosenthal–at a huge cost to his

subordinates–was actually the more remarkable editor.