By Charles Kaiser

March 14, 1999 | 7:00 p.m

The Times of My Life, and My Life With 'The Times' , by

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.