Lucinda Franks obit

Lucinda Franks Morgenthau, Pulitzer-winning reporter, wife of Robert Morgenthau, dies at 74

She was not on the list.

Lucinda Franks Morgenthau, a longtime reporter and writer who was once the youngest woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, died Wednesday evening after a long battle with cancer, her family said.

The Dutchess County resident and widow of Robert Morgenthau was 74.

Robert Morgenthau, who died 10 days before his 100th birthday in July 2019, was New York City's longest-serving district attorney, spending 35 years in the role in Manhattan. He prosecuted some of the city's most high-profile cases and served as the inspiration for a district attorney character on the popular television show "Law & Order."

They were married from 1977 until his death, and had two children together.

They would often spend their weekends on Fishkill Farms in Hopewell Junction, a family-owned farm begun by Robert's father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., in 1913, and now run by Henry's grandson and Lucinda's son, Josh Morgenthau.

"She loved to walk through the woods there," said Lucinda's daughter-in-law, Emily Saul. "And it was a good place to write."

Lucinda Franks was born in Chicago and raised in Wellesley, Massachusetts. After graduating from Vassar College, where she majored in English, she got a job as a coffee girl at the London office of United Press International, where, as she says in the biography posted on her website, she dug up stories on her own time.

Eventually, she distinguished herself covering the violence in Northern Ireland, and was later transferred to the New York office of UPI.

There, she infiltrated the Weathermen, an anti-war group. One of their members, Diana Oughton, had blown herself up in a townhouse that had been turned into a bomb factory.

Franks and her assistant, Thomas Powers, with whom she insisted on sharing her byline because he had been so helpful to her, wrote a five-part series that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Still in her 20s at the time, she was the first woman to win that particular Pulitzer, and the youngest woman to win any Pulitzer.

She later worked for the New York Times, and wrote for other publications, including the New Yorker and the Atlantic. She also taught investigative journalism at Yale, Princeton and Vassar.

It also was in New York that she met Morgenthau.

In a 2015 interview with the Poughkeepsie Journal, Morgenthau recalled their first meeting: Lucinda, still working for UPI at the time, questioning him about then-President Richard Nixon's fundraising activities for a story on the Watergate scandal.

"She made me spell out all these names, and I said, this is the dumbest reporter, or the smartest," Morgenthau said. "After I read the story, I said she was the smartest."

But they remained strictly business associates for three years. It was only after Morgenthau invited Lucinda to a fundraiser for presidential candidate Jimmy Carter at the Upper East Side home of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that they began dating.

Lucinda noted the two had their differences, but were joined by love and respect, and grew together quickly.

Speaking after her husband's death, Lucinda said Robert "has steadied me over the years."

Franks for years continued writing and reporting, including a piece on bloody battles in Ireland and later an interview with first lady Hillary Clinton about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Through it all the couple worked and socialized with notables: President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan; Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon; playwright Lillian Hellman; Cardinal John O'Connor, archbishop of New York; socialite Brooke Astor; Senator Ted Kennedy; New York mayors, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani; journalist Alistair Cooke; author/journalist William Safire; author Bernard Malamud, and on and on. They lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side but kicked back in Millbrook and their homes in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts and at Fishkill Farms, the setting of Franks' 1991 novel, "Wild Apples."

Lila Meade has known Lucinda for about 15 years. They became friends because their daughters were friends. Their husbands also became friends, and the four would sometimes double-date.

Meade and her husband, Andrew, are the co-founders and, respectively, executive director and CEO of the Vassar Haiti Project, which has, among other things, built a school and clinic on the poverty-stricken island nation.

Lucinda spent more than a decade working with the organization. In April 2019 Lucinda and Robert Morgenthau were honored by the Vassar Haiti Project for their achievements in the fields of international social justice and literature.

In January 2019, Lucinda went on one of the project's trips to Haiti.

"She just wanted to see a different life," Meade recalled. "It's very hard to stare poverty in the face and feel compelled to do something... but she came back (from that trip) and said, 'I want to be a better person.'"

It was "a transformative experience for everybody, students and adults” Lucinda said afterward.

"As a journalist I’ve covered poverty all over the world, it’s almost predictable how it will look, the way people look — they are the forgotten people," she said. "I was kind of expecting that. But when I had to climb this mountain, I thought I would have to go by mule — it’s a vertical climb over gorges and cliffs — I put one foot in front of the other and made myself go. There were two young Haitians who are artists who got on either side of me to protect me. When we got to the top these villagers came out and they threw their arms around us and welcomed us in."

Franks wrote several books. Among them was "Waiting Out a War," about Vietnam deserters. Another was, "My Father's Secret War," about her dad's work as a spy in World War II.

And of course there was her memoir, "Timeless: Love, Morgenthau and Me," published in 2015, which highlighted her and Morgenthau's decades together.

Meade said what she loved best about Lucinda was that "she knew what fun was."

"She had a childlike zest for living," Meade said. "And she cared for Bob and loved him, and always made sure he was OK. You know how they say 'behind every great man is a great woman?' That's part of her legacy."