John Lowenthal

John Lowenthal (1925-2003) was a 20th-century American lawyer, civil servant, law professor, and documentary filmmaker, who defended the name and reputation of family friend Alger Hiss almost all his life.[1][2][3][4][5]

John Lowenthal
Born(1925-05-14)May 14, 1925
New York City
DiedSeptember 9, 2003(2003-09-09) (aged 78)
London
OccupationAcademic
Known forLifelong defense of Alger Hiss
Parent(s)Max Lowenthal, Eleanor Mack (niece of Julian Mack)
Academic background
EducationColumbia University
Alma materColumbia Law School
Academic work
DisciplineLaw
Lowenthal helped defend Alger Hiss (here at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons)

Background
Father Max Lowenthal counsels Senator Harry S. Truman (October 20, 1937)

John Lowenthal was born on May 14, 1925, in New York City. His father was Max Lowenthal and mother Eleanor Mack, niece of Judge Julian Mack (for whom his father had clerked). He had two siblings David Lowenthal and Elizabeth (Betty) Lowenthal Levin.[1][2][6][5]

Lowenthal studied at Columbia College and Columbia Law School,[7] where he obtained his law degree in 1950.[1][2][5]

Career

Government service
Harry S. Truman, for whom Lowenthal worked briefly, with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Potsdam (July 1945)

In the 1940s, Lowenthal served in the U.S. Navy.[2][5]

In the late 1940s (overlapping with the Hiss Case), during the Truman administration, he worked in the White House, where his father also worked (unofficially–"in the basement"[8]), according to White House staff Stephen J. Spingarn.[9]

Academia

By 1978, Lowenthal had become a professor of law at Rutgers University.[2][5]

Later, he taught at the New School for Social Research and CUNY Law School at Queens College.[2]

Hiss Case
Alger Hiss (1950), lifelong friend of the Lowenthals

In 1949, Lowenthal volunteered to the defense during Alger Hiss's two perjury trials.[1][5]

In the 1970s, after the release of suppressed FBI documents about the case, Lowenthal, by then a Rutgers University law professor, published an analysis of what this new evidence revealed.[1][5]

Documentary

In 1978 while on sabbatical, Lowenthal made a documentary film called The Trials of Alger Hiss.[1][2][4][5]

Volkogonov

In August 1991,[10] after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lowenthal asked General Dmitry Antonovich Volkogonov, who had become President Yeltsin's military advisor and the overseer of all the Soviet intelligence archives, to request the release of any Soviet files on the Hiss case. Both former President Nixon and the director of his presidential library, John H. Taylor, wrote similar letters, though their full contents are not yet publicly available. Russian archivists responded by reviewing their files, and in late 1992 reported back that they had found no evidence Hiss ever engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union nor that he was a member of the Communist Party. However, Volkogonov subsequently stated he spent only two days on the search and had mainly relied on the word of KGB archivists. "What I saw gave me no basis to claim a full clarification", he said. Referring to Hiss's lawyer, he added, "John Lowenthal pushed me to say things of which I was not fully convinced."[11][12] General-Lieutenant Vitaly Pavlov, who ran Soviet intelligence work in North America in the late 1930s and early 1940s for the NKVD said that Hiss never worked for the USSR as one of his agents.[13] In 2003, retired Russian intelligence official General Julius Kobyakov disclosed that it was he who had actually searched the files for Volkogonov. Kobyakov stated that Hiss did not have a relationship with SVR predecessor organizations,[13] although Hiss was accused of being with the GRU, a military intelligence organization separate from SVR predecessors. In 2007, Svetlana Chervonnaya, a Russian researcher who had been studying Soviet archives since the early 1990s, argued that based on documents she reviewed, Hiss was not implicated in spying.[14] In May 2009, at a conference hosted by the Wilson Center, Mark Kramer, director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, stated that he did not "trust a word [Kobyakov] says."[15] At the same conference, historian Ronald Radosh reported that while researching the papers of Marshal Voroshilov in Moscow, he and Mary Habeck had encountered two GRU (Soviet military intelligence) files referring to Alger Hiss as "our agent".[16]

Vassiliev
Alexander Vassiliev.

In the Autumn 2000 issue of the journal Intelligence and National Security, Lowenthal published the article "Venona and Alger Hiss," which "claimed not only to show that ALES was not Hiss, but that all the VENONA cables were unreliable." (In 2003, U.S. Air Force historian Eduard Mark published a rebuttal, also in Intelligence and National Security that used VENONA 1822 to trace "ALES" as working for State (1945), with relatives (Donald Hiss, brother) also working in the federal government, had been a GRU agent since the mid-1930s (with Whittaker Chambers in the Ware Group, had attended the Yalta Conference, and had returned from travel to the US by 30 March 1945 – all descriptions which fit Alger Hiss.[3] In his 2000 article, Lowenthal had accused Aleksandr Vassiliev, co-author of The Haunted Wood (1999) with Allen Weinstein, of sloppiness. In July 2001, Vassiliev sued Lowenthal indirectly for libel by suing Frank Cass & Co., publisher of Intelligence and National Security, in the High Court of Justice in London. In January 2003, Frank Cass's lawyers offered Alexander Vassiliev to settle the monetary claim for more than 2,000 British pounds and promised not to republish the John Lowenthal article. Vassiliev rejected the offer. In May 2003 Frank Cass proposed to settle the case for 7,500 pounds, but Vassiliev rejected that offer, too. The trial Vassiliev vs Frank Cass started 9 June 2003 and concluded on 13 June 2003, with Judge David Eady presiding. Frank Cass & Co. prevailed on the basis of "fair comment."[17][18]

Hiss Papers

By 2003, Lowenthal had helped son Tony Hiss prepare the Alger Hiss Papers before offering them to the Harvard Law School's library.[19]

Personal and death
Oldest part of Chiswick, UK, where Lowenthal lived in later life (15th-century Old Burlington pub)

Lowenthal was a cellist: he made his last appearance in the year of his death at the Salzburg Music Festival.[2][4]

Lowenthal married Anne Lowenthal of Manhattan and Bridgewater. They had two children: Anne Lowenthal Hermans and James Lowenthal. His later-life partner was Patricia Lousada.[2][5]

In 1999, he was living at The Tides, Chiswick Mall, London W4.[20][21]

He died of esophageal cancer age 78 on September 9, 2003, in London.[2][5]

The Tamiment Library hold his papers, primarily about his documentary.[1]

Works
  • The Trials of Alger Hiss (Los Angeles, California: Direct Cinema, Ltd, 1981)

See also

References
  1. "Guide to the John Lowenthal Papers TAM.190". Tamiment Library. Retrieved 7 April 2017.
  2. Lavietes, Stuart (21 September 2003). "John Lowenthal, 78, Professor Who Made Film on Hiss Trials". New York Times. Retrieved 7 April 2017.
  3. Ehrman, John (11 December 2007). "The Mystery of "ALES": Once Again, the Alger Hiss Case". CIA Studies in Intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived from the original on January 9, 2008. Retrieved 7 April 2017.
  4. "John Lowenthal". The Sunday Times. 2 October 2003. Retrieved 7 April 2017.
  5. "Obituaries: 1947: John Lowenthal". Columbia College. January 2004. Retrieved 2 December 2017.
  6. "Max Lowenthal papers, 1910-1971". University of Minnesota. Retrieved 20 August 2017.
  7. "Columbia College Today". www.college.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2022-06-24.
  8. Spingarn, Stephen J.; Hess, Jerry N. (20 March 1967). "Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn (1)". Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. Retrieved 19 August 2017.
  9. Spingarn, Stephen J.; Hess, Jerry N. (29 March 1967). "Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn (8)". Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. Retrieved 19 August 2017.
  10. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2006). Early Cold War Spies : The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics. Cambridge University Press. p. 134. ISBN 9781139460248. Retrieved 27 August 2017.
  11. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (16 April 2007). "Hiss Was Guilty". History New Network. Retrieved 27 August 2017.
  12. Tanenhaus, Sam (April 1993). "Hiss: guilty as charged". Commentary. Vol. V. 95.
  13. Kobyakov, Julius N. (October 10, 2003). "Lowenthal and Alger Hiss". Humanities and Social Services Net. Retrieved October 25, 2007.; and:
    Kobyakov, Julius N. (October 16, 2003). "Alger Hiss". Humanities and Social Services Net. Retrieved October 25, 2007.
  14. Pyle, Richard (April 5, 2007). "Researcher adds to Alger Hiss debate". The Washington Post. Associated Press.
  15. The Vassiliev Notebooks and Soviet Intelligence Operations in the U.S video transcript of day 1, at 2:24:42 Wilson Center On Demand May 20, 2009
  16. The Vassiliev Notebooks and Soviet Intelligence Operations in the U.S Archived June 6, 2011, at the Wayback Machine video transcript of day 2, Part I at 1:43:10 Wilson Center On Demand May 21, 2009
  17. Klehr, Harvey; Haynes, John Earl; Vassiliev, Alexander (2009). Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. pp. li–lii. Retrieved 27 August 2017.
  18. "Alexander Vassiliev Papers". Library of Congress. Retrieved 27 August 2017.
  19. Lowenthal, John; Hiss, Tony (August 2007). "Alger Hiss Papers, 1911–1999". Harvard University Library. Archived from the original on 3 July 2015. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  20. Lowenthal, John (2 July 1999). "VENONA and Alger Hiss". Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved 8 October 2017.
  21. Lowenthal, John (13 August 1999). "Views of Alger Hiss". Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved 8 October 2017.

External sources
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