John Lowenthal
| John Lowenthal | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 14, 1925 New York City |
| Died | September 9, 2003 (aged 78) London |
| Occupation | Academic |
| Known for | Lifelong defense of Alger Hiss |
| Parent(s) | Max Lowenthal, Eleanor Mack (niece of Julian Mack) |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Columbia University |
| Alma mater | Columbia University School of Law |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Law |
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.
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.
Lowenthal studied at Columbia College and the Columbia University School of Law, where he obtained his law degree in 1950.
In the 1940s, Lowenthal served in the U.S. Navy.
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"), according to White House staff Stephen J. Spingarn.
By 1978, Lowenthal had become a professor of law at Rutgers University.
Later, he taught at the New School for Social Research and CUNY Law School at Queens College.
In 1949, Lowenthal volunteered to the defense during Alger Hiss's two perjury trials.
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.
In 1978 while on sabbatical, Lowenthal made a documentary film calld The Trials of Alger Hiss.
In August 1991, 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." 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. 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, 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. 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." 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".
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