Mostly Morgenthaus

...The author doesn't pose, much less try to answer, these questions...

...If he lacks a thesis, he does have an approach, and not a bad one—he is forgiving, even fond, yet not blind...

...Neither of them," the author says of his parents vis-a-vis the First Family, "ever felt secure," the deb party notwithstanding...

...got mixed up in Jewish wars, and later withdrew...

...cautioned his son...

...The resulting WRB, fundThe American Spectator February 1992 61 wise, who married out, did anything wrong...

...Like the rest of Our Crowd, Henry Sr...

...10 ed mostly from private donations, forced the anti-Semites in the State Department to issue visas and other travel documents to what by 1944 the author says was a "heartrendingly disappointing number" of people on the run...

...It also helps explain the political culture of American Jews in the last generation—what the fathers and grandfathers were afraid or ashamed or too slow to do, what they lacked the chutzpah for, a sufficient number of their children, even when intermarried, have not been afraid, indeed have felt impelled, to say and write and do for Israel and the Soviet Jews...

...Brave as his long march has been, the auThe DA, it is pointed out, nevertheless sits thor doesn't seem to understand, or want to on the board of Temple Emanu-el and is face, the connection between liberalism-infriends with Ariel Sharon...

...Why has it been only in the last thirty or forty years that Our Crowd, and after it the great-grandchildren of the Lower East Siders, have gone in for these cures, especially intermarriage, in such a big way...

...His marriage to Ruth Schachter, he says truly and with pride, was "a drastic departure...

...Exceptions like the author of this book furnish the nicest proof of the rule...

...Surely the experience of fighting in Patton's 3rd Army also helped...

...As for Henry Sr., though he gained the fortune that eluded Lazarus, was embraced by Our Crowd, and became ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, only his own son's fame eased the disappointment and bitterness of his old age...

...It was more than a matter of Our Crowd's bacon, Christmas trees, and Easter bunnies...

...Exceptionally for an American Jew of his age and class, Henry Morgenthau III has no reason to be ashamed of his father's role...

...This was late for someone who aimed to join Our Crowd, that interlocking in-group of families like the Seligmanns and Lehmans, Loebs and Wertheims, Goldmans and Sachses, whose founders had crossed the ocean and made their first piles before the guns went off at Fort Sumter...

...Not only is he married to a Jewish woman, but one who comes from Poland, a match as rare...

...So the old man sent his son to Exeter, where he was "miserable," set him up as a gentleman farmer in Dutchess County, where he lost money growing apples and was Governor Roosevelt's neighbor, and shelled out for the latter's presidential campaign...

...made good...

...I cannot recall ever having a serious discussion with my father about Jewish matters," says Henry III, yet it may have been his father's challenge to FDR and defiance of Henry Sr., both times on the topic of the Jews, that gave Henry III a better angle on that "birth defect...

...in the good old days of Our Crowd as a solar eclipse...

...As the author says, "It was a kind of birth defect that could not be eradicated butwith proper treatment could be overcome, if not in this generation then probably in the next...

...On balance, Henry Jr...

...Granted, he didn't ask the commanderin-chief to order the bombing of Auschwitz...

...was periodically knocked out by migraines...

...They should be...

...D 6 6 on't have anything to do with the Jews...

...the Jews chronically melt away...

...Which is not to say that he so much as hints that those of his friends and relatives who chose other...

...He also went out of his way to try to help his fellow Jews...

...Henry Morgenthau the Third's great-grandfather Lazarus stepped off the boat with his wife and dozen offspring in 1866...

...The Morgenthaus therefore belong securely in the red-hot heart 'of the allbut-extinct American-Jewish-German nobility...

...But his few years in cahoots with the Zionists were important to Israel at its birth, giving him perhaps his least complicated, most autonomous feeling of accomplishment and marking a path for his own son, the author...

...Maybe when one of Henry III realizes how typical his exalted them brings the history of the dynasty up to family is, and how badly some liberal shib- date, he or she will check out that link...

...Will visitors be apprised of this history...

...it was, and is, just enough to enable its creator and his seed to do something more useful than work for a living...

...scourge of BCCI, has intermarried twice...

...That something, that "religion," was to be "service to democracy," writes the author...

...Furthermore, he has seen to it that their children got the basic education in Judaism that he didn't_ These choices followed on andsharpened what he calls his "experience of Jewish rebirth," itself a reaction to the Holocaust, the rise of Israel, and the "malaise" his parents imbued him with at an early age in the face of all things Jewish...

...faintly resembled Joseph Kennedy...

...As soon as Henry Sr...

...Henry Sr., having perhaps exceeded his instructions, was recalled and scapegoated by Wilson...

...Henry Sr...

...had to step in before Saddam destroyed the Kurds...

...about half had wedded Chris- species in America, it's because of intertians...

...For where Henry Sr...

...It is important to note—Henry III doesn't—that this fortune was a middling one...

...The National Holocaust Memorial opens on the Mall this year...

...Already in Mannheim, Lazarus had uncovered his head, shaved his beard, and joined the Reform temple, a mock church...

...Indeed he is proud of it...

...boleths and Jewish survival go together in "Of Grandpa Morgenthau's twelve grand- the Diaspora...

...By the time I came into the world," he writes, "all significant vestiges of ethnicity in my family had been thoroughly camouflaged...

...Yet Henry Jr...

...This did not stop him from being favorably impressed by the muscular, tanned Jews he met in Zion, and aiding them with that gold shipment...

...Like his brother, action and what he calls the "dissolution" the author is a Democrat and a liberal, as of American Jewry...

...A social-archaeological dig," he calls it...

...Yet according to their son, the marriage of Henry Jr...

...His father had migraines, and the author when young had stomach aches...

...Of the Sephardi Jews who upset Peter Stuyvesant by settling in New Amsterdam, there's hardly a living trace...

...could be courageous or shy, he could be superb or dim, as, for example, when he hadn't a clue that Harry Dexter White, one of his Jewish lieutenants at Treasury, was probably working for Stalin...

...With such a father and FDR as a boss, no wonder Henry Jr...

...As he is of the guts it required to promote his unwise plan to de-industrialize Germany after the war, and the fundraising he organized for Israel after Harry Truman let him go and he agreed to head the United Jewish Appeal...

...The author may be aware that social and economic success in the New World has been the undoing of his fellow Jews...

...deplored Jewish nationalism, apprehending it, in his grandson's words, as a "renunciation of newly won rights and acceptance" in America...

...A scion of this family, the author is 74 years old and has made some exceptional choices...

...Most of these Jews knew only enough about being Jewish to suffer privately from it...

...And indeed, besides tapping his memories and those of his relatives, he has traveled to Bavaria to rummage in the Mannheim archives and rub moss off gravestones, interviewed people who worked for his father at the Treasury Department, had Eleanor Roosevelt's letters to his mother deciphered, read the FBI dossiers on Harry Dexter White, and sifted through his grandfather's papers in the Library of Congress and his father's 900-volume, diary at the FDR Library...

...He does make it plain with some charming insider stories and memories that his childhood was spent almost entirely with the other boys and girls of Our Crowd in the plush ghetto of the Upper West Side, from which excursions were mounted to the Dutchess County farm, Deerfield Academy, and, when FDR moved into it, the White House...

...It was as if he were heeding Wilson's advice to his father before Henry Sr...

...Is it because America until the last generation wasn't all that accepting...

...It wasn't in the Rockefeller or Kennedy or Guggenheim league...

...True, the Morgenthaus didn't convert—this book would not exist if they had...

...This idea is not mentioned by the author, but it was an operation the U.S...

...It isn't first-class history and doesn't unpack all the rooms and closets in the mansion with a convincing or brilliant thesis...

...After all, at Princeton before the war, he—the son of a cabinet.officer—had been ignored by the clubs, an "emasculating experience...

...most Americans of Jewish background still However, he has three kids: Sarah, are...

...Elinor also used her best connection for her children's benefit—on the day after Christmas, 1940, the White House was the scene of her daughter Joan's coming-out party, an event even the author is still thrilled by...

...Henry Jr...

...It helps explain many things, including why the U.S...

...From the time he joined the mission, [Felix] Frankfurter served as a Zionist mole bent on informing, leaking, and eventually blowing the mission out of the water," Henry III writes...

...Three generations, a century at most, after a Jew arrives on these shores, most of his descendants have been assimilated...

...What he did press for and eventually got was more symbolic, though it did save a few lives...

...I moved through stages of self-hatred, anger, assertiveness, and, eventually, acceptance leading to a positive re-identification," Henry III writes...

...But he never comes to grips with this paradox, either in the large or within the compass of his story...

...My grandfather was determined that in a Roosevelt administration his son would have the cabinet post of which he himself felt deprived by Wilson...

...was capable of, and one for which some Jews and non-Jews pleaded in vain...

...The reader is at a loss to say whether Kramer, and Henry IV...

...Edward Norden, a regular contributor, is writing a book on the future of the Jews...

...But so far had they come by 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was publicized and the author born, that he wasn't even circumcised...

...The fast track to assimilation, to disappearance, has always been intermarriage, and current figures tell us that American Jews are choosing to marry out more frequently than in and raising their kids mainly as Christians or as nothing...

...He was always utterly loyal, yes, and FDR valued that, although cruelly he never allowed his friend to feel totally confident about his position, either in government or in his affections...

...Or is it because the older members of Our Crowd, now buried in Reform cemeteries, uneasy as they were about their Jewishness, harbored too much snobbery, decorousness, pride, or social anxiety to try to break all the way out...

...Sure enough, Henry Jr...

...Not only was he loyal—he got done what his boss wanted done, rewrote the tax laws to soak their fellow rich, and ran Lend-Lease devotedly when the British were fighting the Germans alone...

...They'll stab you in the back," Henry Sr...

...To press FDR on this would no doubt have been too much even for the shaken Morgenthau, who owed his career to him...

...But his diplomatic career was a failure, for which he blamed the ingrate, cunning, pushy Zionists...

...Today the vanishing is being done by the great-grandchildren of the huddled eastern European masses immortalized by Emma Lazarus, herself of Sephardi extraction...

...There he publicized what the Turks were doing to the Armenians and facilitated the transport of several crates of bullion to Palestine's starving Jews...

...Unlike Frankfurter and Bernard Baruch, who feared its being known as the Jew Deal, Morgenthau was shocked enough, and had a good enough character, to demand specific action, even at a cost to his standing with President Roosevelt...

...Maybe Henry Sr...

...Too much of it is in the where-Iwas-when-I-heard-about-Pearl Harbor mode...

...He acknowledges the help of his cousin, the late Barbara Tuchman, and one suspects that this gifted historian, along with his editors, saved the author from drowning in his material...

...Perhaps the Morgenthaus were overly touchy, perhaps the Roosevelts were political in all their dealings—the author broaches both possibilities...

...Non-Zionist pillars of Our Crowd like Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg would find ways to help out without signing on...

...departed for Constantinople: "Remember that anything you can do to improve the lot of your co-religionists is an act that will reflect credit upon America...

...An early check-writer for presidential candidate Wilson, he de60 The American Spectator February 1992 sired a cabinet post, but had to make do with Constantinople...

...and Elinor Fatman, of Lehman stock, was a "true love match...

...Of course, FDR regretted what the enemy was doing, but preferred to concentrate on winning the war—Thesides, he was idolized by American Jews and didn't have to worry about their votes...

...He mentions things no authorized work could include, thanks to which his subjects, every so often, jump off the page...

...Incited by his Christian lieutenants—Randolph Paul, John Pehle, and Josiah E. DuBois—he convinced the President to establish the War Refugee Board (WRB...

...To be sure, he was pushed by his father and assisted by his wife, the author's mother Elinor, who possibly was Eleanor Roosevelt's best friend...

...From that point, he was "something of a loose cannon," putting Zionism down as "the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history...

...The paper written by DuBois, entitled "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of the Government to the Murder of the Jews," was toned down by Henry to "Personal Report to the President" before being delivered to the Oval Office...

...got the money, he went into behind-the-scenes do-gooder politics...

...Their lifestyle was modeled on that of the richer WASPs, not, God forbid, those consuming outrageously at Newport, yet still complete with jodhpurs and country seats...

...The book he has written is therefore pretty special...

...But it does fairly honestly tell the Morgenthau family's story, a tale of glory and melancholy not without parallels in the general experience of American Jews...

...Yet he understands that his grandfather was out of his depth and why these feelers were mischievous—the assumption on which the Balfour Declaration was being cooked was that the Ottoman Empire was doomed...

...A climber, a bit of a scoundrel with an indifferent business sense and a violent streak, Lazarus failed in his bid to conjure a New World fortune and win the seal of approval for his clan...

...into FDR's field of vision...

...However, one of his German-born sons, Henry Senior, burnished the Morgenthau name with a chain of real estate killings—he sold Times Square to Adolph Ochs—so that by the time his native-born children married, one could be paired with a Lehman, another with a Wertheim...

...could have been with them if his attempt on Wilson's behalf to sound out the Turks on a separate peace in 1917 hadn't bombed as it did...

...She bucked him up and gave War Bond speeches for him when the Secretary of the Treasury was out with a headache...

...His father's pull and money catapulted Henry Jr...

...After Pearl Harbor he, more than anyone else, was responsible for gearing the economy up to make total war...

...The German Jews who came over between 1840 and 1870—"Our Crowd"—have kept their family names but not the ancestral faith...

...And if there's anything classicalmous district attorney of Manhattan and ly illiberal, it's resistance to intermarriage...

...The "treatment" was and is complete assimilation through conversion and/or intermarriage...

...The author's brother, Robert, fa- marriage...

...What he knew of Jewish history wasn't much, and this was typical...

...His marriage, he implies, was the biggest forward step he took...

...These were the symptoms not merely of a poor little rich kid, but a certain type of Jewish rich kid...

...His son and grandson in Manhattan would go him one better by flirting with Ethical Culture, a steppingstone to Unitarianism...

...had failed, Henry Jr...

...Nor did Eleanor, with whom sherode, let Elinor feel it...

...Lazarus was "manic": his brood hired Pinkerton's to shadow him and briefly had him committed...

...If Jews are an endangered children...

...If the Turks had ill-used a handful of Jews, the Germans were exterminating millions...

...The circumstances were now different...

...had a lock on the Treasury job...

...served his country beautifully...