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Posted on 12/06/2001 3:10:47 PM PST by PatrickHenry
This is an obituary about a dead communist lawyer, not particularly thrilling; but you must read it to see who interned at his radical firm back in 1971. Amazing what gets printed in the New York Times:
December 2, 2001
Robert Treuhaft, Lawyer Who Inspired Funeral Exposé, Dies at 89
By PAUL LEWIS
Robert Treuhaft, a crusading radical lawyer who inspired his wife, Jessica Mitford, to write her best seller "The American Way of Death," died in New York on Nov. 11. He was 89.
As a union lawyer representing longshoremen in the San Francisco area in the 1950's, Mr. Treuhaft was enraged by the exorbitant fees undertakers charged, frequently consuming a widow's death benefits.
After organizing the Bay Area Funeral Society to reduce the cost of funerals for union members, Mr. Treuhaft encouraged his wife to write an exposé of the funeral industry, taking a year off from his Oakland law practice to help with research.
The result was "The American Way of Death," first published in 1963. Miss Mitford, who was known as Decca and who died in 1996, dedicated the work to her husband with gratitude for "his untiring collaboration."
In a 1993 interview, Miss Mitford said that initially she had not been interested in the subject. "Then Bob started bringing home the trade publications like Casket and Sunnyside, Mortuary Management -- all those wonderful names -- so I began to study them," she said.
When the British novelist Evelyn Waugh remarked that the book seemed to have been written by two people, Jessica Mitford's sister Nancy wrote back saying: "Clever of you to see the two voices. I am quite certain much of it was written by Treuhaft who is a sharp little lawyer, and who certainly made her write it in the first place."
In 1976 Gov. Jerry Brown of California appointed Mr. Treuhaft to the state Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers.
Robert Edward Treuhaft was born in New York on Aug. 8, 1912, the son of working-class immigrants from Hungary. His mother eventually came to run her own hat shop on Park Avenue; his father, a waiter turned bootlegger, became part owner of a Wall Street restaurant.
Raised in the Bronx and then Brooklyn, Mr. Treuhaft won a scholarship to Harvard, where he studied law.
After working for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York, Mr. Treuhaft was rejected by the Army on medical grounds at the start of World War II and went to work for the Office of Price Administration in Washington; there he met and fell in love with Miss Mitford.
The couple could scarcely have been more different in upbringing. She was one of the blue-blooded Mitford sisters, a daughter of Lord Redesdale and sister to Nancy, the novelist; to Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader; to Unity, one of Hitler's cronies; and to Deborah, who became Duchess of Devonshire.
Miss Mitford was recovering from the loss of her first husband, Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill's nephew, who had been killed on a Canadian Air Force raid over Germany and with whom she had eloped to fight with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Mr. Treuhaft and Miss Mitford were married in 1943; Miss Mitford accepted his proposal before he had finished making it. They moved to San Francisco, where Mr. Treuhaft started a radical law firm that specialized in fighting every kind of discrimination and social injustice.
Both joined the United States Communist Party and were frequently investigated and harassed by government officials; for many years they were denied passports, for example. But by 1958 they had grown disillusioned with Communism and left the party.
In 1964 Mr. Treuhaft was one of four foreign lawyers expelled from Portugal by the fascist government of Premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar after they had tried to investigate penal conditions in the country.
In 1971 he accepted a young Yale lawyer named Hillary Rodham (now Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton) as an intern.
After his wife's death, Mr. Treuhaft completed her last book, "The American Way of Death Revisited." He was working on a collection of her letters at the time of his death.
Mr. Treuhaft is survived by a stepdaughter, Constancia Romilly, and his son, Benjamin, a New York piano tuner who runs the Send a Piano to Havana Project, shipping old pianos to Cuba.
Which one? Bill or Hillery? In either case it would really hurt!
New York Freepers have tried. All this stuff (including the Treuhaft thing) is old news. I had all of it on my fliers that I distributed during capaign 2000.
I was laughed at, made fun of, and on one occasion, verbally threatened.
Hillary will likely be reelected in a landslide - if someone other than Giuliani runs against her.
And why haven't you been banished yet from Hillaryville for such heresy? ;)
Oh gees, they were class racist holocaustic type nazies, giddy at the piles of skull and bones of rich people dead in Soviet and Chinese Sattelites, and they simply were disillusioned. I say bull. Liberals have no shame.
My facts are straight. There were many dreamy, idiot communists who got disillusioned by the Hitler-Stalin pact, and they quit the party back then. But not Truehaft and his wife. No, they stuck with Stalin right through to the end. They quit the party after Stalin died. Probably because they thought Krushchev wasn't tough enough. However, even though they left the party, they never renounced their political views. Hillary knew what she was getting into.
You want facts? This quote is from Treuhaft himself, found at this site: HERE.
So, in the next year, after the convention, '57 to '58, we had lost all of our illusions about the Party, and just felt that it was not accomplishing anything. That's why we left it, because it became more and more a waste of time. Why go to meetings and put all your energy into working for Party organizations if you were butting against a stone wall in the national leadership of the Party? And in the local leadership of the Party too, actually, after a while? So we dropped out on a fairly amicable basis. We told the county chairman here that we were leaving. We asked for a meeting with him to explain why, and he became rather angry, but a couple of friends of ours dropped out too.Of course, after the Khrushchev revelations, very large numbers of people began to leave the Party. We used to call it "defecting" from the Party at first, until we did it ourselves. And so, after '58, we still received the Party newspaper. We had won a life-time subscription, in fact. And we continued to get The People's World, which was a weekly at that time. A couple of years ago, when it was cluttering up the house and we really were rather tired of reading it; then when it became a daily, and it came too often, and it was edited more and more from the East, we wondered how we could get rid of this life-time subscription. We thought we might have to produce proof of death or something like that [laughter], in order to do it. Anyway, we did stop it. So that's the Communist party background.
Now, individually, and publicly, I never announced that I had left the Party. I never avoided red-baiting by saying, "Well, I'm not a Party member anymore." As a matter of principle, I didn't think it was a thing that needed to be publicly discussed unless it was relevant to whatever came up. And, of course, it did come up when I ran for district attorney in 1966. I was red-baited by the incumbent to some extent there.
It is not "diversionary." It is bang-on truth. As the Treuhaft interview poinst out (and I provided you with a link) he left because he didn't like the local leadership. He remained friendly with them all his life. He never renounced his communist ideology. Why does it bother you when I state that Hillary is a communist? Being a commie -- in the White House! -- is far worse than the possibility that she may have croaked Vince Foster.
That was certainly well-known in Berkeley and Oakland where they lived.
A deranged young man broke into my apartment on a Saturday morning in 1962 -- walked right by my husband who was helping a neighbor with a car.
I chased him out, and the entire neighborhood chased him down the block where he tried to break into another home. An elderly lady chased him out with a broom.
We corned him on the street where he was tring to walk right on the line in the sidewalk. The police came. He was armed with a razor blade and had confused me with his sister (who lived on the next corner). He threatened to kill me (his sister).
Turns out he was the son of Robert Truehaft's law partner. Who is Robert Truehaft, I asked at the time. The answer from everyone was, "The famous Communist lawyer who is married to Jessica Mitford, the sister of Hitler's lover, and author of The American Way of Death."
I'm sure that that background was not covered in the end papers of the book, but the fact was well known in Berkeley and Oakland.
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