Henry Morgenthau III

Henry Morgenthau III (born January 11, 1917) is an American author and television producer, and scion of the famous Morgenthau dynasty and member of the Lehman family.

Henry Morgenthau III is the son of Elinor (née Fatman), granddaughter of Mayer Lehman, a co-founder of Lehman Brothers and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who was Franklin D. Roosevelt's U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. He is also the grandson of US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. and grandnephew of New York Governor and Senator Herbert H. Lehman. Henry Morgenthau III is brother of former New York County District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, as well as of Joan Elizabeth Morgenthau Hirschhorn (October 9, 1922 – October 1, 2012), who was professor of clinical pediatrics and preventive medicine and the associate dean for student affairs at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. His cousin is eminent American historian Barbara Tuchman.

Henry Morgenthau III graduated from Princeton University in 1939. During his time at university, he ran on the cross country team, worked on Theatre Intime, and was an editorial-board member of the Princetonian. Despite his family's social stature, Morgenthau was frozen out of bicker in 1937, along with four of the other 11 Jewish students in the class.

During World War II, Morgenthau served in the US Army. From 1945 he was involved in the television business, at various times working as an author, producer and manager for the larger national institutions like NBC, CBS and ABC. From 1955 to 1977, Morgenthau was a chief producer of WGBH (Boston). His shows at WGBH won Peabody, Emmy, UPI, Educational Film Library Association, and Flaherty Film Festival awards. Also he was the acting program manager at WYNC. Morgenthau served as a vice president of the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. He also was a manager of the Morse Communication Center at the Brandeis University.

Morgenthau III was producer of Prospects of Mankind with Eleanor Roosevelt (1959), The Negro and the American Promise (1963), and Conversation with Svetlana Alliluyeva (1967). He was a contributor to Screamers (2006 film) and story editor of A Tale of Two Christmases (21 Dec. 1952).

He wrote Morgenthau family saga Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History (1991), focused on several patriarchs: The first Morgenthau of record, Moses (1773-1834), impoverished teacher of Hebrew from Gleusdorf in Bavaria, who later became a ritual slaughterer married to a rabbi’s daughter, was required to take a family name when the Jews of Bavaria were granted citizenship in 1813. Waiting in line at city hall in the predawn, he looked at the damp ground and decided to call himself Morgen Tau ("morning dew'' in German). His and Brunhilda Morgenthau's son, Lazarus (1815-1897) was making nicotine-free cigars, candy from pine needles, tongue scrapers, and gum-label machines. Married in 1843 to Seline Babette Guggenheim, he moved to the liberal city of Mannheim and opened a cigar manufactory, a business that grew rapidly when his brother Max (also called Mengo) wrote from California in 1849 suggesting he ship his cigars to the American market. Lazarus’ rise to success had been extraordinary, but the luck that had followed him could not prevent the business failure that followed the rise of protective tariffs in the United States when war broke out there in 1861. Financially overextended, Lazarus moved to New York in 1866, where his fortunes plummeted further. Lazarus's ninth child, Henry Sr. (1856-1946), saw his mission as restoring the family to its rightful position. As Wilson's ambassador to Turkey during the crucial years before and during World War I, he supported the Jews in Palestine and heroically rescued Armenians persecuted by the Turks. Henry Jr. (1891-1967) was a close friend of both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, FDR's Secretary of the Treasury and leader of U.S. efforts on behalf of Holocaust survivors.

In his book Henry Morgenthau III casts doubt on the alleged Communist associations of his father's Treasury aide Harry Dexter White, whom Whitaker Chambers accused of being a Soviet spy and conspirator.

On May 9, 2015, at Marriott Marques Hotel in Washington DC, during the National Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide Centennial Reception And Award Banquet, Catholicos Karekin II presented an award to Henry Morgenthau III.

Henry Morgenthau III is an observant Jew who rediscovered his religion after his marriage in 1962. His Viennese born wife, Ruth Schachter Morgenthau (January 26, 1931 - November 4, 2006), was professor of international politics at Brandeis University and an advisor to President Jimmy Carter on rural development in poor countries. Her parents, Osias and Mizia Kramer Schachter, owned a textile importing company until they fled from the Nazis in 1940. She graduated from Barnard College in 1952, then attended the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris as a Fulbright scholar. In 1958, she received a doctorate in politics from Oxford. In 1964, she wrote “Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa". She was a member of the United States Mission to the United Nations, and in 1988 ran unsuccessfully as a Democratic candidate for Congress in Rhode Island. He and his wife had two sons: Henry (Ben) Morgenthau (born 1964) and cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau (born 1966); and a daughter, Sarah Elinor Morgenthau Wessel (born 1963). Morgenthau turned 100 on January 11, 2017, He celebrated the occasion in Washington DC with 35 relatives and friends.