John Lowenthal 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.
In the 1940s, Lowenthal served in the U.S. Navy. In the late 1940s, during the Truman administration, he worked in the White House, where his father also worked, according to White House staff Stephen J. Spingarn.
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.
Documentary
In 1978 while on sabbatical, Lowenthal made a documentary film called The Trials of Alger Hiss.
Volkogonov
In August 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lowenthal asked General Dmitry Antonovich Volkogonov, who had become President Yeltsin'smilitary 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 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 files referring to Alger Hiss as "our agent".
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." , with relatives also working in the federal government, had been a GRU agent since the mid-1930s 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."
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.
Personal and death
Lowenthal was a cellist: he made his last appearance in the year of his death at the Salzburg Music Festival. 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. In 1999, he was living at The Tides, Chiswick Mall, London W4. He died of esophageal cancer age 78 on September 9, 2003, in London. The Tamiment Library hold his papers, primarily about his documentary.
