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Tara Bahrampour / The Washington Post
Henry Morgenthau III, a television producer and documentary filmmaker who helped shape public television in its infancy and served as a forum for civil rights conversation in the 1960s, is died on July 11th. retirement community in Washington. He was 101 years old.
The cause was complications of aortic stenosis, says his daughter Sarah Morgenthau.
A descendant of a prominent German Jewish family, Morgenthau was a son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, grandson of the United States Ambassador to the Empire Ottoman under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, elder brother of Robert Morgenthau, former district attorney of Manhattan, and Barbara Tuchman, author of the Pulitzer Prize
. the literary society, although he said that his Jewish heritage often made him feel like a stranger from time to time. This contradiction would inform his professional life as a storyteller, on screen and in print.
His years as a producer at WGBH in Boston, from 1955 to 1977, coincided with the birth of public television. Morgenthau was inspired by "the whole concept of using television to educate and also tell stories of marginalized people in society," says his son Kramer Morgenthau
He was one of the first television producers Americans to integrate apartheid in South Africa. He has also produced "Prospects of Mankind", a weekly program hosted by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, with roundtables on foreign and domestic affairs with political, academic and media experts.
As executive producer of the WGBH His television shows have won the Peabody and Emmy awards, among other honors. His 1963 program, The Negro and the American Promise, consisted of one-on-one interviews with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin. It was aired at a tense time after Alabama Governor George Wallace said with defiance that he supported "segregation forever" and before the march on Washington. Excerpts from Baldwin's interview appeared in the documentary "I Am Not Your Negro" (2016).
In 1991, he wrote "Mostly Morgenthaus", a book about his family that tells the story of his great-grandfather's life. , a Bavarian cigar manufacturer who moved to New York in 1866, and his grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., who unsuccessfully pushed the United States to intervene in the 1915 killings of Armenians in Turkey.
His father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., played a pivotal role in the design of the New Deal and in financing United States participation in the Second World War. He urged the United States to do more to help Jews suffer persecution in Europe, and continued to help shape foreign policy after the war
"He grew up at a time when the government – and certainly the New Deal for the loser of society, "said Kramer Morgenthau. "It inspired him a lot of inspiration, and at the same time, he was under tremendous pressure for it to live up to his family's reputation …. I think he needed it." to find one's own voice. "
Henry Morgenthau III was born at home in New York City on January 11, 1917. He was the eldest of three children of the late Elinor Fatman and Henry Morgenthau Jr., and a great-grandson of Mayer Lehman, co-founder of securities firm Lehman Brothers.
The family had a house near the Roosevelt property in Hyde Park, New York, and the young Morgenthau later remembered to escape The adults talk during dinner, with Roosevelt's sonorous baritone and the Contagious laugh rising above the other voices.
His assimilated Jewish family lived badly in their religion. His youth was shaped by deep tensions of anti-Semitism during the pre-World War II period. In his book, he remembered a playmate asking him, so 5, what religion he was. He asked his mother, who grinned and replied, "If someone still asks you, tell them you are American."
Morgenthau studied at Princeton University, where he specialized in art history, ran glee club and served on the editorial board of the student newspaper. Despite the social importance of his family, he was, along with several other Jewish students, refused to enter the prestigious university catering clubs.
The following year, he transcended his wounds and turned a personal attack into a kind of mitzvah. Michaelis, a longtime friend, wrote in an e-mail to the children of Morgenthau after his death.
Every week during this winter, Michaelis added, "Henry had gone to the back doors of Prospect Street's most selective restaurants, and African-American cooks in those kitchens, he was kindly received large amounts of leftovers and scraped food from the club tables, and he carried this manna from the Depression era across the campus and Witherspoon Street to the African-American parish "
After graduating in 1939, Morgenthau served in the army in Europe during the Second World War and received the Sta
In addition to his work at WGBH, he was also Interim Program Director at WNYC in New York, USA. worked with Eleanor Roosevelt in a radio and TV production company and was director of a communications research institute at Brandeis University.
While working on a documentary about Tanzania, he was p resented to Ruth Schachter, an expert in African politics who taught at Boston University and later at Brandeis. His Jewish family fled Vienna in 1938, and their relationship pushed Morgenthau to embrace his own religion more completely. They were married in 1962.
His wife died in 2006. Survivors include three children, Sarah Morgenthau from Washington, Henry "Ben" Morgenthau IV from Danville, California, and Kramer Morgenthau from Los Angeles; his brother; and six grandchildren.
Morgenthau settled in Washington in the Boston area in 2010 and took on a new calling: writing poetry. Just before turning 100, he publishes his first collection, "A Sunday in Purgatory". The poems are inspired by his memories that are growing in the 1930s in New York; his father's account of Franklin Roosevelt's last dinner; and reflections on old age and mortality.
The poems also explored what he called his life fears of being "discovered", that in one way or another he did not met expectations. "I'm trying to tell you the truth, / half hoping not to hear, / while I'm trying desperately to expel / something stuck in my soul / I can not stand to live with, / but I do not want to die with. "
" I do not know exactly what or why I started, "he told The Washington Post last year. "I showed it to a few people and I was encouraged to keep going.It was developed in a conflicting way.On one hand it was a way of separating myself from my legacy of a distinguished family. "
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