Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History

by Henry Morgenthau III

with a foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger

Mostly Morgenthaus is the intimate portrait of an extraordinary American family, which included an ambassador, a cabinet member, prominent businessmen and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Reaching back to the eighteenth century, Henry Morgenthau III tells the story of this Jewish family, tracing the careers of his great-grandfather, the dynamic but unstable Lazarus Morgenthau (1815-1897), who in 1866 transported his family to New York after making and losing a fortune in Mannheim, Germany; his grandfather, the determined Henry Sr. (1856-1946), who recouped the family fortune and retired from business in midlife to devote himself to public service as ambassador to Turkey and plenipotentiary throughout the Armenian crisis of 1913-15; and his father, the diffident Henry Jr. (1891-1967), who became one of the country’s most influential men and, as secretary of the Treasury under FDR, one of the first Jews to serve in the cabinet.

From his privileged vantage point, the author describes the Bretton Woods Conference, the controversial Morgenthau Plan, the scandal surrounding Harry Dexter White, his parents’ remarkably close friendship with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, his sister Joan’s spectacular White House coming-out party, the encounter his cousin — historian Barbara Tuchman — had with Roosevelt, and the career of his younger brother, Robert Morgenthau, US district attorney in New York. He also provides an inside picture of the remarkable German-Jewish families — the Strausses, Lehmans, Ochses, Guggenheims, Wertheims — who played important roles in American life.

Ticknor & Fields