He was criticized for hiring mostly Ivy League graduates and the offspring of rich and famous families. John F. Kennedy Jr. worked in his office, as did Dan Rather Jr., son of the former news anchor. So did Cyrus Vance Jr., the son of the former U.S. secretary of state, who won election in 2009 to succeed Morgenthau.

Family Ties
“If having a famous father were a disqualification,” Morgenthau responded to critics, “I wouldn’t have gotten my job.”

Robert Morris Morgenthau was born July 31, 1919, in New York to a wealthy family of German-Jewish origin. Though privileged, Morgenthau’s background didn’t quite fit the “patrician” label often attached to his name.

His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, arrived in the U.S. from Germany at age 10, penniless and speaking no English. He worked his way through law school, made a fortune in real estate and became U.S. Ambassador to Turkey in World War I.

Morgenthau’s father, Henry Jr., served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury from 1934 to 1945. A non-practicing Jew like his own father, Henry Jr. tried but failed to persuade the U.S. government to take a more active role in rescuing European Jews from Hitler’s Germany.

Camouflaged Ethnicity
Until then, as Morgenthau’s older brother Henry III wrote in “Mostly Morgenthaus” (1991), a 501-page family history, “all significant vestiges of ethnicity in my family had been thoroughly camouflaged, and the Morgenthaus had assumed protective coloration to blend in with Protestant America.”

Morgenthau grew up in Manhattan and on his family’s Hudson Valley apple orchard, Fishkill Farms. He graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, in 1941 and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in World War II, rising to lieutenant commander. In 1944, the Germans sank his ship, the USS Lansdale, and he floated hours in the Mediterranean before being rescued.

“I made a deal with the Almighty,” he recalled on his 88th birthday in 2007. “If I got out alive, I’d devote my life to some form of public service. I’m still paying back.”

His office walls were covered with historical documents: photos of FDR, a letter to him as a schoolboy from Eleanor Roosevelt, a picture of his grandfather with Shirley Temple.

Close Call
Morgenthau received a law degree from Yale University in 1948. He then practiced law for 12 years at the New York firm of Patterson, Belknap & Webb.