John Lowenthal (1925-2003) was an attorney and filmmaker. He was born in Manhattan on May 14, 1925. He served in the Navy and attended Columbia College and Columbia University School of Law (class of 1950). While in law school, Lowenthal spent some time as a volunteer assistant to the defense during Alger Hiss's two perjury trials in 1949 and 1950.
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. Several years later, Lowenthal took a leave from Rutgers to make "The Trials of Alger Hiss," a feature-length documentary film about the case, released in 1980. Lowenthal worked closely with Hiss on the film, which used a series of new interviews and presented evidence that had been withheld from the jury that found Hiss guilty of perjury.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lowenthal, on Hiss's behalf, asked Russian General Dimitry Antonovich Volkogonov, a biographer of Stalin and at the time military advisor to President Boris Yeltsin, to search Soviet files for any evidence that Alger Hiss had been either a Communist or a spy. In the mid-1990s, Lowenthal was one of the first legal scholars to challenge the assertion that the National Security Agency's then just-released "Venona" cables -- coded wartime messages sent home from the United States by Soviet operatives and then intercepted and decrypted -- supported the allegation that Hiss had been engaged in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. In 2003, Lowenthal successfully defended a Hiss-related libel action brought against him in London by Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB agent and co-author (with Allen Weinstein) of The Haunted Wood, a study of Soviet espionage in the U.S. Vassiliev sued Frank Cass and Company, publishers of Lowenthal's article, "Venona and Alger Hiss" in the journal Intelligence and National Security. The libel action asserted that Lowenthal, in his article, had called Vassiliev an "unreliable author whose identification of persons who worked for the KGB is in part wrong, in part based on out-of-context information, and in part mere guesswork." On June 13, 2003, the jury threw out the case.
In the years after the release of his film, Lowenthal taught at the New School for Social Research and at the CUNY Law School at Queens College. He was also a classical cellist who performed widely. John Lowenthal died of cancer in London, where he had made his home for some years, on September 9, 2003.
From the guide to the John Lowenthal Papers, 1934-2004, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)
