70 years ago: Chicago Tribune publishes a front page story “exposing” a “secret US government” led by three Jews

On May 29, 1950, this story was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune:

 

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JTA reported:

The assertion that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Senator Harbert H. Lehman, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. constitute “the secret government of the United States” is made by the Chicago Tribune here in a two-column dispatch from its Washington correspondent. The correspondent attributes this assertion to “a person with the highest State Department connections.”

Justice Frankfurter is termed as “the most powerful man in the government, reaching into the White House with his proteges.” Sen. Lehman is pictured as “a powerful Wall Street force,” while Mr. Morgenthau was named by the alleged “State Department authority” as “the spokesman of the powerful Zionist groups.”

Declaring that “the names of all three figures were woven into the case of Alger Hiss” who was convicted of perjury, the Chicago Tribune says: “None of the three has been named as a fellow traveler, or has ever fallen under any suspicion of taint of Communism. All have been pro-Soviet to a degree, but only when the Russian position advanced the British or Zionist causes, or worked toward the fall of Nazi Germany.”

More here.

A couple of weeks later, the Tribune apologized to Jewish organizations, but it denied that the article was antisemitic and it never apologized in the newspaper:

The Chicago Tribune today apologized to Jewish organizations for a front-page article asserting that Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau Jr., and Sen. Herbert H. Lehman constituted a “secret government of the United States.” The article appeared May 29 under a Washington dateline.

The apology was made in the form of a letter addressed by J. Loy Maloney, managing editor of the paper, to the Chicago chapters of the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, Jewish Labor Committee and Anti-Defamation Leagus of B’nai B’rith. However, the letter was not published in the Chicago Tribune.

Declaring that the article to which the Jewish organizations took exception “was an isolated news report and not the start of a series,” Mr. Maloney’s letter says that the Washington correspondent dealt with Justice Frankfurter, Mr. Morgenthau and Sen. Lehman as public men, regardless of their religious beliefs. “The story was not meant to imply any association or parallelism between Zionism and Communism,” the editor said.

“The Tribune is not anti-Semitic,” Mr. Maloney continued. “Its record has been that of a defender of minorities when they were right, however unpopular their cause.” Emphasizing that in printing the article, the Tribune “did not foresee the interpretations which have been put upon it in Jewish circles,” the letter concludes by saying that “these implications were not intended by the Tribune, which has no desire to create ill-feeling or to furnish ammunition to anti-Semites.”

In 1968, the Congressional Record included a speech with an attached article against George Ball becoming the UN ambassador, claiming that he was working for “international bankers” and referring to this article.

Trohan didn’t seem to like Israel much, as he highlighted an obscure opinion by a law professor denying any Jewish legal claim to Israel in 1964: