Henry Morgenthau III, who shaped public TV, dies
Henry Morgenthau III, a TV producer and documentarian who helped shape public television in its early days and provided a forum for the nation’s civil rights conversation in the 1960s, died July 11 at a retirement community in Washington. He was 101.
The cause was complications from aortic stenosis, his daughter Sarah Morgenthau said.
A scion of a prominent German-Jewish family, Morgenthau was a son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, a grandson of the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under President Woodrow Wilson, the older brother of former Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, and a cousin of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman.
He grew up moving comfortably among Washington and New York political and literary society, although he said his Jewish heritage made him often feel like an outsider at times. That contradiction would inform his professional life as a teller of stories, 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,” his son Kramer Morgenthau said.
He was among the first American TV producers to bring a crew into apartheid South Africa. He also produced “Prospects of Mankind,” a weekly show hosted by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt featuring roundtable discussions of foreign and domestic affairs with political, academic and media experts.
As executive producer at WGBH, his shows won Peabody and Emmy awards, among other honors. His 1963 program “The Negro and the American Promise” consisted of one-on-one interviews with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin. It aired at a fraught period, after Alabama Gov. George Wallace defiantly declared support for “segregation forever” and before the March on Washington. Footage from the Baldwin interview appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” (2016).
In 1991, he wrote “Mostly Morgenthaus,” a book about his family that chronicles the lives of his great-grandfather, a Bavarian cigar maker who moved to New York in 1866, and his grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., who unsuccessfully pushed the U.S. to intervene in the 1915 Armenian genocide in Turkey.
His father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., played an integral role in designing the New Deal and in financing U.S. participation in World War II.
Henry Morgenthau III was born at home in New York City on Jan. 11, 1917. He was the oldest of three children of the former Elinor Fatman and Henry Morgenthau Jr., and a great-grandson of Mayer Lehman, a co-founder of the securities firm Lehman Brothers.
The family had a home near Roosevelt’s estate at Hyde Park, New York, and the young Morgenthau later recalled slipping out of bed to listen to the adults talk over dinner, with Roosevelt’s sonorous baritone and contagious laughter rising above the other voices.
His youth was shaped by deep strains of anti-Semitism during the run-up to World War II. He served in the Army in Europe during World War II and received the Bronze Star Medal.
In addition to his work at WGBH, he also was acting program manager at WNYC in New York, worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on a radio and TV production business, and served as manager of a communication research institute at Brandeis University.