Robert Treuhaft, a crusading radical lawyer who inspired his wife, Jessica Mitford, to write her best seller "The American Way of Death," died in New York on Nov. 11. He was 89.
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Robert Edward Treuhaft was born in New York on Aug. 8, 1912, the son of working-class immigrants from Hungary. His mother eventually came to run her own hat shop on Park Avenue; his father, a waiter turned bootlegger, became part owner of a Wall Street restaurant.Raised in the Bronx and then Brooklyn, Mr. Treuhaft won a scholarship to Harvard, where he studied law.
After working for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York, Mr. Treuhaft was rejected by the Army on medical grounds at the start of World War II and went to work for the Office of Price Administration in Washington; there he met and fell in love with Miss Mitford.
The couple could scarcely have been more different in upbringing. She was one of the blue-blooded Mitford sisters, a daughter of Lord Redesdale and sister to Nancy, the novelist; to Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader; to Unity, one of Hitler's cronies; and to Deborah, who became Duchess of Devonshire.
Miss Mitford was recovering from the loss of her first husband, Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill's nephew, who had been killed on a Canadian Air Force raid over Germany and with whom she had eloped to fight with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
Mr. Treuhaft and Miss Mitford were married in 1943; Miss Mitford accepted his proposal before he had finished making it. They moved to San Francisco, where Mr. Treuhaft started a radical law firm that specialized in fighting every kind of discrimination and social injustice.
Both joined the United States Communist Party and were frequently investigated and harassed by government officials; for many years they were denied passports, for example. But by 1958 they had grown disillusioned with Communism and left the party.
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In 1971 he accepted a young Yale lawyer named Hillary Rodham (now Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton) as an intern.
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They were communists too, as was the "Abraham Lincoln Bridgade", made up of American communists, with equipment and "advisors" sent by Uncle Joe Stalin. The other side were no angels either, being supported, with "volunteers" (like the Chicom "volunteers in Korea a couple of decades later)