Robert Treuhaft

Robert Treuhaft was born on August 8, 1912, in New York City. He was the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants.^[2] He graduated from Harvard University in 1934 and attained his LL.B. degree from Harvard Law School in 1937.^[3]

Treuhaft worked for labor union and radical left causes much of his life. From the early-to-mid-1940s to 1958 he and Mitford were members of the Communist Party USA, leaving the party when they felt it had become ineffective.^[4][5]

Treuhaft was admitted to the California Bar in 1944,^[6] and in 1945, he began at the Oakland, California law firm Grossman, Sawyer, & Edises. In 1963, he founded his own Oakland-based firm Treuhaft, Walker, and Bernstein,^[3] where Hillary Clinton worked as a summer intern in 1971.^[7] Also in 1963, he provided Mitford with background and legal information that was important for Mitford's best-selling exposé of the funeral industry, which he also unofficially co-authored, The American Way of Death.^[8]

In 1964, Treuhaft represented more than 700 Free Speech Movement students arrested during a two-day sit-in at the University of California, Berkeley. He and his firm also represented anti-Vietnam War protesters, the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).^[3]

Before his death, Treuhaft specified that any memorial donations be sent to "Send a Piano to Havana" project, which was started by his son Benjamin Treuhaft, whom the State Department had prevented from taking a piano to the embargoed island.^[9]

Treuhaft died on November 11, 2001.