More Key Figures from LHOCW

·        Oscar Straus – first person of Jewish faith to occupy a cabinet position when in 1906 he was made Secretary of Commerce and Labor. This also made him head of immigration and the go-to man on matters of race, ethnicity and integration. As US ambassador to Turkey, he persuaded a wealthy baron to set up a fund to aid relocation of Jewish refugees from Russia.
 
·         Fred Lavenburg – brother-in-law of Oscar. Set up the Lavenburg Foundation. In early 1927, he built the Hanavah Lavenburg Home for Working Girls at 331 East 12^th St in Manhattan. It was changed to Youth House for Boys in the 1940s.  At the heart of this work was integration and the two main barriers to integration were assessed as being housing and delinquency.  To help address the housing issue, the Lavenburg Trust was used in 1927 to build apartments at 124-142 Goerick St which was in the heart of Brooklyn’s slums. As noted, this was where the Rosenbergs lived.
 
·         Roger Straus – son of Oscar Straus and nephew to Fred Lavenburg. Lavenburg made Roger president of the Lavenburg Foundation shortly before his own death – thus giving Roger control of both Youth House and the immigrant apartments. Roger married into the Guggenheim family.
 
·         Roger Straus, Jr – son of Roger Straus. Co-founded the successful publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux who published two pulp fiction books by E. Howard Hunt.  Whilst the Director of Lavenburg Homes had supplied a reference for Julius Rosenberg, Straus, Jr. gave a reference to the FBI for Hunt to work as Press Secretary for Avril Harriman who ran the European Recovery Program. This however was CIA cover and Hunt would later admit that the allocated recovery funds were nothing but a giant slush fund for CIA bribes to various politicians and unionists.
 
·         Donald B. Straus – cousin to Roger, Jr Donald was president of the American Arbitration Association and rented a holiday house on Naushon Island – owned by the Forbes family and regularly used by Ruth and Michael Paine for holidays. 
 
·         Nathan Straus III was the Grand-Son of Nathan Straus who was a brother to Oscar. In May 1971, it was reported that he was heading a “private” group including Leo Cherne and Morton Hamburg to keep an eye on the volatile situation in Haiti. The Group called itself “The American Friends of a Free Haiti.” Cherne was head of the CIA front, International Rescue Committee. Cherne would have been well known also to Donald B. Straus since Cherne was on the board and executive committee 1944 - 1969 of the American Arbitration Association of which Donald was president.
 
In short, this family had links to the CIA and to the Paine family. Moreover, members of the family ran Youth House and the apartment block where the Rosenbergs lived. But that’s not all. As we will see later, there is a possible link directly into Oswald’s interrogation room.

I always find it admirable that with a little ingenuity, even the most modest immigrants can become a trust bastion of the American dream. This family seems to have had more than their fair share of good luck.

And I think it points a big flying fickle finger at what's really been going on here for quite some time.

Thanks, Greg.