By NATASHA KORECKI, ALEX THOMPSON and THEODORIC MEYER
04/29/2021 06:32 PM EDT
With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Payne
Welcome to POLITICO’s 2021 Transition Playbook, your guide to the first 100 days of the Biden administration
Through the course of JOE BIDEN’s presidential campaign, SARAH MORGENTHAU, an attorney and former Obama administration official, was both a public and behind-the-scenes force.
She was national co-chair of Lawyers for Biden, a prolific fundraiser and a volunteer on national security policy groups for the campaign. She served as a surrogate who was frequently quoted in national publications about the trajectory of the race or the temperature of donors.
At the same time, Morgenthau was having discussions with TONY BLINKEN (now secretary of State) and BRIAN McKEON (now deputy secretary of State for management) about a century-old ethnic cleansing campaign that a U.S. president had yet to formally recognize: the Armenian genocide.
Morgenthau has a powerful connection to the tragedy, one that dates back more than 100 years and is intimately entwined with her family history.
She is the great-granddaughter of HENRY MORGENTHAU SR., the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, who in 1915 documented systematic atrocities against Armenians.
On Saturday, Biden became the first U.S. president to call the mass killings a genocide, a designation Turkey had actively lobbied against for decades. In the sea of coverage over the weekend, Morgenthau Sr.’s role and his standing in the Armenian community were repeatedly highlighted.
Among the Armenian diaspora, he is an exalted figure, a hero for sounding the alarms and dispatching detailed, contemporaneous accounts of "a campaign of race extermination,” as his cable to the State Department on July 16, 1915, said.
“Joseph Biden's recognition of the Armenian Genocide is the affirmation of a legacy of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau,” said ROUBEN ADALIAN, director of the Armenian National Institute. “Effectively, he was the very first person in the world to alert humankind, that part of it was being subjected to genocide. That’s how important and historic a figure he really is.”
While Morgenthau Sr.’s efforts to aid the Armenians in modern-day Turkey failed, he made it his mission to tell the world what was happening and successfully urged a philanthropist friend and other New Yorkers to start the Armenian Atrocities Committee (which later became the Near East Foundation) credited with bringing life-saving relief, including basic food, shelter, and clothing, to hundreds of thousands of Armenians who were scattered across the Middle East.
In addition to serving as U.S. ambassador to Turkey under President WOODROW WILSON, Morgenthau Sr. led the Democratic National Committee’s finance committee. His offspring have continued to be a major presence with Democratic politics for more than a century. HENRY MORGENTHAU JR. was a close friend of President FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT and served as his Treasury secretary for more than a decade.
“The family legacy repeats itself when his son becomes the man who notifies Franklin Roosevelt about the Holocaust in a formal manner,” Adalian said.
During FDR’s tenure, ELINOR MORGENTHAU, Morgenthau Jr.’s wife, and ELEANOR ROOSEVELT were close. The then-first lady famously resigned from the Colony Club of New York in protest over its refusal to admit Elinor because she was Jewish.
One of Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s sons, ROBERT MORGENTHAU, raced sailboats with JOHN F. KENNEDY as a young man. When Kennedy was elected president, he tapped Morgenthau as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a post he used to go after Wall Street and organized crime. Robert Morgenthau became an icon in the legal world, going on to serve for more than 35 years as “Gotham’s aristocratic Mr. District Attorney,” as his New York Times obituary put it. He also helped found the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Through the decades, the Morgenthau family and the Armenian-American community have been connected– from travel to electioneering to philanthropy.
“From a very young age, I got this real sense of wanting to be engaged, wanting to serve, wanting to help in whatever small ways that I could,” Sarah Morgenthau said. Under Obama, she served as deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and a senior political appointee at the U.S. Peace Corps. In her talks with the Biden campaign, she added her voice to those advocating for Armenian issues.
Sarah’s brother, HENRY MORGENTHAU IV (who goes by Ben), has planted trees in Armenia, and attended Armenian weddings and Red Sox games with Armenian Americans. He visited Armenia twice, once with his late father in 1999.
“I remember distinctly walking down the streets of Yerevan and people coming up to my father in tears and saying, ‘Thank you.’ It wasn’t my father who they really wanted to thank. They were thanking the ambassador,” he said. “The emotional response has always been incredible. It speaks to the depth of the wound. I feel pride in our country for finally doing it.”