John Abt

John Abt

John Jacob Abt Esq. stated in his autobiography that he had been a secret Communist Party USA member and a participant in Harold Ware’s underground group. Identified as assisting Soviet espionage in a deciphered KGB cable (Venona), and in the KGB documents cited in Weinstein and Vassiliev’s Haunted Wood. He was married to Jessica Smith and later to Vita Barsky.

Obituary

From the New York Times in 1991:

John J. Abt, a lawyer who spent most of his career as chief counsel to the Communist Party in the United States, died on Saturday at the Columbia-Greene Medical Center in Hudson, N.Y. He was 87 years old and lived in Manhattan.

He died as a result of a stroke, his family said.

In the early 1950's, Mr. Abt and the late Vito Marcantonio, then state chairman of the American Labor Party, were retained to test the constitutionality of the Internal Security Act, also known as the McCarran Act. The act, passed in 1950 over President Harry S. Truman's veto, requires registration of Communists and other "subversive" groups and bars Communists from holding Federal jobs and passports.

Arguing before the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the act in 1960, Mr. Abt said the statute represented "an attempt without precedent in this country to enforce conformity by suppressing association and advocacy." In 1961, however, the Court sustained the section of the act requiring Communist-action organizations to register with the Government, 5 to 4.

Although he lost that battle, Mr. Abt did win a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in 1965 that individuals may invoke their constitutional privilege against self-incrimination and refuse to register with the Government as members of the Communist Party. Mr. Abt considered this his greatest legal victory.

At his 80th birthday celebration, Mr. Abt a slender, quick-witted man with a small, brush mustache, said he had been a member of the Communist Party for 50 years.

"I am sure that this announcement will surprise no one here tonight," he said. "But it seems to me a rather sad commentary on the state of the freedom of political association in this country that I had to wait for half a century after the event before I felt free, publicly and proudly, to confirm a fact which anyone who knows anything at all about me has assumed to be true for lo, these many years ."

John Jacob Abt was born in Chicago on May 1, 1904, into what he described in a 1989 interview as a "bourgeois family." His father was a Yale graduate and he himself was a graduate of the University of Chicago, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, and from its law school.

From 1927 to 1933, he practiced real-estate and corporate law in Chicago.

In the early 1930's, inspired by the New Deal, he moved to Washington and joined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. He then became assistant general counsel for the Works Progress Administration, and in 1936 and 1937 was chief counsel for the Senate Civil Liberties Investigating Committee.

In 1937, he married Jessica Smith, editor of The New World Review magazine, then Soviet Russia Today, and a year later, moved to New York. She died in 1983. The couple had no children.

Refused to Testify

In 1948, Mr. Abt became a key worker for the Progressive Party in the Presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace. That year, a Time magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee about what he said was a prewar Communist underground in the Federal Government. One of the men he named as a member of a "cell" in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in the early 1930's was John J. Abt. Mr. Abt refused to testify before the committee.

In 1953, as chief counsel, he represented the Communist Party in a case in which the New York Board of Regents sought to bar party members from holding jobs in the schools. The Board of Regents lost.

Four years later, he was back in the news when Col. Rudolf Abel, the Soviet agent, asked Mr. Abt to defend him against charges that he transmitted United States secrets to the Soviet Government. Mr. Abt turned him down.

The day after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, accused as the killer, asked to be allowed to hire Mr. Abt to defend him. Before Mr. Abt could accept or reject the bid, Mr. Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby.

Mr. Abt is survived by his wife, the former Vita Barsky, and a stepdaughter, Judy Dodson of Sparkhill, N.Y..

Ware Group

The famous Ware Group Communist apparatus was organized by Harold Ware, a son of prominent communist "Mother" Ella Bloor.

This group acted as an adjunct of the NKVD of the Soviets. The principal function of the group was to obtain information desired by the NKVD particularly with regard to individuals.

Chambers stated that frequently he turned over to Peters sizable sums which he had collected from the Ware group. Chambers has identified John Abt, formerly with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, later with the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, and with the LaFollette Senate Civil Liberties Committee as having been a member of this group. In 1952 Abt was representing the Communist Party USA as co-counsel with Vito Marcantonio before the Subversive Control Board.

Following the death of Harold Ware in an automobile accident, John Abt married Ware's widow, Jessica Smith, who at one time was a secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D. C. Later, when she became editor of Soviet Russia Today, she was one of the few persons ever to register as a Soviet agent.

Other members who comprised this group were Lee Pressman, formerly with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and later general counsel of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Henry Collins, at one time a member of the Forestry Service of the Department of Agriculture, Nathan Perlow, an economist, and when known to Chambers was connected with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D. C., Charles Kramer, who was also employed by the La Follette committee while Chambers was in contact with him and Alger Hiss, who worked with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the State Department, the United Nations Organization, and finally was president of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.

Herbert Aptheker Testimonial Dinner

On April 28, 1966 John Abt, New York was a sponsor of the Herbert Aptheker Testimonial Dinner. The dinner was held on the occasion of Herbert Aptheker's 50^th birthday, the publication of his 20^th book, and the 2^nd anniversary of the American Institute for Marxist Studies. It was held in the Sutton Ballroom, The New York Hilton, Avenue of the Americas, 53^rd to 54^th Street, New York City. Most speakers, organizers and sponsors were known members or supporters of the Communist Party USA.

American-Korean Friendship and Information Center

On Feb. 27, 1971, John Abt Attorney, New York was listed as an initiating sponsor of the American-Korean Friendship and Information Center. The Center, a front for the Communist Party USA, was established to promote the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea and Vietnam.

Communist Party member

On February 8 and 9, 1975, the Second National Conference in Solidarity with Chile was held at Concordia Teachers College in the Chicago suburb of River Forest. Known Communist Party USA members sponsoring the event included John Abt. He has served on the CPUSA general counsel and has been a member of the CPUSA Political Committee since the 1950s.

We Will Make Peace Prevail!

On March 28, 1982 the New World Review organized a gala luncheon "We Will Make Peace Prevail! Disarmament Over Confrontation, Life Over Death", at the Grand Ballroom, Hotel Roosevelt, New York City. Virtually all participants were identified as Communist Party USA.

John Abt was listed on the Committee of Sponsors.