W. Michael Blumenthal
 W. Michael Blumenthal    ( politician, businessman, economist) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Werner Michael Blumenthal 1926-01-03 Oranienburg, Germany |
| Nationality | US |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | • Berkeley • Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs |
| Religion |  Judaism |
| Spouse | Margaret Eileen Polley |
| Member of | Council on Foreign Relations/Members, International Rescue Committee, Le Cercle, Trilateral Commission |
| Party | Democratic |
US/Secretary of the Treasury in the 1970s. Attended the 1972 Bilderberg meeting, before being one of the founders of the Trilateral Commission in 1973. Le Cercle, CFR
| |
Werner Michael Blumenthal[1] was a US presidential economic advisor. He attended the 1972 Bilderberg meeting, before being one of the founders of the Trilateral Commission in 1973. He was appointed [[Secretary of the Treasury] in 1977 in the Carter administration, which was dominated by trilateralists. Another deep state connections is that he attended Le Cercle.
Family background
Blumenthal's father, the wealthy textile merchant Ewald Blumenthal, was awarded the Iron Cross during the First World War. During the November pogroms of 1938, he was interned for several months in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Initially, Werner Michael Blumenthal attended the private Jewish Kaliski School in Berlin. His family fled with him from Germany to Shanghai in the spring of 1939, where the family survived in the Shanghai ghetto of Japanese-occupied Shanghai, China, until 1947. Blumenthal witnessed severe poverty and starvation throughout the ghetto, sometimes seeing corpses lying in the streets.
His schooling was haphazard, and the stress of survival caused his parents to divorce.[2] Nevertheless, he was able to learn English during a brief period attending a British school, and learned to speak some Chinese, French and Portuguese during other periods there.[3]:25
When the war in the Pacific ended in the summer of 1945, American troops entered Shanghai. He found a job as a warehouse helper with the U.S. Air Force thanks to his linguistic skills.[4] By 1947 he and his sister, after much effort, received visas to the U.S.
Education
Blumenthal found his first full-time job earning $40 per week as a billing clerk for the National Biscuit Company. He later enrolled at San Francisco City College and supported himself doing part-time work, including truck driver, night elevator operator, busboy and movie theater ticket-taker.[2]
Blumenthal was admitted to the University of California, Berkeley where he graduated in 1951 with a B.S. degree in international economics.[4] It was also where he met and married Margaret Eileen Polley in 1951.[2] In 1952 Blumenthal became a naturalized U.S. citizen.[5]
Blumenthal was offered a scholarship to attend the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, in New Jersey. From there, he received a Master of Arts and Master of Public Affairs in 1953, followed by a Ph.D. in economics in 1956 on the German steel industry.
Career
From 1953 to 1956 he worked as a lecturer in economics. He then became vice-president and eventually director of Crown Cork International Corporation. From 1961 to 1967 he was an employee of the US State Department and at the same time an economic policy adviser to US Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In 1967, he joined the board of the technology company Bendix Corporation, of which he was the chairman of the board.
Johnson made him U.S. Ambassador and chief U. S. negotiator at the Kennedy Round General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade talks in Geneva, considered to be one of the world's most significant multilateral trade negotiations.[2]
In 1973, Blumenthal was one of the founding members of the Trilateral Commission. From 1977 to 1979, he was Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinet of US President Jimmy Carter. Blumenthal first met Carter in 1975 at a meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Japan.[6]
He became vice president in 1980 and chairman of the Board of Burroughs Corporation in 1981. He merged the computer company with Sperry in 1986 to form Unisys, of which he also became chairman.[7] After that, from 1990 to 1996, he was a partner of the investment bank Lazard Frères & Co. LLC and began writing his autobiography.
In 1997 he was appointed as the founding director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He succeeded in expanding the museum into the largest Jewish museum in Europe. In June 2014, he announced that he was resigning from his position at his own request as of September 1, 2014.[8][9]
Blumenthal was a member of the Advisory Board of the investment bank Evercore Partners, the American Jewish Committee in Berlin and the International Rescue Committee. He was a member of the board of Trustees of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Princeton and Century Club.
Event Participated in
| Event | Start | End | Location(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilderberg/1972 | 21 April 1972 | 23 April 1972 | Belgium Hotel La Reserve Knokke | The 21st Bilderberg, 102 guests. It spawned the Trilateral Commission. |
References
- ↑ https://www.jmberlin.de/en/topic-w-michael-blumenthal
- ↑ Jump up to: a b c d http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20068654,00.html
- ↑ Katz, Bernard S., and Vencill, Daniel. Biographical Dictionary of the United States Secretaries of the Treasury, Greenwood Publishing (1996)
- ↑ Jump up to: a b http://www.princetonmagazine.com/michael-blumenthals-search-for-answers-takes-him-full-circle-back-to-berlin/
- ↑ Katz, Bernard S., and Vencill, Daniel. Biographical Dictionary of the United States Secretaries of the Treasury, Greenwood Publishing (1996)
- ↑ Kaufman, Burton Ira. The Carter Years, Infobase Publishing (2006) p. 47
- ↑ https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Wir-gingen-wie-wir-kamen-zum-80-Geburtstag-von-Michael-Blumenthal-162276.html
- ↑ http://www.focus.de/panorama/boulevard/museen-peter-schaefer-wird-direktor-des-juedischen-museums-berlin_id_3932584.html
- ↑ http://jmberlin.de/main/DE/06-Presse/01-Pressemitteilungen/2014/2014_06_19.php
