Leo Cherne; Former Refugee Relief Leader

Leo Cherne, who was directly involved in most of the major refugee movements of the last four decades as head of the International Relief Committee, has died in New York. He was 86.

For 40 years ending in 1991, Cherne was the chairman of the private, New York-based relief organization, which was founded in 1931 to assist escapees from Nazi oppression in Europe. He was known as a dogged champion of refugees fleeing persecution.

A lawyer and economist, Cherne was “one of the most combative men ever bred,” William F. Buckley Jr. wrote some years ago. “If he thought he was right about something, he would spend from now until doomsday pressing his view.”

He advised nine presidents and helped oversee the CIA as a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1973 to 1991. He was staunchly anti-Communist.

In 1947, he became the first person to debate Sen. Joseph McCarthy before a national audience, on a radio program called “America’s Town Meeting of the Air.” Disgusted by McCarthy’s demagogic tactics, he took him on again in 1952, at the peak of McCarthy’s influence. That debate was considered so effective in exposing the senator that Life magazine published the entire transcript.

John Whitehead, the current chairman of the International Relief Committee, remembers Cherne as a fiery speaker and a hands-on leader who would take ad-hoc “citizens committees” right into trouble spots. He “loved the drama that revolved around violations of human freedom,” Whitehead said.

During the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Cherne and another International Rescue Committee official drove an old Chevrolet filled with medical supplies across the border from Austria to Soviet-occupied Budapest, periodically halted by armed men belonging to the popular forces. He was in Cuba in the early 1960s, in Cambodia in 1975, in Nairobi in 1977.

“Just get there and do something,” Cherne would say whenever a crisis producing refugees erupted somewhere on the globe.

He raised millions of dollars for the relief organization, which was struggling financially when Cherne succeeded theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as its chairman. When Cherne returned from Hungary, he got himself booked on the Ed Sullivan television show to tell the American public about the plight of the refugees fleeing Soviet tanks. His appeal brought an immediate flood of donations, eventually totaling $2.5 million.

His front-line experiences touched him deeply, as he noted in a Saturday Review article he wrote after his mission in Hungary:

“As you drive at night through shattered streets over glass and rubble, tangling your car in overhead electric cables lying in the streets in distorted shapes everywhere, you suddenly know with nauseating shock that under your wheels is something which had been alive just yesterday.”

He was also a gifted sculptor. His bust of Albert Schweitzer, whom he met in Lambarene in what is now Gabon in 1954, was displayed in the Smithsonian. His head of Abraham Lincoln graced the Cabinet room of the White House. He also molded bronze images of Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ralph Bunche, Eleanor Roosevelt and Boris Pasternak.

Born on Sept. 18, 1912, Cherne was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He attended public schools, New York University and New York Law School.

He worked in several law firms and became an expert on the new Social Security law. In the mid-1930s, he became partners with a Kansas Bible salesman named Carl Hovgard to sell a book about how to deal with the new law. Their venture grew into the Research Institute of America, which provided business leaders and policymakers with Cherne’s assessments of how world events would affect them.

Every year Cherne delivered his economic and political forecasts in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria before hundreds of businessmen, politicians and others. Buckley, who attended many of the sessions, wrote that he was in awe of the “sheer gall” of Cherne’s astute predictions.

His forecasts earned him a national and international reputation. In the prewar years, Cherne helped plan the mobilization of industry for the war effort. After the war, he advised Gen. Douglas MacArthur on the reconstruction of the Japanese economy.

All of this prepared him for what Aaron Levenstein, author of a history of the International Rescue Committee, called “the major preoccupation” of Cherne’s life, saving those who sought freedom.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan awarded Cherne the Medal of Freedom, citing his “moral passion” in the service of refugees.

Just days before he succumbed Tuesday after a long battle with pulmonary disease, Cherne told Lionel Olmer, a former undersecretary of commerce and friend for 25 years, how he wanted to be remembered.

“He was an anti-Communist from the beginning,” Olmer said Thursday. “He said, ‘I want to be remembered as a cold warrior.’ ”