As a self-described “Jewish kid from Brooklyn,” Arthur Sackler did not advertise his Jewish roots in the WASP world of Madison Avenue.1 One of Sackler’s attorneys recalled how many times Sackler endured the ingrained anti-Semitism that was a hallmark of the 1950s New York ad business: “You would sit at meetings where they would tell Jewish jokes, anti-Jewish jokes, and you had to sit there and swallow it, and laugh along with the boys.”2 Sackler did not like it. He did not protest, however. Arthur instead decided his best revenge would be to beat his rival Mad Men, most of whom came from privileged families and boasted of Ivy League degrees, exclusive country club memberships, and listings in the society pages.
Arthur was born in Brooklyn in 1913 to Sophie and Isaac Sackler, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who ran a small grocery store. They named him Abraham, after his grandfather (he later used that only on legal papers and opted instead for the less Jewish-sounding Arthur). When he was five, an influenza epidemic killed more than thirty thousand New Yorkers. The family’s Flatbush neighborhood was hard hit. It was then, he later said, that he first thought of becoming a doctor.
After Sackler tested well on an IQ test, he joined a small class for gifted students at Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School. There were few Jews; and one of the teachers was overtly anti-Semitic.3 Sackler kept a quiet profile, outperforming others while dividing his free time visiting the Brooklyn Museum or taking the subway to Manhattan to study with noted sculptor Chaim Gross at the Lower East Side’s Educational Alliance Art School.4
After graduating from Erasmus, he enrolled in New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences, then situated on top of a hill in the Bronx.5 His major was English drama and at night he took classes on art history at tuition-free Cooper Union.6
His parents were hardworking. The savage downturn of the Great Depression, however, cost them their business and wiped out their savings, as it did for many of their neighbors and friends.7 They had two more sons by then, Mortimer and Raymond. Unless Arthur found a job with a decent wage, he could not afford his NYU tuition, much less indulge his art interests. Ever practical, he added premed courses to his curriculum. “Unfortunately, early in life,” he later recalled, “I realized my limitations.”8
Given his financial pressures, art could not long compete with medicine as a career choice. The widespread belief among many recently arrived immigrants was that unrestrained capitalism had led to the economic collapse. That kindled Sackler’s early attraction to left-wing politics.9 Socialism was dominant in New York’s Jewish neighborhoods. Sackler’s parents had been part of the enormous wave of two million Jews from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires that arrived in America during a four-decade span ending in 1920. Living in overcrowded tenements and working long hours at factories in unsafe and harsh conditions, New York Jews became the force behind trade unions. Integral to the message about workers’ rights were underlying socialist themes about developing a cooperative, classless society. Sackler’s parents subscribed to Forverts (Forward), a socialist daily that, with a quarter million readers, was also the world’s largest Yiddish newspaper. Many of their Brooklyn neighbors belonged to the United Hebrew Trades, an umbrella socialist organization designed to mobilize the Jewish workers who dominated the garment industry.10 Jews accounted for 40 percent of New York’s Socialist Party (not as shocking a figure as it might at first glance seem since Jews made up one third of the city’s population).11 The year before Arthur’s birth, the Socialist candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, garnered nearly a million votes (6 percent of the popular vote). Sixty percent of New York’s Jewish voters voted for him.12
Arthur was one of a small group of committed Marxists at NYU. He had little opportunity, however, as an editor for the Journal of the Medical Students Association to indulge his politics. For protests over undergraduate rights, Sackler produced a “very crude strike bulletin.”13 He also handled demands and negotiations with the college administration on behalf of his striking fellow students.14 Mostly, however, to pay his bills he took a series of part-time jobs at Drake Business Schools, the Medical Bulletin of Bellevue Hospital, and even a few months at William Douglas McAdams, a four-person firm that specialized in the just emerging field of medical advertising. It sounded dull but germane to his studies. There Sackler learned he had a talent for writing ad copy.15
During his last year of medical school, he met Else Finnich Jorgensen, the daughter of a Danish family that had recently emigrated to America. After a short courtship he proposed. Sophie Sackler was crushed that her eldest son would marry a non-Jew. It was such a source of contention that Else converted to Judaism.16 Sackler was only twenty-four when he graduated in 1937 from the NYU School of Medicine with specialties in psychiatry and neuroendocrinology. He began a rotating internship at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, run by New York City’s Department of Public Welfare.17
Arthur’s younger brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, decided to follow him into medicine. Just a couple of months after Arthur’s graduation, Mortimer got the bad news that he had failed to get one of the spots then allotted for Jews in New York’s medical schools. So Mortimer instead sailed steerage to the U.K.18 In Glasgow, the Jewish community helped him get admitted to the well-respected Anderson College of Medicine. Two years later the same happened to Raymond.19
During the spare time of his hospital internship, Arthur raised money to support Norman Bethune, a Canadian physician Sackler called his “moral exemplar.”20 Bethune was a committed communist who had volunteered as a battlefield surgeon for anti-fascist fighters in Spain before moving to China in 1938 to join the communist insurrection. Mao Zedong commissioned him to lead a mobile operating unit at the front. Arthur thought Bethune was a model for what a politically committed doctor might achieve.
By the time Arthur completed his residency in December 1939, however, Bethune was dead at forty-nine. He had cut himself during a battlefield operation and the resulting blood infection proved fatal. Years later everyone would know as much about Bethune as Sackler did; Chairman Mao made him a hero of the Communist Revolution by dedicating an essay to him.21 And Arthur, when he visited China much later to sponsor medical conferences, told his Chinese hosts that nothing would be a greater honor for him than to be “a present-day Bethune.”22
Bethune’s death put Sackler into a funk. His parents were distressed to learn he had skipped the state medical exam, the final requirement before he could practice as a physician. Instead, the twenty-seven-year-old learned about a job at Schering, the American subsidiary of the German pharma company. Schering hired Sackler as the deputy to the director of its four-person Medical Information Division, the company’s bare-bones ad department.23 One of his jobs while working through school had been selling ads for Drake Business Schools and the Medical Bulletin of Bellevue Hospital.24 He had told friends he thought many advertisers wasted their money since they did not know how to put a good sales pitch into a few columns of newsprint. The Schering post gave him a chance to prove he knew better. He tried jump-starting Schering’s stagnant product line by creating the first graphic ads in medical journals. Before long he was pestering management in vain for a larger budget for a direct mail campaign.
World War II had been under way a few months by the time Arthur began working at Schering. He was one of the few in the forty-person executive suite who was not a native-born German.25 Some recent arrivals, he learned, were German Jews, although none advertised that. Dr. Julius Weltzien, the CEO, was the son of a Christian schoolteacher father and a nonpracticing Jewish mother.26 By Nazi race laws he was Jewish. Weltzien was one of seven “Jewish” managers and senior executives the German parent had transferred to America in 1938. By the end of that year, Schering in Germany had purged all Jewish directors in order to get a Certificate in Good Standing as an Aryan Company (the Nazi Ministry of Economics complained the following year that the U.S. branch was merely a subterfuge that kept Jews in management).27
America did not prove much of a safe haven for men like Weltzien.28 Declassified FBI files obtained by the author reveal that the Bureau investigated German and Swiss pharmaceutical firms in America even before the U.S. formally entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It suspected that Schering, Hoffmann-La Roche, and Ciba Chemical were conduits for money to blacklisted countries. Schering, in particular, had obtained from several German conglomerates the exclusive patent rights for drugs the FBI considered “of great importance from the standpoint of national defense.”29 The U.S. military had concluded that its “adrenalin hormone which is used in the treatment of shock, especially shock resulting from severe burns and wounds, is of direct and immediate importance to our war efforts [and could]… have saved the lives of thousands of English soldiers after Dunkirk.”30
The FBI suspected that Schering sold those drugs through “Panamanian dummy corporations” and then funneled the profits to “a Swiss Holding company.” The FBI concluded the conspiracy had resulted in $2.5 million ($23 million in 2018) making its way to “Nazi controlled banks.”31 The British Ministry of Economic Warfare urged the U.S. to freeze Schering’s accounts. The British charged that the company bankrolled a network of Nazi agents in foreign countries and its trade with South America was a sophisticated scheme to circumvent the British blockade of Europe.32 As a result, the FBI pressured Weltzien and other executives, demanding they cooperate or be investigated for espionage.
FBI files reveal the Bureau had developed six confidential informants at Schering. One reported that during the previous year “a Jewish influence had been growing in the company… the management was Jewish.” That unidentified source reported that Weltzien “denies the fact that he is a Jew” although the informant “feels sure he is.”33 To another, Weltzien admitted his mother was Jewish but insisted he was not, and that he was first and foremost a German.34
Hiding a Jewish family background was not unusual in Hitler’s Germany. The Bureau had mistakenly thought that that fear would disappear for Germans who had recently emigrated to America. Yet they did not feel safe simply because they were several thousand miles away from Germany. They worried about the safety of relatives left behind. (Weltzien’s mother later killed herself instead of being deported to a concentration camp.)35
If Weltzien was Jewish, the FBI wondered if that made it less likely that the New Jersey subsidiary played a key role in an elaborate scheme to funnel money to the Third Reich. According to the Bureau’s chief informant, Weltzien and the other emigrant executives were “international Jews who would pour oil on both fires [Allied and Axis powers] if a profit was in sight.”36 Still, the FBI obtained information from Schering’s few American Jewish employees, including Sackler. Declassified FBI files reveal that Arthur secretly helped the government agents: “Dr. Sackler is considered to be completely reliable and was of considerable assistance to the investigation.”37
American socialists and communists were justifiably suspicious of the FBI; the Bureau treated membership in many left-wing organizations and political groups as proof of seditious intent. Sackler’s cooperation is strong evidence that his distaste for Hitler’s Third Reich trumped whatever apprehensions he had about helping the Bureau. (Arthur later told his family that he had volunteered to be drafted when the war broke out but had been rejected because of nearsightedness. The author was unable to verify whether he ever applied for military service.)38
During this period Arthur met Ludwig Wolfgang Fröhlich, a German who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1936 after a brief stopover in Bermuda.39 Fröhlich, who applied the following year for American citizenship, would play a critical role in Sackler’s life.40 The same age as Arthur, he worked at the American subsidiary of a German typesetting firm. He Americanized his name to Bill and dropped the umlaut. If someone later asked what the W stood for, he said William. Frohlich was formal and charming. Colleagues and friends took notice of his tailored suits and talked about his refined sense of style.41
The no-nonsense Sackler with his sharp Brooklyn accent and the suave, softly spoken Frohlich would seem to have little in common. They shared a love of fine art, however, and were hugely ambitious in an era where such an admission was considered gauche. They became close friends.42
In the social watering holes on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to which Frohlich gravitated, he focused on cultivating the right connections to gain entrée to New York’s old-money crowd. He never talked about his past and steered away from conversations about the tumultuous events wracking Europe and his native Germany. An aura of mystery allowed plenty of rumors about him. At first, many thought he was a Jew who had fled Hitler. But that seemed less likely the more they got to know him. The friends he sought were from influential WASP families, many listed in the Social Register.
If Frohlich was not Jewish, then the gossipers wondered if he might be a Nazi. That rumor reached the FBI. The Bureau conducted a brief but intensive background check and failed to uncover any link to the Third Reich.43
Arthur Sackler was one of the very few who knew Frohlich was Jewish. Arthur understood the reasons why his new friend wanted it a secret. A surprisingly small number of colleagues knew that Sackler was Jewish.44
Hiding one’s religion had not been easy in Nazi Germany. When applying in 1934 to Frankfurt’s Goethe University, for instance, Frohlich filled an admissions form for “non-Aryans.” On it, he noted that his family had lived in Germany since the fifteenth century and that his father fought for Germany in World War I. He also had to admit, however, that neither his parents nor grandparents were “of Aryan origin” (Nazis race laws considered anyone with one Jewish grandparent to be Jewish themselves).45 The answer was also no as to whether his family had “renounced their Jewish faith.”46
Frohlich had made a wide circle of well-placed friends before his younger sister, Ingrid, and their mother arrived in New York in 1938. His connections helped land the five-foot-eight Ingrid a coveted job as a couture model for Sophie Gimbel, the noted American designer who ran Saks Fifth Avenue’s fabled Salon Moderne custom dress shop. Sophie was the first female clothing designer to make the cover of Time.47 Only a wealthy clientele—including the Woolworths, du Ponts, Huttons, Dukes, and Loebs—could afford her steep prices, ranging from popular day dresses at $300 to $1,500 for hand-stitched evening gowns ($5,463 to $27,315 in 2019 dollars).48
Since working at Sophie’s put Ingrid in touch with a rarefied crowd, the Frohlichs decided it was important to their new lives in America not only to deny their Judaism but to go out of their way to do so.49 The author discovered that the last time either admitted to being Jewish was on their U.S. immigration papers, in which “German/Hebrew” is listed for both as nationality.50 Ingrid, in particular, was insistent she was not Jewish.51 “Christian” was her answer if asked about religion (later changed to “Lutheran” before finally becoming “Catholic”). A distant relative recalled years later that Ingrid often said, “Those Jewish people, I can’t stand them.”52
It worked. Ingrid became one of Sophie’s top models. She was the personal favorite of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée for whom the King of England, Edward VIII, had abdicated his throne. British intelligence was so concerned about Edward and Simpson’s pro-German sympathies that the government exiled the couple to the Bahamas for five years. There, Edward served as the island’s governor. Simpson battled boredom with regular shopping sprees to the U.S. Her carefree lifestyle angered many in Britain who endured constant German bombs, rockets, blackouts, and strict food rationing.
Sometimes Ingrid flew to Miami to model some of Sophie’s designs for the duchess. During one trip she met her future husband, a wealthy Florida accountant, Thomas Burns. After they wed she became Kathleen Ingrid Burns and made an easy transition from the insular world of Sophie’s salon to social seasons in New York and Palm Beach.53 She joined the two most exclusive and prominent Palm Beach country clubs, the Bath and Tennis Club and Everglades Club, both of which enforced a “no Jews” admission policy.54 In Manhattan, she became a member of the Colony Club, an all-women’s club most famous for Eleanor Roosevelt’s resignation after it rejected the membership application of Elinor Morgenthau, the wife of FDR’s secretary of the treasury, Henry (the Morgenthaus were Jewish). The club was not apologetic about its exclusionary policy.55
Meanwhile, Ludwig joined Manhattan’s University Club, which also barred Jews (that policy ended in 1962).56 It was not long before he collected an eclectic and creative group of friends, including composer Aaron Copland and soprano Birgit Nilsson. When he later bought an East 63rd Street townhouse, he hosted parties that were coveted invites.57 And with Ingrid, he purchased a small retreat in East Hampton. There he became a member of the Devon Yacht Club and both joined the exclusive Maidstone Club.58
Judaism was not L. W. Frohlich’s only secret. Only a couple of his closest friends knew he was gay. For the rest of the world, he was one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, often in the company of beautiful women.59 “He will never settle down,” was the common refrain from the gossipy dowagers who saw him with different dates at social events.
Two years after meeting Sackler, Frohlich left his job at the typesetting firm to launch his own art studio. Sackler tried helping him in his new venture by sending a lot of Schering’s typesetting and graphics work.60 Sackler was not only enjoying his work inside the ad department, but his medical degree gave him a role in drafting booklets that Schering sent to doctors from its Medical Research Division.61
That work at Schering was short lived. Not long after the December 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor, newspapers reported the Roosevelt administration was preparing to select an Alien Property Custodian. That had last happened during World War I, when the federal government seized assets of all significant German-owned properties in America. Arthur Sackler recognized that the only way Schering might avoid that same fate was if an American owned it.
Arthur had become familiar with Schering’s strengths and weaknesses and was confident the right owner could turn it into a far more powerful pharmaceutical company than the one the government might seize. He arranged a meeting with Alfred Stern, the heir to a wealthy banking family, who had himself earned a small fortune in Chicago real estate. Stern’s first marriage had been to one of the daughters of Julius Rosenwald, the part owner of Sears and Roebuck and one of the country’s most progressive philanthropists. He had assumed control of the family’s charitable foundation after Rosenwald’s 1932 death. One of Stern’s first endeavors was to fund the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago, dedicated to research about the causes and treatment of mental illness. That intrigued Sackler, who had decided that if he ever became a practicing physician, it would be as a psychiatrist.62
By the time Sackler reached out to him, Stern had divorced Rosenwald’s daughter and remarried. His new wife was Martha Dodd, the daughter of an American historian and diplomat. She had a secret. Soviet intelligence had recruited her as an agent while she was living with her father, the U.S. ambassador to Germany before World War II.63 Martha soon converted Stern into an enthusiastic backer of left-wing causes, including Modern Age Books, an experimental paperback publisher of radical literature.64 Stern had moved to New York, bought an East Side townhouse, and worked from an expansive office in Rockefeller Center. He became a director of New York’s Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a haven for many left-wing intellectuals and militants fighting under the broad banner of “tenants’ rights.”
Sackler liked Stern’s politics, activism, and his bank account. And Stern liked that someone who held only the number two spot in an underutilized part of Schering had the gumption to want to buy the company. But they could not act quickly enough. Beginning in January 1942, federal agents entered Schering and took physical control of its New Jersey headquarters.65 The Alien Property Custodian was formally appointed the following month and straightaway seized all German-owned corporate assets in the U.S. (It took ten years before Schering was sold at public auction for $29 million—$281 million in 2019 dollars—to the Plough family and renamed Schering-Plough).66
Frohlich sold his design studio in early 1943 and launched L. W. Frohlich Inc., a medical advertising agency, at a nine-story brick townhouse at 34 East 51st Street. Parke-Davis became his first client. Sackler had introduced Frohlich to a senior vice president there. He knew they both shared a passion for opera and had season tickets to the Metropolitan.67 Sackler correctly figured that would open the door to business.68
Arthur was uncharacteristically undecided about what to do next. It was an unplanned opportunity for him to spend more time with Else and their first child, Carol, born the previous August. He vacillated about taking the state medical exam. Although he had little desire to begin private practice, it would give an option of working one day with his brothers, Mortimer and Raymond. They were only several years away from getting their own MD degrees. While Arthur had worked at Schering toying with new marketing concepts, Mortimer had switched schools and finished his studies at Middlesex University School of Medicine in Waltham, Massachusetts (on land occupied now by Brandeis). Raymond, who had volunteered during the Battle of Britain serving as a plane spotter for the British Home Guard, followed his brother back to Middlesex. Their timing was auspicious. They got their degrees just before the school lost its accreditation, disqualifying some graduates from taking the state boards.69
On January 29, 1944, twenty-three-year-old Raymond married nineteen-year-old Beverly Feldman, a premed student at New York University. She was from a working-class Jewish family in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as the Sacklers.70 Raymond and Beverly shared Arthur’s hard-line leftist politics. A confidential informant had secretly taken photos of the 1944 membership list of the Communist Party of America (CPA) Kensington Club on Church Avenue in Brooklyn. Among the names were Raymond Sackler and Beverly Feldman, both of whom the FBI discovered were card-carrying party members. When the newlyweds moved temporarily to Boston that April so Raymond could finish his Middlesex studies, they transferred their membership to the party’s Boston chapter.71 On Raymond’s graduation that September, the couple returned to Brooklyn. Beverly began studies at NYU Medical School while Raymond started as an intern at Harlem Hospital. Again, they requested their party memberships be returned to the local New York chapter.72
The couple had joined the Communist Party during its peak in the years following the Great Depression and World War II. The party had only 6,000 members before the 1929 stock market crash. A decade later it was 66,000.73 In the 1930s and 1940s, half the members were Jewish, mostly Eastern European immigrant families like the Sacklers and Feldmans.74 According to A. B. Magil, a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party who later worked for Arthur, “a reliable source” told him that “all three Sacklers had been party members early on, but not for long.”75 I
Raymond and Beverly remained steadfast communists through a period that tested the faith of some party loyalists. Joseph Stalin’s show trials of the old Bolshevik party leaders began in the mid-1930s. It was the start of Stalin’s bloody and brutal “Great Purge.” Germany’s communists had helped the Nazis bring down the Weimar Republic. Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler and then joined the Nazis in conquering and dividing Poland in September 1939.
The file the FBI opened on Raymond and Beverly in 1944 remained active at least until 1968. The Bureau occasionally assigned agents to call or visit the Sacklers, always under some concocted story, to discover if their Communist Party affiliation made them security risks.76 The family always refused to discuss any political allegiances with the FBI.77
While Raymond and Mortimer were in their first-year residencies at Harlem Hospital in 1944, Arthur took a career detour. Frohlich told him there was an opening at William Douglas McAdams. Arthur had a part-time job there eight years earlier while working his way through New York University. William Douglas McAdams, a Chicago journalist, had started his agency in 1926 with consumer accounts that included Van Camp Beans and Mother’s Oats. He later convinced Squibb it could sell more of its cod liver oil if it advertised to doctors in medical journals. That campaign doubled Squibb’s cod liver oil sales in under a year.78 McAdams boasted to Sackler that his agency was the nation’s largest medical advertiser. He hired Arthur and gave him the impressive title of “medical and creative director.”79 It did not take Sackler very long to realize that being the country’s biggest medical ad firm was not much to boast about given that the market was tiny.
In addition to his new McAdams job, Arthur also started a part-time residency that same year at Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, a seven-thousand-bed state mental institution.80 The little free time he had vanished once he was promoted in record time to become vice president of McAdams.81
Mortimer and Raymond followed Arthur to Creedmoor. All three shared a belief that mental illness likely had biochemical roots that could be treated, or at least controlled, with medication.82 That concept countered the prevailing Freudian theory that mental disorders were the result of people’s experiences. The problem wasn’t Freud, Arthur wrote years later in an essay about the future of psychiatry, but rather that the search for “an organic foundation” of mental illness “was obscured, if not lost, in the brilliance of his psychodynamics.”83 There was little funding for research into organic causes or pharmaceutical treatments.
The Sacklers saw little hope in earlier and cruder treatments, including electroshock and lobotomies. Instead, they hoped at Creedmoor to establish a research institute, supported by state funding, that concentrated on nascent drug therapies, primarily hormones.
American psychiatry, which was in its heyday in the 1950s, accommodated their left-wing politics. The FBI had placed an undercover informant inside the American Communist Party during the 1940s. In congressional testimony and public interviews the following decade, the informant disclosed that the party had a secret “professional unit” composed of “psychiatrists, psychologists, medical doctors and social, health and welfare workers.”84 “A huge percentage of young psychiatrists in the 1930s and 1940s considered themselves to be Marxists,” history and psychology professor Ben Harris told the author.85
Arthur wanted to find work that would allow him to merge his medical knowledge and political zeal. During World War II, he got angry about the Red Cross’s policy of refusing all blood donations from blacks, and later accepting them but segregating both the collection and dispensing of white and black blood. Although the Army’s surgeon general realized there was no convincing medical reason for separating blood by race, he advised the assistant secretary of war that it was “psychologically important in America.” Labor unions, some activist black newspapers, militant left-wing newsletters, and the American Communist Party were at the forefront demanding change. The communists condemned the blood drive segregation as “Barbarian Hitlerism.” Sackler was outspoken, calling it ridiculous, and he might even have helped some students at Harlem’s P.S. 43 with posters they distributed protesting the Red Cross policy. (The Red Cross ended its blood segregation policy in 1949. Arkansas required it until 1969 and Louisiana until 1972.)86
Sackler’s activism brought him to the attention of the FBI in 1945. In a forty-nine-page memo sent to J. Edgar Hoover, the New York field office provided details about a February fundraising dinner at Times Square’s Hotel Astor for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (it was soon placed on the attorney general’s List of Subversive Organizations).87 The ostensible purpose was to honor playwright Lillian Hellman, and to kick off a $750,000 fundraising drive to fight Spanish fascists (Pablo Picasso was an honorary chairman). Poet Dorothy Parker introduced Hellman, who had just returned from the Soviet Union. Hellman was one of the first Americans allowed to visit the Red Army at the front, and she regaled the audience with stories of how Russians fought for Soviet-style communism. There were several dozen banquet tables, each with ten paying guests; all proceeds went to the money drive. The FBI obtained a list of attendees. Table 72 was “Arthur and Else Sackler and Bill Frohlich.”88 Three months later, the FBI noted the Sacklers attended another Refugee Committee fundraiser, this time a “Doctor’s Dinner” at the Hotel Commodore.89
The FBI understood that not everyone at left-wing fundraisers was a communist, much less a security threat. However, it also realized that while the American Communist Party had about 70,000 card-carrying members by 1945, there were many more supporters who were not formal members. When the Cold War got under way after World War II ended, the Bureau focused on Soviet espionage. At the top of the FBI’s suspect list were committed communists and those sympathetic to the Red cause.
In 1947, Arthur pushed politics into the background to concentrate on his career. He took the state medical exam and received his license to practice as Abraham Sackler. Mortimer got his medical license a few months later, and Raymond got his the following year.90 The author uncovered that just a couple of years before the trio got their professional licenses, they had incorporated Pharmaceutical Research Associates, their first joint business.91 It was one of the earliest companies dedicated to conducting safety trials for new drugs. As the requirements for drug approval tightened in the coming decades, it designed and managed trials and prepared and submitted regulatory filings. Pharmaceutical Research Associates also bore a feature that would be a Sackler trademark in many future ventures: their ownership was secret.92 Dr. Alfred Halpern, a Sackler family friend, was the only publicly listed name associated with the firm through the 1950s. Its address was 17 East 62nd Street, a five-story limestone townhouse that figured prominently in future Sackler ventures.93
It was not long after Arthur got his medical license that he told Mortie and Ray, as he called them, that he needed to reduce his Creedmoor workload.94 He and his wife, Else, had saved enough to buy a one third share of William Douglas McAdams. It was one of the few companies in which the Sacklers could not remain anonymous. It was a prescient move; just as the breakthrough with antibiotics was revolutionizing the drug business, it would soon foster a competitive market tailor-made for modern advertising.II95
I. The FBI file for Beverly Sackler, née Feldman, is thus far only declassified in part. The FBI informed the author that at least one file on Raymond Sackler, created by the New York Field Office (100-NY-75887) was destroyed by the Bureau on November 12, 1970. That was, according to the FBI, done as a “periodic destruction of records pursuant to a legal schedule.” The author consulted with an attorney specializing in the Freedom of Information Act. Pending the release of additional information now withheld by the FBI, it is not possible to verify if that purge of the New York field office file on Raymond Sackler was in accordance with the statutory requirements. The FBI identified to the author four additional, still-classified files, as potentially relevant to Raymond Sackler and/or Arthur Sackler. The author filed a public access records request for those files to the National Archives Special Access division. The Archives deemed that two, both from the Boston FBI—100-BS-15 and 100-BS-589—were “unresponsive to your request.” Although they were about Americans who were Communist Party members in the Boston area, they had “no mention of any of the Sacklers.” Two other files—100-HQ-340415 and 100-NY-75702—were responsive. They contain a total of approximately 350 pages about Arthur Sackler; the headquarters files (HQ) are an investigation into Arthur from March 1945 to July 1968, and the New York office file (NY) covers an FBI probe into him from November 1944 to July 1968. Although both files are in the Archives’ first-tier processing queue, the Archives estimates that it is unlikely that a review and release of information shall take place before April 2020. The author became aware of another FBI file focused solely on Arthur Sackler—100-NY-75887—not in the possession of the National Archives but likely still in the Bureau’s custody. A formal request for declassification of that file was made in April 2018 and it is pending with the Bureau’s Freedom of Information Office. Finally, University of New Hampshire professor Ben Harris provided the author a copy of eighty-nine pages released by the FBI in 1999 subject to his request about Arthur Sackler (FOIPA No. 442908).
II. The author discovered that one third remained with William McAdams, and one third was owned by Helen Haberman, the company’s executive vice president. By 1953, McAdams’s share was reduced to 10 percent and Arthur and Else had 46 percent with Haberman holding 44 percent.