Unraveling my family’s Cold War mystery: Why did UN General Counsel Abraham Feller really die?

When I first learned about my great uncle, Abe Feller, he had been dead by suicide for many years, his story bronzed into family myth. It was recited more than told, chanted with the rhythm of prayer: editor of the Harvard Law Review; youngest attorney to argue before the World Court; Harvard Law professor; member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust;” co-author of the United Nations charter, and its first General Counsel. And all the while, he performed feats of intellectual derring-do that had become family legend, such as reading The Encyclopedia Britannica cover-to-cover and learning Italian in a week.

Still, Abe has never felt like an integral part of our family’s larger story. He’s a bright tangent, a rocket that explodes in mid-flight and stops conversations. Whenever his name came up, a cousin would murmur, “Roy Cohn—it was Cohn who destroyed his life. Simple as that.” But then, nothing. Not even the wistful trailing-off typically inspired by absent friends or uncles.

In my family’s mythology, the Abe Feller who plunged to his death during the Red Scare is embodied in equal measure as the exemplary and the damaged, the inspirational and the cautionary. I often asked my grandparents about him. But they would recite the legend and change the subject at the mention of his irradiated name.

The Abe that I learned about, mostly from his sister — my grandmother Gertrude Arkin — was the public Abraham Feller, the one in newspaper archives and approved biographies. He was slightly built, prematurely balding, a driven attorney who, as he plunged from his 12th-floor Manhattan apartment in 1952, was the U.N.’s most powerful figure, save for the Secretary-General, Trygve Lie. A Norwegian politician, Lie was in many ways Abe’s opposite — a large, blustery figure who posed for photographs with feet spread wide and hands jammed into the pockets of pin-striped suits. My great uncle was ensconced in an office next to Lie’s in the organization’s new headquarters, a blue glass modernist gem on First Avenue that Abe had been instrumental in building.

He’d proudly participated in the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the U.N. compound in 1949, just three years after Joseph McCarthy had been elected to the Senate. In the two years it had taken for the headquarters to rise over the East River, the former poultry farmer had become a TV star, a dominant force in American politics, and the face of an era-defining “ism.” 

Yet McCarthy was not nearly the most prolific red hunter of the era. That honor went to Nevada Senator Pat McCarran, a silver-pompadoured scourge of the welfare state who had been holding hearings on the question of “Who Lost China?” for a year before McCarthy was elected.  

In June of 1952, McCarran teamed with a new assistant attorney general — the driven, young, slightly built, and prematurely balding Roy Cohn — to look into suspected subversives at the U.N. Feller must have understood the threat the pair represented to the organization, but family members say he seemed untroubled by the gathering storm and assured them that the U.N. and its employees would be protected from the vagaries of American politics.

When I read that Abe had testified in front of a federal grand jury looking into “Fifth Amendment Communists” at the United Nations in October of 1952, it was difficult for me to see how he had presented a likely target for Cohn. He had been vetted by the U.N., the State Department, and the Office of War Information, and no one had found any suggestion he was, or ever had been, a member of the Communist Party.

The story of Abe’s appearance before Cohn’s grand jury summoned the memory of the first time I’d heard about the event from my grandfather, Abe’s brother-in-law. The rise and fall of Grandpa’s chest, as he remembered how troubled Abe had been by his “invitation” to testify. “Terrible, terrible. Unavoidable. Terrible,” he’d said.

My grandfather’s memory invited the question of why Abe had been questioned by the prosecutor in the first place. A former New Dealer, an academic, an internationalist, he was the type who offended Cohn, but he was almost comically irreproachable. 

His daughter Caroline told stories about sneaking out of bed to spy on the suspiciously quiet parties Abe and his wife, Alice, hosted, only to discover ambassadors and foreign ministers on sofas and wing chairs, each with a book, contentedly reading.

Lie’s rocky tenure at the U.N. (his appointment as Secretary General had never been officially recognized by the Soviet Union, which resented his support for U.N. intervention in the Korean War) ended with his resignation on November 10, 1952, delivering what must have been a hammer blow to my great uncle, who had testified for Cohn only weeks before, and who, only six days before Lie’s resignation, had watched the returns come in for Adlai Stevenson’s loss to Dwight Eisenhower. 

Abe had been a passionate supporter of the unassuming governor of Illinois, a fellow New Dealer whose persona — unapologetically worldly, proudly erudite — no doubt served as a kind of model for him. Republicans had made the 1952 election a referendum, not only on what Stevenson stood for — the expansion of the New Deal — but on the cosmopolitan style he and other believers embodied. Stevenson’s crushing defeat could be seen as not merely a rejection of everything Abe believed in but of the kind of person he was. Abe took Stevenson’s defeat personally because the election had been made personal.

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Uncle Abe had been immersed in liberal New Deal culture his whole professional life. He’d worked 12-hour days at every post he’d held and even spent most of his social time in that work. During the early portions of the dinner parties that Caroline remembers for their study hall ambiance, Abe would preside over pitched battles of an international version of charades he’d designed, featuring agreed-upon hand signals and a “translator” to help decode foreign gestures.

The last trace I could find of joyous Uncle Abe, the pre-1952 Abe of Caroline’s memories, was in his own work, in his last book, “United Nations and World Community,” published days before his death. It’s a heartfelt yet poised defense of the U.N., a respectful consideration of opposing arguments, and a charting of a pragmatic course — straight down the middle of the ideological road.

It’s no page-turner, but Abe was a good writer with a trial lawyer’s sense of story and a knack for dramatic closing arguments. He typically saved the stirring rhetoric for the last few paragraphs of a chapter, in the form of mini St. Crispin’s Day speeches, fanfare for his noble, pragmatic mission:

We can have no illusions about the discouragements which lie ahead. The temptations to write the task off as impossible, or to forget all about it as a tedious bore, will be almost irresistible. The effort will go on because it must. The choice is between the quick and the dead.

The subject of fateful choices came up one day with my grandfather, as we shared a poolside lemonade near the end of a resolve-meltingly humid afternoon at his retirement community. He marveled that Abe had once turned down a “big position” at a corporate law firm for a lot of money. “I can only wear one suit of clothes at a time, Ken,” Abe had said to him. My grandfather dropped his chin to his chest and finally, as if admitting a kind of weary defeat, said: “He always had ashes on his lapel. Cigarette ashes. I had to identify the body, you know.”

He remembered Abe as being in good spirits throughout that final summer. He recalled visiting an art gallery with Abe in late August of 1952, an afternoon spent trading war stories about raising teenage daughters. My grandfather said, “He was rubbing his ear lobe between his fingers all day. He always did that. It was a habit, like a worry stone. But that’s the only sign of trouble I can remember.”

October of 1952 brought a noticeable change. Abe hadn’t talked much about the growing pressure from the committees, but he did say that Cohn had come to his office to demand, “Heads—I don’t care whose.” My grandfather noticed that even when Abe’s book earned an admiring piece in The New York Times Book Review (“unquestionably the best book published” about the U.N.), it did little to lighten his mood.

My grandfather had a vague memory of Abe seeing a psychiatrist that October, grudgingly, at Alice’s insistence. She had been startled by a moment of difficulty he’d had in helping Caroline with her homework. Abe suddenly felt he couldn’t concentrate on the text long enough to understand even a sentence and had emerged from his daughter’s room clutching his head and muttering, “I am losing my mind.”

On November 9, a Sunday, he and Alice enjoyed an early matinee of a new movie with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe, “Monkey Business.” But two days later, while returning from lunch to the apartment with Alice, Abe had stepped absentmindedly into oncoming traffic on Columbus Avenue, to be rescued only by a two-handed tug from his frightened wife, forceful enough to pull him to the concrete.

Three days after Lie’s resignation, on November 13, 1952, Abe woke late, just after Caroline had left for school, at 7 a.m. Still shaken by his wandering into traffic on the previous Monday afternoon, and when she saw that sleep had done nothing to lift the “grayish aspect” she’d observed in Abe the night before, Alice suggested he not go into the office that day. 

She called Dr. Bridge, his psychiatrist, and asked him to come as quickly as possible to the apartment. She steered Abe into the large, airy front room, with its 12-foot ceilings and six windows overlooking the bright yellow elms and orange oaks of Central Park and the shadowed East Side skyline beyond. She talked to him about the Times review for his book, what it might mean for his career, and how touched their daughter had been by its heartfelt dedication: “To Caroline and Her Generation.” She talked about the future.

Alice would later tell reporters: “He began talking about suicide. He said, ‘I’m going to commit suicide’ I couldn’t believe he was serious, but I clung to him…I thought I could reason with him until the doctor came, but he kept saying, ‘The doctors can’t help me. It’s no use. It’s no use.’ He started back through the apartment, and I followed him as swiftly as I could through all the rooms until we came to the den off the kitchen at the rear. I would try to hold him by the arm, or by the head or the body or by the leg….”

Alice pleaded with Abe to think of her, to think of Caroline. She wrapped her arms tightly around his shoulders and screamed to the neighbors for help as Abe opened the narrow window in the room, but her grip weakened and loosened, dropped to his waist and then his legs, until she was grasping only an ankle, and then suddenly only a shoe, a fully tied oxford, still warm from the foot of her husband, who had fallen a dozen stories to his death in an open cellar entrance below.

In his autobiography, Lie would say that when he heard of Abe’s death, “grief and shock overwhelmed me. Abe Feller was nearer to me than anyone else outside the circle of my immediate family…. He was a victim of the witch hunt … the hysterical assault upon the U.N. that reactionaries were using for their own ends.”

And that’s how the story was told to me when I was old enough to hear it: vividly, succinctly, and angrily. Abe had abruptly “snapped” under the pressure of an assault, for which the perpetrators were unapologetic: “If Feller’s conscience was clear,” Senator McCarran said, “he had no reason to suffer from what he expected from our committee.”

No doubt Abe’s conscience was clear of the qualms McCarran was referring to — he’d never attended a meeting of any organization to the left of the Democratic Party. But obviously, something had been deeply troubling him.

The portrait of my great uncle in the written record of his life is a maddeningly positive diary and autobiography entries by Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, and others, recorded interviews of U.N. employees, including novelist and former U.N. staff member Shirley Hazzard and former U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs Brian Urquhart — all testify to his unimpeachable character.

A staffer from the general counsel’s office, Oscar Schacter, considered Abe’s stature and wondered how political pressures could have led to his death:

I don’t know why he committed suicide; he himself was not implicated in a personal way. Many of the top people were…Abe was not as far as I know, there was no reason for him to think that. He was at the height of his influence, not only with Lie, but with major delegates like Acheson… Not many Secretariat people had that, no one really.

Even if I chalked up Abe’s suicide to Cohn and his threats, it was always difficult for me to imagine what those threats might have been. How does a person whom Time called “a tough-minded man who has long shown an abundance of intellectual and physical resiliency” wind up on a window ledge?

I eventually glimpsed a hint of an answer in “United Nations,” Abe’s last book, in that same passage about the U.N.’s role in controlling nuclear weapons.

If the United Nations were useful for nothing else, it would be imperative to keep it alive … We can have no illusions about the discouragements which lie ahead. The temptations to write the task off as impossible, or to forget all about it as a tedious bore, will be almost irresistible. The effort will go on because it must. The choice is between the quick and the dead.

The passage, one of many that sound at first like a battle cry to the happy few of the U.N., can also be read as a therapeutic pep talk to a consciousness facing an existential threat, a gathering of courage in the face of crisis.

In a later chapter, Abe writes,

Superficial listeners might be tempted to think of (these debates) as another symptom of disintegrating… unity. The fissures…are often serious, and there have been and will be crises of serious import. It is inevitable that they should add to our tensions and difficulties.

The diagnostic language of psychological collapse leaps out at me: “symptom,” “disintegrating,” “fissures,” and, of course, “tensions,” the same word he’d used to describe his worsening state to my grandfather shortly before his death.

Then, later, in the book’s closing passage,

The forces of disruption and destruction are powerful. They can be kept within bounds and eventually dissipated only by…moral strength and firm maintenance of a united purpose…

It’s easy to make hints out of coincidence, of course, especially if one is predisposed to finding such hints. I may be hearing more in these words than they were ever meant to (even unconsciously) convey. But it does seem to me that Abe’s last public statements were infused with a tone of private struggle, a call to arms not just against external enemies but buried tectonic forces of “disunity,” a low rumble of anguish that was, on some level, meant to be heard.

There is a popular myth that the McCarthy era was rife with suicides, but Abe’s was one of some half-dozen figures who had been targets of the committees. It made the front pages of newspapers all over the world, was the subject of magazine articles, and was a particular sensation in France where, soon after reading a story about it in a magazine featuring a cover illustration of Abe tumbling headfirst from the grasp of two manicured hands extending from a curtained window, Jean-Paul Sartre began writing a play about him.

The incomplete manuscript was published for the first time in 2005 under the title, “La Part du feu (The Devil’s Portion).”

The philosopher depicted Abe Feller bobbing like a cork on a sea of history, tossed and battered by the imperatives of property, money, and class. The draft feels like a café napkin sketch: schematic and brutally declamatory — the dialogue a parody of existentialist theater shouted through a bullhorn.

For all its cartoonishness, though, the play’s depiction of my great uncle struggling with personal and public identity in a Cold War where everything had been reduced to binary choices rang uncomfortably true.

A 1952 Harvard Law Review essay about Abe depicted a problem-solver happy to strike reasonable bargains and fade into the background: “…a middle-of-the-roader in search of solutions acceptable to all, a compromiser of great skill, an inventor of new formulas….” It was this practiced moderation, this faith in a future made by cosmopolitan men, that the McCarthyites feared.

The McCarthyites warned, in the direst of terms, not about the nationalization of America’s industries but the evolution of its culture, of changes in speech, art, and behavior that amounted to a cataclysm. It was no coincidence that McCarthy’s first targets were members of the entertainment industry.

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The main speaker at Abe’s funeral was his U.N. colleague Ralph Bunche, who had been instrumental in creating and adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The diplomat — and first African American to be awarded a Nobel Prize, for his U.N. work mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict in Palestine — was a ferocious U.N. defender, and his words were revelatory and astonishing.

That afternoon, with Lie just a few feet away, Bunche said: “Hard as it must be to stand up against the demands of Washington, a strong Secretary-General would surely have refused to enter into a secret pact with the State Department under which he agreed not to employ any American citizen who was, or appeared to be, a Communist. Abe Feller, as general, tried desperately to substitute legal procedures for such miserable calculations.”

“…a secret pact with the State Department.”

Abe had been struggling with those who wanted to destroy the U.N. and the man who led it. Internal U.N. memos from and to the General Counsel’s office and historian Paul Ybarra’s “Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt” confirm that in 1952 Abe had been waging a two-front war. 

In Lie’s memoir, “In the Cause of Peace, Seven Years With the United Nations,” the secretary-general complains bitterly about the lack of help he received from member countries in resisting the assault by the witch-hunting congressional committees, yet never acknowledges that he had himself asked the State Department and the FBI in 1949 to provide him the names of American employees of the U.N. suspected of “disloyalty” — or that he’d fired employees whose political leanings might cause him trouble, including those who had exercised their Fifth Amendment privilege not to answer questions from Cohn and this ilk.

Lie was observed by U.N. staffer Alfred Katzin to be so shaken by Abe’s death that he appeared “Like the man in Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman.’ A broken man.” Yet he did little to protect Abe while he was alive.

Lie was no McCarthyite. He had been a devoted socialist, a prominent and vocal member of the Norwegian Labor party in his pre-U.N. career. On the other hand, it certainly would not have been easy for him to refuse to enter into the agreement. But, according to several interviews given by former U.N. employees to the U.N. Oral History Project, as well as Brian Urquhart’s invaluable memoir, “A Life in Peace and War,” he never even put up a fight. And his acquiescence even failed as a political strategy. By 1952 Trygve Lie was the most cordially hated man in New York: toasted at the dais but scorned by an indignant left and vilified by the right.

Lie and Feller were midcentury men — chastened idealists who expected nothing to come easily. That any politician of the era could have wholly avoided making the kind of compromises they did is probably naive. But by fully accommodating the FBI and the State Department’s demands for employee information, Lie had exposed the organization to attacks by its enemies.

And, incredibly, Abe had said yes to the agreement. My great-uncle had signed a secret pact with the FBI and the State Department to screen Americans for political affiliations. The McCarthy and McCarran committees would summon former classmates, ex-girlfriends, and in-laws of suspected U.N. staffers to testify against them. They would ask U.N. employees what they read and how they voted. Husbands and wives of staffers were fired from their jobs. Children were pulled out of schools, and bankruptcies were declared.

News reports and U.N. memos describe Abe arguing for canceling the agreement and seeking to compromise with the congressional committees in hopes of softening the damage they might do. But his arguments failed. He could never meaningfully slow down what he’d helped set in motion. And he would never see his extraordinary loyalty to Lie reciprocated.

Viewed in the context of a fastidiously ethical life, Abe’s support of Lie’s secret pact and his devotion to his invertebrate superior are astonishing. What can explain it?

I guess it was a moment rather than a man that inspired his loyalty. At some point in 1949, he faced a choice between accepting Lie’s pact or leaving the U.N. The initial moral calculus Abe must have performed would have seemed irrefutable on paper: the U.S. was paying one-third of the U.N.’s operational costs. It could not become a target of the committees and survive.

And so, Abe made a pragmatic choice to trade principle for access. He believed he could do more good from within the U.N. than from outside of it. He chose the path to the only future he had ever imagined.

It was a fatal decision that created an unbearable situation for a torn conscience.

I’ve never found the idea that Abe jumped because of what others were doing to him to be plausible. But the idea that he did so because of what he had done to others seems not just likely but inevitable. Confronting the personal suffering of the accused and their families, understanding, finally, that his actions had been in vain, that the U.N.’s reputation of the U.N. and the suspected staffers would be scorched, Abe would likely have felt he had no other choice.

Suicide mocks the proscriptions of narrative, resists the search for the beating butterfly’s wings, the instant that begets a world-changing reaction. The factors that lead to self-annihilation, in forces large and small, will always resist discovery. The act itself resides outside the realm of reason. 

I will never know for sure what Abe’s last days were like. The most dependable truth of his story is that there is no single story. There are legends and anecdotes, facts and mysteries, remembered, re-imagined, and altered, all told in service of the teller and heard, no doubt, the way I wanted to listen to them.

But I imagine that Abe Feller experienced the events of 1952 not as a difficult detour or a temporary setback but as the death of a world. Not necessarily the egalitarian outer one he’d dreamed of and worked so hard to make real, but rather the world he’d carried inside him, an inner world governed by reason and teeming with compassion. That world, after all, must have suddenly seemed rendered a figment.  I think Abe might have meant it literally when he said, “I’m losing my mind,” that he might have been feeling something like a planet flung from orbit, inexplicably abandoned by infallible laws. 

It seems likely that for Abe Feller, a man essentially composed of faith in reason, compromise and human commonality — a conviction that unity is always possible because we all want the same things — the confrontation with the unblinking nihilism of McCarran, McCarthy and Cohn, and the resulting revelation that his accommodations had opened the gates to the enemies of compromise, must have been fatally disorienting. An inversion of everything he had known as “reality.”

It must have pulled the world from his feet.

If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis  Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

A different version of this story was once published by the Big Round Table in 2015.