ABRAM, MORRIS BERTHOLD

ABRAM, MORRIS BERTHOLD (1918–2000), U.S. attorney, civic leader, second president of Brandeis University. Abram was born in Fitzgerald, Ga. Following service as a major in Air   Force Intelligence during World War II, Abram was counsel in the U.S. prosecution staff at the Nuremberg Trials (1946), then assistant to the director for the Marshall Plan (1948). As counsel for the Anti-Defamation League in the South (from 1955), as well as member of several civic committees, Abram led a prolonged fight against the Georgia county unit election system, which culminated in a 1963 Supreme Court ruling known as the one-man one-vote principle. Abram was appointed the first general counsel of the Peace Corps by President Kennedy, later serving in several positions in the United Nations, to which he was appointed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He was an appointee of three additional presidents – jimmy carter , ronald reagan , and george h.w. bush . He led U.S. delegations to numerous international meetings, including the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the former Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and was a former vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. As president of the American Jewish Committee, 1963 to 1968, Abram led talks on Catholic-Jewish relations with Pope Paul. He was president of Brandeis University from 1968 to 1970. He served as chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) from 1983 until 1988, at the peak of the movement to free Soviet Jews. During that period, he also served for three years as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Under President Bush, he served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva and founded United Nations Watch following his term as ambassador. He was a president of the American Jewish Committee, chairman of the United Negro College Fund, and chairman of the board of Cardozo Law School. For many years he was a senior partner at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Abram published The Day Is Short in 1982, in which he reviewed his career and his battle with an acute form of leukemia. (Burton Berinsky / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)