Michael Greenberg

Who was Michael Greenberg?

Michael Greenberg was a scholar of Chinese economics and history. He was alleged in the first wave of McCarthyism to have provided a Soviet spy with information during the 1940s, but was never charged with espionage.

Greenberg was born Michael Menahem Greenberg in Manchester, Lancashire, England, son of a Polish-born father. He attended Manchester Grammar School and won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge where he won first class honours.

Greenberg arrived in the United States in 1939 to attend the Graduate School of Harvard University under a Joseph Hodges Choate Memorial Fellowship from Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied at Harvard from October 1939 to January 1941. Greenberg also became Managing Editor of the Institute of Pacific Relations publication, Pacific Affairs in 1941. In August 1941, Edward Clark Carter, General Secretary to the Pacific Council of the IPR, wrote Lauchlin Currie asking if letters to Owen Lattimore in China could be transmitted so that "they are not read by others before reaching him." Currie promptly replied on a White House letterhead that "I will be glad to get the letters you mentioned to Lattimore uncensored." Currie's assistant in the White House was Greenberg.