Joseph Kovner

Joseph Kovner (c. 1910–1994) was a 20th-century American lawyer and government official, best known as assistant general counsel to Lee Pressman for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and 1940s and then attorney with the Justice Department.

Background

Joseph Kovner was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, circa 1910. He had at least one sister, Florence.

Congress of Industrial Organizations

In February 1937, Kovner joined Lee Pressman, already general counsel, as assistant counsel for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). By mid-1937, Kovner had pulled in Anthony Wayne Smith, another Yale Law School graduate, who had worked for Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot (1934–1937) and then the law firm of William Donovan (where fellow IJA colleague Nathan Witt had also worked). Kovner and Smith were "legal technicians" to Pressman's development of policy and strategy.

In early 1937, prior to the outbreak of the Little Steel Strike, Kovner wrote an early report that persistent, entrenched anti-union efforts by steel industrialists throughout the 1930s rendered the CIO dependent on "decisions and administrative rulings of a reinvigorated NLRB" and on support from the courts. He noted that court decisions did not take note of a company's union status." Also, issues like "union bargaining and minority rights were not answered." Later, Kovner recalled that the CIO viewed the NLRB "as essentially doing the work of the CIO."

In 1939, Kovner, Smith, and Bernstein helped Pressman prepare CIO testimony against the American Federation of Labor and against industrialist charges against the National Labor Relations Act. Kovner was again in front of a Senate committee in February 1949 during debates over the CIO supported repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act which restricted union power. Kovner proposed setting up a new commission to, for six months, study different forms of compulsory union membership and to determine what regulations, if any, should be made to protect workers rights. While the commission was working, the Taft-Hartley Act could be repealed and less stringent limits on unions put in place, and Kovner believed that unions would be unlikely to act radically during that period.

In 1951, through questioning of Nathaniel Weyl by the U.S. Department of Commerce's loyalty board, Dublin Keyserling came to be questioned. Her appointment book of 1938 showed a list of attendees (at a Communist-affiliated conference by the Industrial Relations Institute in Mexico City) that included Joseph Kovner, CIO lawyer.

In 1953, Kovner left the CIO and returned to private practice, based out of Concord, New Hampshire.

U.S. Department of Justice

In 1958, Kovener joined the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). By the time he retired 16 years later in 1974, he was assistant chief of the Court of Claims Section of DOJ's Tax Division.

National Wildlife Federation

After his retirement in 1974, Kovner served as volunteer lawyer for the National Wildlife Federation.

(One biography of Silbergeld mentions that Joseph Kovner "was a liberal lawyer who was ousted from his government job by the House Un-American Activities Committee" who then moved to New Hampshire and only returned to Washington "when the political climate had changed enough."