Background
Greenbaum was born on April 13, 1890, in New York City, the son of Samuel Greenbaum, a New York State Supreme Court justice, and Selina Ullman.
Greenbaum was born on April 13, 1890, in New York City, the son of Samuel Greenbaum, a New York State Supreme Court justice, and Selina Ullman.
Greenbaum attended the Horace Mann School and Williams College, receiving his B. A. in 1910. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1913, he was admitted to the New York bar.
Greenbaum practiced law in New York City for two years after graduation. He then joined his older brother Lawrence, Herbert A. Wolff, and Morris L. Ernst to form the firm Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst. When the United States entered World War I, Greenbaum joined the army as a private after his color blindness kept him out of an officers' training program. At Camp Upton on Long Island, he set up a night school to teach English to immigrant recruits. Because of the success of his program, on February 6, 1918, the army promoted him, the first person commissioned a captain from the ranks. Returning to civilian life, he built up a prosperous practice. In 1933 a bankruptcy court named him trustee for the American estate of Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish financier known as the world's match king, who had committed suicide in Paris after going broke and who left debts in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Over the next six years, Greenbaum built up the estate's assets from less than $84, 000 to more than $3 million. His long friendship with Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times from 1935 to 1961, led to Greenbaum's service as counsel for the trust that controlled the Times. He helped develop a pension fund for Times employees and helped to mediate disputes between the newspaper and its workers. Greenbaum became involved in two major literary cases. The Russian expert George F. Kennan, a neighbor of Greenbaum's in Princeton, New Jersey, put him in touch with Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin's daughter, when she moved to the West in 1967. After journeying to Switzerland and advising Alliluyeva on the intricacies of publishing contracts, Greenbaum returned to the United States with the manuscript of her Twenty Letters to a Friend and offered it to Harper and Row, which his firm had represented for many years. He later became Alliluyeva's close friend and counsel. In 1967, Greenbaum also defended Harper and Row in its efforts to publish The Death of a President, William Manchester's account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Jacqueline Kennedy, the book's original sponsor, objected to parts of the book and brought suit to block its publication; she eventually dropped the suit. Greenbaum's involvement in public service and legal reform began in 1928 when he headed a lawyers' committee working with the new Institute for the Study of Law at Johns Hopkins University. The committee focused on problems relating to litigation of civil cases. Greenbaum maintained his interest in these problems and in 1952 chaired a special committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York that helped realize a state commission on court reform. This led to the establishment of the New York State Judicial Conference to oversee the administrative work of the courts. Greenbaum worked with the conference; in 1961 its studies resulted in a constitutional amendment that overhauled the state's court system. In 1933, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt selected Greenbaum to head the New York Alcohol Control Commission after the repeal of Prohibition. Greenbaum was an assistant to the United States attorney general from 1934 to 1938 and a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations in 1956-1957. He was also active in Jewish communal affairs and in local bar groups in New York and New Jersey, to which he moved in 1954. Between the two world wars, Greenbaum retained a commission as an officer in the army reserves. In 1940 the army promoted him to lieutenant colonel. He served during World War II as an executive officer to Robert P. Patterson, undersecretary and then secretary of war. He negotiated many major contracts between the government and private defense firms. In 1945 he left the army with the rank of brigadier general. Greenbaum died in Princeton on June 12, 1970, after a long illness. He worked at his firm until his death, although he had gone into semiretirement a few years earlier.
In 1920 Greenbaum married Dorothea Rebecca Schwarcz, who later became a well-known sculptor; they had two children.
He was the publisher of The New York Times from 1935 to 1961.
She was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife.
