Ralph Gardner Jr. gets a history lesson in a visit with the former Manhattan district attorney
By RALPH GARDNER JR.
June 21, 2016 6:03 a.m. ET
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Over lunch a few weeks back, Robert Morgenthau, the former Manhattan district attorney, was asked when he leaves the city for weekend visits to his Hudson Valley farm.
“Friday afternoon,” he said.
“And when do you return?”
“Sunday night.”
At 96 years old, you’d think he might allow himself to linger a little longer.
ENLARGE“I’m too busy,” he explained.
Mr. Morgenthau’s wife, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lucinda Franks, recalled: “When he retired from being DA,” and went to work for the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, “I said ‘You’re going to come home at 2 or 3 at the latest.’ He started wandering in at 6:30 every night. I said, ‘You broke your promise to me.’ He said, ‘I’m coming home a half-hour earlier than I did as DA.’”
Mr. Morgenthau’s country home, Fishkill Farms, about an hour and 20 minutes north of the city, isn’t exactly a country idyll, either.
“The cars back up all the way to 84,” his son Josh told me when I visited the farm on Saturday, “Founder’s Day.” He was referring to Interstate 84 and the traffic waiting to access the 270-acre farm, where 150 acres are in cultivation and 80 varieties of apple and a whole lot of other fruits and vegetables are grown. “That’s almost a mile and half.”
On peak autumn weekends as many as 6,000 people visit the farm.
It was founded on June 18, 1914 by Henry Morgenthau Jr., Robert Morgenthau’s father and President Franklin Roosevelt’s treasury secretary. These days the third generation manages the farm, incorporating the latest sustainable techniques. “Even though he’s secretary of the treasury,” Josh Morgenthau, 32 years old, said of his grandfather, “he’s first and foremost a farmer. There was a sense of nobility in farming and food production that the Founding Fathers had and that my grandfather had.”
As does Josh’s father. “He not only runs it,” Ms. Franks said of her husband and the farm, “he makes up for the shortfall.”
On Saturday afternoon, Robert Morgenthau’s primary role was as the farm’s éminence grise, as his son describes him, greeting visitors and accepting praise as he sat on a porch in sandals and wide-brimmed khaki hat, across from the hamburger stand, the bustling farm store and a majestic stand of pines he planted as a child. The family poodle, “Ivan the Terrible,” served as protection while Mr. Morgenthau’s actual driver and bodyguard, David Garcia, dropped by with his family.
“Because he was DA and received a lot of death threats, he’s entitled a bodyguard and driver,” Ms. Franks explained.
Mr. Morgenthau needed a couple of canes to traverse the uneven terrain between the porch and the farm store, but his mind remains as sharp as ever. “He’ll go around the store and talk to people and say, ‘You know, that Honeycrisp is the best,’” his son said.
Indeed, this being Founder’s Day, Mr. Morgenthau launched into recollections of helping his own father host FDR at the farm during World War II. “I used to make mint juleps for him,” the former district attorney remembered. “He brought Churchill here on June 20, 1942. Just before Tobruk fell. We have the videos of that.”
Behind Mr. Morgenthau, his dad’s home movies played. They included FDR campaigning for governor of New York along the Erie Canal, the king and queen of England’s historic 1939 visit to Roosevelt’s home in nearby Hyde Park, and that meeting between FDR, Churchill and Henry Morgenthau at Fishkill Farms.
It included Robert Morgenthau, then 22 years old, and in his naval dress whites, serving the not especially enthusiastic British prime minister a mint julep. Apparently, Churchill rejected the cocktail in favor of straight whiskey.
There was also an exhibition set up outdoors that included correspondence, filled with private jokes between FDR and Henry Morgenthau Jr., who were close friends. “Most of these documents have never been seen before,” Mr. Morgenthau said.
An American history lesson might have seemed slightly incongruous in the context of day tourists in sneakers and shorts heading to the pick-your-own strawberry patch. But the historical significance of the farm, and Robert Morgenthau’s own resume, seemed lost on few.
A steady stream of visitors approached the porch to shake the great man’s hand, ask to have their picture taken with him or have him autograph a book, and to thank him for his service. “I’m from Texas,” one man told him. “You’re one of my heroes.”
— ralph.gardner@wsj.com