Schine was born in Gloversville, New York, to Jewish parents, hotel magnate Junius Myer Schine and Hildegarde Feldman.[5][6] He attended Phillips Academy and graduated from Harvard University in 1949.[1] He had entered Harvard in the summer of 1945, taken a leave of absence in the spring of 1946, and returned in the fall of 1947 after a year working as an assistant purser for the Army Transport Service. Though this was a civilian position, he wrote on his application for re-admission to Harvard that he was a "lieutenant in the Army," and other students resented his calling himself a veteran. Said one, "We were all veterans and his pretending to be one went over like a lead balloon."[7]
At Harvard, he lived, according to a later Harvard Crimson portrait, "in a style which went out here with the era of the Gold Coast," the years before World War I when wealthy Harvard students lived apart from their classmates in private accommodations.[8] College administrators denied his requests to use his dormitory room as an office and to allow a female secretary to visit outside of regular visiting hours.[7] He did, however, conduct the university band and also served as its drum major.[9]
Anti-communism and Army–McCarthy hearings
In 1952 Schine published a six-page anti-communist pamphlet called "Definition of Communism"[10] and had a copy placed in every room of his family's chain of hotels.[11] Although the pamphlet contained many errors, Time called it "remarkably succinct."[12][13] The pamphlet introduced Schine to Roy Cohn through newspaper columnist George Sokolsky, and the two became friends.[14] Cohn at that time was Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel, and he brought Schine onto McCarthy's staff as an unpaid "chief consultant".
McCarthy-era opponents of Communism sought to stamp out material they viewed as pro-Communist. Schine and Cohn conducted a much-criticized tour of Europe in 1953, examining libraries of the United States Information Agency for books written by authors they deemed to be Communists or fellow travelers.[15][16]Die Welt of Hamburg called them Schnüffler or snoops.[17]Theodore Kaghan, Deputy Director of the Public Affairs Division in the Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany and a target of the subcommittee, called them "junketeering gumshoes."[18]
In November 1953, Schine was drafted into the United States Army as a private.[19] Cohn immediately began a campaign to obtain special privileges for Schine. Cohn met with and made repeated telephone calls to military officials from the Secretary of the Army down to Schine's company commander. He asked that Schine be given a commission (which the Army refused due to Schine's lack of qualifications) as well as light duties, extra leave, and no overseas assignments. At one point, Cohn was reported to have threatened to "wreck the Army" if his demands were not met.[13] During the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954, the Army charged Cohn and McCarthy with using improper pressure to influence the Army, while McCarthy and Cohn counter-charged that the Army was holding Schine "hostage" in an attempt to squelch McCarthy's investigations into Communists in the Army.
The hearings were broadcast live using the relatively new medium of television and were viewed by an estimated 20 million people. Just prior to the hearings, Schine and Cohn appeared on the cover of Time on March 22, 1954, under the banner "McCarthy and His Men".[20]
The Army–McCarthy hearings absolved McCarthy of any direct wrongdoing, blaming Cohn alone. The exposure of McCarthy and his methods before a television audience, however, is widely considered to have heralded the beginning of the end of his career.[21][22] Cohn resigned from McCarthy's staff shortly after the hearings.[23]
Later years
After the hearings, Schine left politics and refused to comment on the episode for the rest of his life, so his view of his relationship with Cohn remains unknown. He remained active in the private sector as a businessman and an entrepreneur, working in the hotel, music, and film industries. He was for a time a member of the Young Presidents' Organization.[24] On October 22, 1957, he married Miss Universe of 1955, Hillevi Rombin of Sweden.[25][26] They had six children and were married for nearly 40 years.[25] Also in 1957, Schine's father named him head of Schine Enterprises, though in 1963 Schine's father resumed his position as head of the company.[27] In 1977, Schine described himself as "retired."[2]
Schine and Hillevi's marriage lasted almost 40 years until their deaths together in 1996 in a private plane accident. Schine, 68, and Hillevi, 62, died on June 19, 1996, along with their 34-year-old son Berndt, who was piloting the plane that crashed in Burbank, California.[1][19][25] They were buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.
^Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 419–21; Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 44, 51
