Educated in the United States, Albert E. Kahn attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College, where he was a star athlete.
After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Kahn agreed to lead an "ambulance tour" to raise medical relief funds for Loyalist forces fighting against the fascist-supported Franco rebellion.
With no employment prospects, Kahn accepted a job at his uncle's architectural firm, where his father Moritz was a senior engineer.
Almost immediately, Kahn was offered a position as Executive Director of the newly formed American Council Against Nazi Propaganda.
Working for a Board of Directors including Helen Keller, Condé Nast, John Gunther, former Ambassador William E. Dodd, and German writer Thomas Mann, Kahn founded The Hour, a syndicated newsletter.
Most historians, by contrast, believe that these were show trials designed to suppress any opposition to Stalin; many of those convicted were summarily executed or exiled in the gulag.
In 1948, Kahn leveraged his name recognition as an author to run as the American Labor Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. House elections for New York's 25th congressional district.
[4] The firm put out controversial books, often written by blacklisted authors, on recent events such as Cedric Belfrage's Seeds of Destruction: The Truth about the U.S.
Cameron & Kahn also released the novel The Ecstasy of Owen Muir by Hollywood Ten screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr.[8] In 1955, Cameron & Kahn published False Witness,[9] the confession by Harvey Matusow, a former Communist and paid U.S. government witness, who admitted he had repeatedly lied under oath when testifying at House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings.
After months of hearings and thousands of pages of testimony, the grand jury declined to issue indictments against Cameron or Kahn.
During the grand jury proceedings, Kahn, Cameron, and Matusow were also subpoenaed to testify before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by James Eastland (D-Mississippi).
The purpose of the Senate hearings was to determine whether publication of False Witness resulted from a Communist conspiracy to induce Matusow to lie about committing perjury.
During the 1950s, Kahn had his passport revoked for refusing to sign an affidavit newly required by the federal government, as to whether or not he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party.
The requirement to sign the affidavit was later ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving Rockwell Kent, a noted painter and friend of Kahn.
[citation needed] On a trip to Moscow after Stalin's death, Kahn met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin.
[citation needed] Other later books written by Kahn included Smetana and the Beetles (Random House, 1967), a satire of the defection of Stalin's daughter to the United States; Joys and Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, 1970), cellist Pablo Casals's memoir, as told to Kahn; and The Unholy Hymnal (Simon & Schuster, 1971), a satirical exposé of the credibility gap of the Nixon administration and others.