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.
A central issue was CIO's foreign policy, heavily influenced by Pressman's push for pro-Soviet stance.
For example, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact became public in September 1939, Pressman remained pro-Soviet, while Kovner and Smith let anti-Nazism guide them.
In early years of World War II, the pact led Pressman to oppose the Lend Lease Act.
[2] In 1948, Kovner appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union.
[10][11] 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.
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.
[4][21][22][23] (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.
[3][4] Carol Weiss King's biographer Ann Fagan Ginger describes Kovner as "very bright, able, and decent, a compassionate person amid the sharks of the New York legal world" who, leading the IJA Bulletin editors, "argued out the jurisdiction and style of their new periodical with care.