Stanley Sheinbaum

Stanley K. Sheinbaum is the publisher of New Perspectives Quarterly. He was a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Chairman of the American Civil Liberties Foundation of Southern California, and Regent of the University of California from 1977-89. He helped found the People for the American Way, and in 1971, he organized the Pentagon Papers-Daniel Ellsberg Defense Team. He has also been active in the Middle East peace process. Between 1991 and 1993 he was President of the Los Angeles Police Commission. Stanley K. Sheinbaum did his doctoral work in economics at Stanford University and taught there and at Michigan State University (1955-1960). While at Michigan State, he was the campus director of a 54-man technical assistance group under contract to the State Department in Vietnam. Discovering that the group comprised a CIA component and by exposing such publicly, he succeeded in keeping universities apart from such clandestine activities. From 1960 to 1970 he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. From 1971 to 1973 Mr. Sheinbaum organized the defense in the Pentagon Papers trial. From 1973 to 1982 he was Chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California. From 1977 to 1989 he was a Regent of the University of California. From 1982 to the present he has been a board member of the International Center for Peace in the Middle East in Tel Aviv. Similarly, he has been on the board of Americans for Peace Now since 1988. In 1988 he led a delegation of five American Jews who succeeded in getting Yasser Arafat to recognize Israel and to disavow terrorism. For the last ten years he has been the publisher of New Perspectives Quarterly. In 1989 he founded the west coast affiliate of the Human Rights Watch. From 1991 to 1993 he was President of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners following upon the beating of Rodney King. Rejected by 33 colleges, he was finally accepted by Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University), then transferred to Stanford University, where he majored in economics and graduated summa cum laude. He taught economics at Michigan State and, during the late 1950s, provided technical assistance to South Vietnam under a Michigan State program that he later found was a Central Intelligence Agency front. He revealed his discovery to the journalist Robert Scheer, who wrote an article about it in Ramparts magazine in 1966. Radicalized by the revelation, Mr. Sheinbaum left Michigan for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Calif., and ran for Congress twice as a peace candidate. He was defeated both times. In 1964, after his first marriage ended in divorce, he married Betty Warner, daughter of the movie mogul Harry Warner. She survives him, as do his stepchildren, Karen Sperling, Matthew Sperling and Cass Warner; eight grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren. Independently wealthy by the time of his second marriage, he collaborated with Norman Lear to form People for the American Way, which worked to fend off religious conservatives, and he supported sympathetic candidates, including Eugene McCarthy, George S. McGovern, John B. Anderson, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and Bill Clinton.