
Haakon Maurice Chevalier (10 September 1901-4 July 1985) was an American academic and Communist Party member.
Biography[]
Haakon Maurice Chevalier was born in Lakewood Township, New Jersey in 1901, the son of parents of French and Norwegian descent. He served as a deckhand on a commercial sailing ship during his twenties before becoming a writer, translator, and professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Chevalier befriended J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1937 and took care of his children when they were infants, and he attempted to recruit Oppenheimer into the Communist Party, to no avail. In 1942, he told Oppenheimer that his friend George Eltenton was in a capacity to pass along any information from Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project to the Soviets if Oppenheimer was willing, but Oppenheimer called such a suggestion "treason"; nevertheless, he did not report the incident for years and refused to betray Chevalier's identity to the government, resulting in the revocation of his security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954. He served as a translator for the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, but he lost his job at Berkeley in 1950 after the HUAC hearing and was forced to move to France to find continued work as a translator. He died in Paris in 1985 at the age of 83.