Kerry appoints Frank Lowenstein as the new staff director, Douglas Frantz as deputy staff director

[karynnj]

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has named Frank Lowenstein as the new staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and committee investigations chief, and former journalist, Douglas Frantz as the deputy staff director, Senate committee aides have told POLITICO.

SFRC spokesman Fred Jones confirmed the two appointments.

Lowenstein, who has served as chief counsel of the committee for more than the past year, previously served as Kerry's foreign policy adviser in his Senate office and before that as national security adviser to the Kerry-Edwards 2004 presidential campaign.

Frantz previously served as a journalist and foreign correspondent for The New York Times and as the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. (POLITICO's Michael Calderone interviewed Frantz last year about the move from journalism to the Hill.)

http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0310/Lowenstein_new_SFRC_staff_director.html?showall

Lowenstein, was the son of the famous Allard Lowenstein of the 1960s and 1970s. He also was the staffer with Kerry in Iraq when the Republicans tried to say the soldiers would not eat with him. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/29/16212/741

Here is a speech that Kerry gave at Yale, crediting Allard Lowenstein as someone who made him more politically active that Noisy Democrat posted (I was looking for the 2004 article on Lowenstein, but this is actually more interesting - and has an inncredible introduction by Ted Kennedy.

Just a quick aside. I'll tell you that when I was at Yale in 1962 and '63, a young congressman came to talk to us. His name was Allard Lowenstein. And he was my first sort of introduction to the connection between verbal passion and actions that you take as a consequence of that. And it was about the civil rights movement. And many of us became very much activated and interested in the civil rights movement as a consequence of what he and others were doing then. And we began to raise money, as students, to put people on the freedom rides, the buses, that went south in
order to break the back of desegregation--of segregation. And it was the first lesson to me about the power of students and the ability of young people to make a difference.

And that was carried on many, many different ways, when I came back from Vietnam, through various efforts to try to impact this country and change things.

Frantz was the man who wrote about BCCI.

With these two men as the director and the deputy director, it would seem that Kerry's SFRC will become even stronger than it already is.

[wisteria]

1. They both seem like great appointments. I wonder why he is doing this now though?n/t