Jaffe, Lee K.

Lee K. Jaffe, APR, Fellow PRSA, and award-winning government public relations practitioner, served as director of public relations for The Port of New York Authority from 1944 until 1965, during the revitalization of Manhattan's financial district and the planning and early construction of the World Trade Center. She is credited with suggesting that the World Trade Center be the tallest building in the world and, by the time she retired, she was said to be earning the highest salary in the country for someone at her level.

Born Lillian Kreiselman in Treveskyn, Pennsylvania, and schooled in Ohio, Jaffe moved to Wichita, Kansas, with her family after graduating from high school. There she soon began working for U.S. Senator Henry J. Allen. Allen also was born in Pennsylvania but moved to Kansas with his family at the age of 2. He was a reporter turned newspaper publisher who served first as the governor of Kansas from 1919 to 1923, and later as the publicity director for the Republican National Committee before being appointed to fill a U.S. Senate seat from 1929 to 1930.

When Allen lost his bid for that seat, he set Jaffe up as the Washington correspondent for his flagship newspaper, the Wichita (Kansas) Beacon, where her first story was the 1932 Veterans' Bonus March, a demonstration by 12,000–15,000 veterans calling for their World War I service benefits. She also wrote for the Binghamton (New York) Press and The Northwestern Miller trade journals before joining the Domestics Division of the Office of War Information. Later she worked for the New York Metropolitan Region of the Office of Price Administration, the wartime agency charged with price regulation and rationing; there she served first as an information officer and then as the regional radio director. She married Isidore Jaffe on December 22, 1933, and they lived in Great Neck, Long Island.

In 1944, Austin J. Tobin, a longtime Port Authority attorney who had become executive director two years earlier, hired Jaffe to help promote the agency's image during a time when the wartime lack of money and materials kept it from fulfilling its own mission. Founded on April 30, 1921, The Port of New York Authority was the first agency of its kind in the Western Hemisphere with a bi-state district, and it surrounded the Statue of Liberty (in 1972 the name changed to The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey). Over the years, it was responsible for the planning, building, policing, and administering of systems and structures relating to transportation, from bridges and tunnels to airports and a rail line—which later became the Port Authority Trans-Hudson lines (PATH)—as well as other commercial entities in [Page 466]the port jurisdisdiction. Thus, the Port Authority eventually came to oversee the building of the World Trade Center, which was originally conceived in the 1940s as a global import/export business center in downtown Manhattan.

With the backing of David Rockefeller and his Downtown-Lower Manhattan Development Association, then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and the Port Authority, among others, the first plans for the center were unveiled in 1961. But a year earlier, according to historian Angus Kress Gillespie, Jaffe wrote a memo suggesting that the center be the tallest in the world. As it turned out, the final set of plans presented to the public in 1964 revealed two towers, each of which would be the tallest in the world upon completion—only to be upstaged by the Sears Tower in Chicago a month before the Center's dedication on April 4, 1973.

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