The Turkish Ambassador to Washington, Münir Ertegün and his family, including his sons Ahmet Ertegün (left) and Nesuhi Ertegün (right), and his daughter, Selma (middle) in February 1942
Born in Istanbul to a civil servant father, Mehmed Cemil Bey, and a mother Ayşe Hamide Hanım, who was a daughter of Sufi shaykhİbrahim EdhemEfendi,[1] he studied law at Darülfünûn-u Şahâne (دار الفنون شهانه), now Istanbul University, and graduated in 1908. He was a legal counsel for the Ottoman Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when he saw the birth of his first son, Nesuhi, on 26 November 1917, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), during the First World War.[2] Taking part in an Ottoman delegation with a mission to seek reconciliation with the Nationalists in Ankara, by the end of 1920, changed his destiny. While the two Ottoman ministers heading the delegation returned to Istanbul after not achieving an understanding with the revolutionaries led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha he chose to join the National Struggle and remained in Ankara, leaving behind his young wife and three-year-old son, Nesuhi.[2] He became an aide to Mustafa Kemal during the Turkish War of Independence and the chief legal counsel of the Turkish delegation to the resulting Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
After the Western powers recognized the newly founded Republic of Turkey in 1923, he was sent to Geneva to the League of Nations as an observer for the Turkish Republic. During this assignment, he frequently went to Paris for the Ottoman public debt negotiations. Following this posting to the League of Nations, he was appointed ambassador to Switzerland (1925–1930), France (1930–1932), the United Kingdom (1932–1934)[3] and the United States (1934–1944).
As the Republic's ambassador to Washington, Ertegun opened his embassy's parlors to African American jazz musicians, who gathered there to play freely in a socio-historical context which was deeply divided by racial segregation at the time.[4] Ertegun worked also on his government's orders to remove any mention of the Armenian Genocide in American popular culture. In 1934, he led a ferocious and ultimately successful campaign to quash a film adaptation by MGM of Austrian writer Franz Werfel's Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a historical dramatization of an episode from the genocide.[5] He became the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps in May 1944.[6] He held this last post until he died in Washington, D.C., of a heart attack in November of the same year.
^Thomas A. Bryson, 'Tars, Turks, and Tankers: The Role of the United States Navy in the Middle East,' Scarecrow Press, Inc., Metuchen, NJ, and London, 1980, 90.
