Hugh S. Gibson

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Hugh S. Gibson (no year)

Hugh Simons Gibson (born August 16, 1883 in Los Angeles ; died December 12, 1954 in Geneva ) was an American diplomat.

Life

Hugh S. Gibson studied at the École libre des sciences politiques in Paris and entered the United States Foreign Service , armed with the language of diplomacy, French . His training stations were in Honduras and London , Washington, DC and Cuba . He had been deployed in Brussels since 1914 when the German army conquered Belgium. Before the USA entered the war, he went to London in 1916. In March 1918 he was back in Paris and after the war he was a member of the Coolidge Mission in the states of the former Austria-Hungary , led by Archibald Cary Coolidge .

In April 1919 he was appointed General Plenipotentiary of the USA in the re-established Poland, which was at war with Bolshevik Russia, in border disputes with Germany and Lithuania and in disputes over referendums in the border regions, in Gibson's view between Bolsheviks on the one hand and Huns on the other . One of his few legation secretaries was Arthur Bliss Lane , who became ambassador to Poland in 1944. The economic, social and ethnic tensions in Poland erupted in several pogroms , for which the Polish government was blamed in parts of the US press and politics, while Gibson tried in his diplomatic reports on the difficult legacy of 150 years of occupation history to point out.

Since February 1922 Gibson was married to the Belgian Ynès Reyntiens. In 1924 he became ambassador to Switzerland and in 1927 to Belgium. Gibson was sent from 1925 to various international conferences on disarmament and maritime disarmament, at which he was also entrusted with the leadership.

With the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency in 1932, Gibson, who was a supporter of Herbert Hoover , became ambassador to Brazil. Gibson mediated the peace negotiations in Buenos Aires after the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay . In 1937 he was again ambassador to Belgium, in 1938 he retired from the foreign service and went to London. After the beginning of the Second World War, he coordinated US aid to the civilian population in the German-occupied countries of the Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. From 1941 he worked in the USA as an editor at the publishing house Doubleday Doran and after the end of the war he was involved in the publication of the diaries of Joseph Goebbels , Galeazzo Ciano and Ulrich von Hassell . In 1946 he assisted Hoover, who was commissioned by President Harry S. Truman to coordinate global hunger relief. With Hoover he visited Germany, Austria and Italy in January 1947 ("The President's Economic Mission to Germany and Austria"), as a result of which the goals of the Morgenthau Plan were shelved.

Gibson was then sent to Geneva and worked as a director for the International Organization for Migration .

Fonts (selection)

The Ciano Diaries 1939-1943
  • A Journal from Our Legation in Belgium. Doubleday Page, New York 1917.
  • Rio. Doubleday Doran, New York 1937. (Photo book)
  • Belgium. Doubleday Doran, New York 1938.
  • with Herbert Hoover: The Problems of Lasting Peace. Doubleday Doran, New York 1942.
  • with Herbert Hoover and contribution to: Prefaces to peace: a symposium. Simon and Schuster, New York 1943.
  • The Road to Foreign Policy. Doubleday Doran, New York 1944.
  • with Herbert Hoover: The Basis of Lasting Peace. D. van Norstrand Company, New York 1945.
  • as editor: The Ciano Diaries 1939–1943: The Complete, Unabridged Diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1936–1943 . Introduction. Sumner Welles . Garden City NY 1947.
  • Perrin C. Galpin (Ed.): Hugh Gibson, 1883-1954, Extracts from his Letters and Anecdotes from his Friends . New York 1956.

literature

  • Martin Weil: A pretty good club. The founding fathers of the US Foreign Service. Norton, New York 1978.
  • Ronald Emil Swerczek :: The diplomatic career of Hugh Gibson 1908–1938. Dissertation. University of Iowa, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1978.
  • Ronald Emil Swerczek: Hugh Gibson and Disarmament, the Diplomacy of Gradualism. In: Kenneth Paul Jones (Ed.): US Diplomats in Europe, 1919–1941. ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, CA 1983.
  • Andrzej Kapiszewski: Hugh Gibson and a controversy over polish-jewish relations after world war 1: a documentary history. Nakladem uniwersytetu jagiellonskiego, Warsaw 1991. (collection of documents)
  • Andrzej Kapiszewski: Conflicts across the Atlantic . Jagiellonian University, Ksiẹgarnia Akademicka, 2004, ISBN 83-7188-682-9 .
  • Halina Parafianowicz : Hugh S. Gibson's diplomatic service in Poland after the First World War. In: Białostockie teki historyczne. December 2014, pp. 159–174 ISSN  1425-1930 PDF
  • Vivian Hux Reed, Mieczysław B. Biskupski , Jochen Böhler , Jan-Roman Potocki (eds.): An American in Warsaw Selected Writings of Hugh S. Gibson, US Minister to Poland 1919–1924 . University of Rochester Press, 2018, ISBN 978-1-58046-929-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Gibson April 19, 1919, quoted in Halina Parafianowicz, 2014, p. 162.