Jules Bassin oral history interview

1979-10-02/1979-10-09

Bassin, Jules; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with Jules Bassin conducted by Marlene Mayo on October 2 and 9, 1979. Jules Bassin (1914-2009) was an American lawyer, member of the Foreign Service and State Department representative. Bassin was born in 1914 to two young Russian immigrants in New York City. Bassin attended school in Brooklyn before going on to City College where he received a BA in History and Mathematics in 1936. Two years later, he received a law degree from New York University. In 1942, he joined the Army and served on General Douglas MacArthur's legal staff in 1945 negotiating the Treaty of Peace with Japan. After he left the Army in 1946, he served as the Law Division Chief until the end of the Occupation in 1952. Bassin joined the Foreign Service and worked in Tokyo on legal issues related to the treaty. In 1960, he became a State Department Representative and faculty member at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. From 1969 until his retirement in 1975, Bassin served as a minister and deputy chief of the United States Diplomatic Mission in Geneva. While retired he consulted for the State Department on affairs regarding refugees and immigration. Jules Bassin died in 2009 of a heart attack.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

Japan--History--Allied occupation, 1945-1952

Japan; District of Columbia

Postwar Japan

Special Collections and University Archives

English

Collection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the University of Maryland Libraries at http://www.lib.umd.edu/special/contact/home.

Recording: 05:59:00 (audio cassette; mp3); Transcript: 155 pages (PDF)

This oral history interview is part of the Marlene J. Mayo oral histories. A guide to the full collection of Marlene J. Mayo oral histories is available in our archival collections: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/42478.
Accession 2009-209-GWP
An interview transcript is available.

Filename: prange-087505