Hugh S. Gibson

Who was Hugh S. Gibson?

Hugh Simons Gibson was an American diplomat.

Gibson was actively involved in disarmament talks from 1925 to 1932. Throughout his career, together with such colleagues as ambassadors Joseph C. Grew, William R. Castle, and Hugh R. Wilson, he remained a leading proponent in the drive to establish a professional Foreign Service based on merit rather than personal wealth or political influence.

He was active in famine relief work in Europe during and after World War I and continued to pursue these efforts during and after World War II. His close friendship with Herbert Hoover began in this context.

As first American minister plenipotentiary to Poland in 1919, he was called upon to respond to the acute problems of a renascent state while investigating reports of pogroms and mistreatment of Polish Jews in the chaotic postwar years from 1919 to 1924. His reporting on this highly sensitive matter was surrounded by controversy, but ultimately won the approval of significant figures in the American Jewish community.

Gibson retired from the Foreign Service in 1938, worked in London for the Commission for Relief in Belgium during the first two years of the war. He then returned to the United States and worked in publishing at Doubleday, Doran and Co. and, following the end of the war, published the journals of Joseph Goebbels, Galeazzo Ciano, and Ulrich von Hassell.