A look back...

Ahmet Ertegun, who is the chairman of Atlantic Records and the most arresting figure in the American music business, was born in 1923—the year the Turkish republic was declared—in Uskudar, which is a section of Istanbul that lies on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus. His father, Mehmet Munir Ertegun, was a lawyer and came from a family that had its origins in Uzbekistan, in Central Asia. Ahmet’s mother, Hayrunnisa Rustem, came from a family with traditions in the Turkish Navy (Ahmet’s maternal grandfather had been Admiral of the Port of Istanbul) and with ties to Bosnia and other Turkish provinces in what is now Yugoslavia. On both sides, Ahmet’s family seems to have belonged to that class—not aristocratic but educated and, in Ottoman terms, cosmopolitan—which had been most humiliated by Turkey’s defeat in the First World War and was most determined after the war that Turkey should have, in the future, access to influences that were non-feudal, modern, and European. Mehmet Ertegun had been attached at an early age to the chancery of the Ottoman government, but when he was sent (with others) to Ankara to persuade the rebel Mustafa Kemal to abandon his opposition to the Sultan, he instead joined Kemal’s party and became his legal adviser. Upon Kemal’s accession to power, in 1922, Mehmet Ertegun was given a series of diplomatic posts of the first importance. With Ismet Inonu, he represented Turkey at the 1922-23 Lausanne conference, where the present borders of Turkey were for the most part established and diplomatic recognition was accorded to the new republic. In 1925, when Ahmet was two years old, Mehmet Ertegun was named Minister to Switzerland, and two years later he was named Turkish observer at the League of Nations. In 1929, he was named Ambassador to Paris. In 1931, he assumed the Embassy in London, and in 1934 he came, as Ambassador, to Washington. Mehmet Ertegun seems to have been a man of strong character and strong opinions, somewhat scholarly, and somewhat less outgoing than his wife, who was a very modern Turkish woman. Surprisingly—for the Kemalist movement was aggressively anti-clerical—Mehmet Ertegun also seems to have been a religious man. “When Kemal was persecuting the people he considered to be the backward religious leaders of Turkey,” Ahmet said to me once, “my father would say, ‘It is by the grace of God that our side will triumph,’ and so forth. He prayed five times a day all his life.”