Robert Blum papers

Robert Blum, a specialist in Asian Affairs, was born in San Francisco on March 12, 1911. He spent his childhood in San Francisco and Japan (Yokohama and Kobe). He earned his undergraduate (A.B., 1930) and his graduate degree (Ph.D. 1936) from the University of California at Berkeley. From 1937 to 1942, he was a research assistant and instructor in international relations at Yale University. He served in the OSS from 1942 to 1946, spending most of those years in London. In the fall of 1944, he was named Chief of the X-2 Branch set up in Paris, one of the Branches of the Counter Espionage division of the OSS. After the war he worked for two years as an assistant to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. In 1949, Robert Blum returned to Europe, working in Paris with the Marshall Plan. From 1950 to 1951, he was the head of ECA (Economic Cooperation Administration), an agency of the Marshall Plan, in Indochina. He returned to the United States in 1953 to become the President of the Asia Foundation with headquarters in San Francisco. He left the Asia Foundation in 1962 to direct a three-year project for the Council on Foreign Relations financed by the Ford Foundation titled “The United States and China in World Affairs”. Robert Blum died suddenly on Long Island (N.Y.) on July 9, 1965 before he could revise his manuscript for publication. His book, The United States and China in World Affairs, edited by A. Doak Barnett, was published the following year.