Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, Jr.

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Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, Jr., also known as A. J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. (December 17, 1897 - November 13, 1961), was an American diplomat.

Biddle was the son of millionaire Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle and Cordelia Rundell (Bradley) Biddle. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Biddle served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War I. He was married to Mary Duke, a tobacco heiress, in 1915, and they divorced in 1931, after having two children, Mary and Nicholas (born as Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle 3rd). His second wife, whom he married in 1931 (later divorced), was Margaret Thompson Schulze, the only child of mining magnate William Boyce Thompson; by this marriage he had two stepchildren, (Margaret) Boyce Schulze and Theodore Schulze Jr, as well as a son, who died at birth. He married as his third wife, in 1946, Margaret Atkinson Loughborough, the former wife of William Ellery Loughborough; after Biddle's death, she married, as her fourth husband, Colonel Edwinston Robbins.

He served in the following diplomatic posts:

• U.S. Minister to:
  • Norway, 1935-37, 1941-42
  • Netherlands, 1941-42
  • Yugoslavia, 1941
  • Czechoslovakia, 1941-43
  • Greece, 1941-42

• U.S. Ambassador to:
  • Poland, 1937-43
  • Belgium, 1941-43
  • Netherlands, 1942-43
  • Norway, 1942-43
  • Yugoslavia, 1942
  • Greece, 1942-43
  • Czechoslovakia, 1943
  • Spain, 1961

He died in 1961. Interment at Arlington National Cemetery. Cenotaph at The Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

• The Political Graveyard
• United States Department of State: Chiefs of Mission by Country, 1778-2005

Diplomatic posts
Preceded by Hoffman Philip	U.S. Ambassador to Norway 1935–1937	Succeeded by Florence Jaffray Harriman
Preceded by Florence Jaffray Harriman	U.S. Ambassador to Norway 1941–1943 To Norway government-in-exile in England. Commissioned also to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, and Yugoslavia; resident at London.	Succeeded by Lithgow Osborne
Preceded by John Lodge	U.S. Ambassador to Spain 1961	Succeeded by Ellis O. Briggs