Cemal Gürsel

Biography

Cemal Gürsel was born in 1895 in Hınıs, in the Erzurum province of the Ottoman Empire, the son of an army officer, and graduated from the Kuleli military high school in Istanbul. He fought as an artillery lieutenant at Gallipoli in 1915 and on the Palestine front, where the British captured him in 1918. Released in 1920, he joined Mustafa Kemal's forces and fought in the major battles of the War of Independence.

He graduated from the military college as a staff officer in 1929 and rose steadily, becoming a general in 1957, commander of the Third Army and, in 1958, commander of the land forces. A coup by junior officers on 27 May 1960 overthrew the Democrat Party government without his involvement, but the plotters, needing a senior and popular general, made him head of their National Unity Committee. He became head of state, prime minister and defence minister at once.

He freed students and journalists and reopened banned newspapers, and he pleaded unsuccessfully for clemency for Adnan Menderes and other defendants sentenced to death in the Yassıada trials. After the new constitution and the 1961 elections he was chosen president. Paralysed by strokes, he was flown to Walter Reed hospital in Washington in February 1966; parliament ended his presidency on medical grounds in March, and he died in Ankara in September 1966.