Prof. T. Blaisdell; Helped Plan Recovery of Postwar Europe

Thomas C. Blaisdell Jr., whose half-century of public service and scholarship included a prominent role in planning the reconstruction of postwar Europe, died Tuesday. He was 93.

Blaisdell was a distinguished professor of political science at UC Berkeley who continued teaching long after assuming emeritus status in 1963.

After a long career in public service starting in the New Deal era and culminating in his leadership in helping plan European recovery after World War II, Blaisdell joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1951.

Active in publishing and lecturing well into retirement, Blaisdell taught freshman seminars in political science and international relations as recently as last year.

Born in 1895 in Pittsburgh, Pa., Blaisdell graduated from Pennsylvania State College in 1916. He earned a master’s degree in social history at Columbia University in 1922 and his doctorate there in 1932. He taught at Columbia from 1925 to 1932.

In 1933, Blaisdell went to Washington to join Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain trust” in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Over the next two decades, he held a number of federal positions, working first on helping the nation recover from the Depression and then on European postwar reconstruction.

Blaisdell was assistant secretary of commerce during the Administration of President Harry S. Truman.

Although he was modest about his role in postwar European recovery, colleagues have called him one of the principal architects of the Marshall Plan, proclaimed in 1947 by Secretary of State George C. Marshall.

A widely published author, Blaisdell’s best known work was “The American Presidency in Political Cartoons.” Written with Peter Selz, a Berkeley art history professor, the 1976 book received wide acclaim.

No services have been set.

The family asked that donations be sent to the Fund for Cal in the Capital, the Young Musicians Program, both at UC Berkeley, or the Harry S. Truman Institute in Independence, Mo.

Blaisdell is survived by a son, Thomas; a brother, William; two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.