He was a legal counsel for the Ottoman Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when he saw the birth of his first son, Nesuhi, on 26 November 1917, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), during the First World War.

While the two Ottoman ministers heading the delegation returned to Istanbul after not achieving an understanding with the revolutionaries led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha he chose to join the National Struggle and remained in Ankara, leaving behind his young wife and three-year-old son, Nesuhi.

As the Republic's ambassador to Washington, Ertegun opened his embassy's parlors to African American jazz musicians, who gathered there to play freely in a socio-historical context which was deeply divided by racial segregation at the time.

In 1934, he led a ferocious and ultimately successful campaign to quash a film adaptation by MGM of Austrian writer Franz Werfel's Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a historical dramatization of an episode from the genocide.

In April 1946, a year after World War II had ended, his body was carried back to Istanbul aboard the USS Missouri[7] and buried in the garden of Sufi tekke, Özbekler Tekkesi [tr] in Sultantepe, Üsküdar.