| Summary/Abstract |
MANY OF US ARE OFTEN ASKED HOW WE BECAME WHO WE ARE. FOR ME,
that has generally come down to the old adage—nature (genes) or nurture
(parental influence), and the latter is pretty strong in my case. My father,
Norman J. Padelford, was one of the early scholars of international organization
(IO) and the United Nations. He was one of a number of academics
who were recruited by the US Department of State during World War II as
consultants to work on the preparation of the UN and other issues. After
participating in the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks conference and the April 1945
meetings of the UN Committee of Jurists in Washington, DC, he served as
executive officer for Commission IV of the UN San Francisco Conference
Secretariat, which dealt with all arrangements concerning the International
Court of Justice and such other legal matters as were referred to in the draft
Charter. In the closing days of the conference, he was made secretary of the
jurists committee that directed the work of drafting the Charter. In 1946, he
moved from the Fletcher School to MIT to develop courses in international
relations. He was a founding editorial board member and later chairman for
the journal International Organization (1960−1973). He died in 1982
before his friend Gene Lyons and others founded the Academic Council on
the United Nations System (ACUNS) and invited me as a then relatively
junior scholar at the University of Dayton to be part of the ACUNS founding
conference and to give the presentation “Teaching International Organization.”
So, the story of the UN’s founding has always, in part, had a personal
dimension for me, as has much of the history of the study of the UN
and international organizations.
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