Part 1 - The Institute Libraries - Institute for Advanced Study

egarded work of his career before his illness. However, Professor Earle,
so long imred within four walls, understanbbly would not willingly
return to such a setting for any purpose as prolonged as the creation
of another book. His first meeting with Riefler at Saranac in 1935 was
a happy occasion, for the economist agreed that he should work on Amer-
ica's foreign relations.
There is little doubt that Flexner's consciousness of early
friendship for Professors Earle and Mitrany caused him to be hypercrit-
ical in judging their actions, plans and wishes. He felt responsible
for their success in a highly personal sense, which they resented. His
fault was exaggerated by his frequent references to the certainty and
harmony with which the faculty members of the School of Mathematics
seemed to function. (But he confessed he' had no judgment whatever of
what they did or how successful their work was.) His two friends de-
plored the fact that whire all the mathematicians had personal assistants,
they had none, though Flexner earlier would have been the.first to grant
tl-at the complexity of their fields, the need for languages not their
own, the wealth of written materials in any subject in their fields with
which they should be familiar, made such help desirable.
It was curious that the one person in the School of Econannics
and Politics who had been promised the colleagues and assistants he re-
quired, not only before his appointment but twice thereafter, and who
never received any of what was promised, was theDirector1s real friend.
Riefler might have been so resentful of Flexner's failure to live up to
his comitments that their relationship would have curdled. Like the
Trustees. Professor Riefler had understood frm the beginning of his