If the eastern academic grapevine h

If the eastern academic grapevine had provided the sole means of recruitment, the OSS could still have boasted a professoriate of a distinction to which any university might well aspire. It is very much to the credit of these established gentlemen, however, and to their insight into the complexity of the task that awaited them, that they did not set out to construct an organization in their own collective image. To the contrary, as several units of academic irregulars were pressed into service, the Research and Analysis Branch came to shelter a community of scholars without precedent in modern intellectual history.