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Joseph Elliot Slater was an American economist, internationalist and intellectual entrepreneur born in 1922. He died in 2002 of Parkinson's disease. Over the course of his lifetime, Slater was involved in a number of corporations, institutes, and government committees. From 1944-1954 he held a number of crucial post-war positions related to the denazification of Germany and the Allied High Commission. Throughout the twentieth century he worked as an economist and director of international affairs at a number of corporations including Creole Petroleum, the Ford Foundation and Volvo North America. While at the Ford Foundation Slater went on two details to work for the Executive Branch; first, as the Secretary for President Eisenhower's Commision on Foreign Assistance (the Draper Committee), and second, as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Education and Cultural Affairs during the Kennedy administration. Slater served as the President and the CEO of the Salk Institute from 1967-1972 and held the same positions at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies from 1969-1986. After leaving the Aspen Institute, Slater served as the Chairman of the John J. McCloy International Center. In the final decade of his life Slater served as a trustee and member of the board of directors for a number of organizations related to education, science, the arts, and foreign relations. The material in this collection includes files and items from all of these eras of Slater's professional life. While much of this collection is related to Slater's various professional roles, there are personal files interspersed throughout the collection.

Louis Henkin (1917-2010) was a prominent figure in international human rights law and taught at Columbia Law School for over sixty years. Henkin published more than twenty books on constitutionalism, foreign policy, human rights, and international law, and served as an expert member of the United Nations' Human Rights Committee. The collection consists of 22 linear feet of Henkin's professional record, primarily from the last twenty-five years of his career, and focuses on his teaching activity, writings, and work for the United Nations.