McNair identified his protégé as a man without “a trace of the political agitator in his temperament,” yet with a “passion for justice” and the “relief of suffering.” McNair believed the events he lived through in Lemberg and Vienna from 1914 to 1922 prompted a belief in protecting human rights as a matter of “vital necessity.” Individuals should “possess international rights,” an innovative and revolutionary idea then and, in many quarters, still now.
