Leo Pasvolsky (August 22, 1893 – May 5, 1953) was a journalist, economist, state department official and special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He was one of the United States government's main planners for the post World War II world and "probably the foremost author of the UN Charter." Thomas Connally said in his memoirs "Certainly he had more to do with writing the framework of the charter than anyone else." His New York Times obituary is subtitled "Wrote Charter of World Organization." A short, rotund, mustachioed pipe smoker with a very large and round head, he joked that he might find it easier to roll than to walk. An aide compared him to the third little pig in the Three Little Pigs, Hull called him "Friar Tuck". A hardworking "one-man think tank" for Hull, he preferred to stay invisible, in the background. In the words of Richard Holbrooke, he "was one of those figures peculiar to Washington – a tenacious bureaucrat who, fixed on a single goal, left behind a huge legacy while virtually disappearing from history." Early life Pasvolsky was born in Pavlograd in the Russian Empire in 1893. His parents were anti-czarists and the family fled to the United States in 1905. After graduating from the City College of New York in 1916 he studied political science at Columbia University and also attended the University of Geneva. He then edited periodicals, the monthly The Russian Review and Amerikansky Viestnik, and the daily newspaper Russkoye Slovo. Engaged in the tempestuous political climate of the emigres in New York, he debated Leon Trotsky during his visit to New York in 1916. He was at first optimistic about the Russian Revolution, and worked as the secretary of Boris Bakhmeteff, the last Ambassador to the US of the Kerensky government, but became embittered and anti-communist after Lenin's October Revolution. In 1919 he covered the Paris Peace Conference for the New York Tribune, the Brooklyn Eagle and other newspapers, and in 1921 he covered the Washington Arms Conference for the Baltimore Sun. During this period he became a Wilsonian internationalist and softened his stance toward the Soviet Union, arguing for its recognition by the US and its admission into the League of Nations. Brookings In 1922 he became an economist on the staff of the Brookings Institution, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1936, and which was his institutional