he taught from 1939 to 1946, advancing from the rank of Instructor to Associate Professor. Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II. In 1942, McCune was given a leave of absence to serve the war effort. He worked as a Social Science Analyst in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). After serving in the OSS for two years and briefly on the Board of Economic Warfare, McCune was appointed as officer of the Korea Desk in the State Department. During those years, he was "generally recognized as the government's leading expert on Korean affairs." In 1946, he began teaching at UC, Berkeley. In 1948, he was promoted to associate professor of history at Berkeley, but he died that year because of heart problems. At Berkeley, he had helped establish an intensive course in the Korean language in the Far Eastern and Russian Language School of the University Extension. In addition, he acquired for the East Asiatic Library several hundred volumes in the Korean language: "These constitute one of the first such collections in this country." "He was a member of the Far Eastern Association, the Foreign Policy Association, the American Historical Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute of Pacific Relations, the American Association of University Professors and the World Affairs Institute. In 1947 he was appointed a member of the Advisory Editorial Board of the Far Eastern Quarterly and in the same year was a delegate to the National Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, at Coronado, California." His brother, Shannon Boyd-Bailey McCune (1913–1993), became a geographer and wrote several books about Korea for the general public. References 1908 births 1948 deaths Linguists from the United States Koreanists 20th-century linguists Linguists of Korean People from Pyongyang Huron University alumni Rutgers University alumni Occidental College alumni Occidental College faculty University of California, Berkeley faculty People of the Office of Strategic Services American expatriates in Korea