Volume 4, Number 1 · February 11, 1965
Left Field
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Red Pawn: The Story of Noel Field
by Flora Lewis
Doubleday, 283 pp., $4.95
Noel Field was born in London in 1904. His father, a biologist and a Quaker, was American and his mother English. They moved to Zurich, and young Field grew up in Switzerland. He came to the United States at the age of eighteen after the First World War, went to Harvard and joined the Foreign Service in the Coolidge administration. He brought with him a naive and romantic idealism which the Depression and the rise of fascism set in a Communist mold. By the mid-Thirties his zeal attracted the attention of the Soviet intelligence apparatus. Field wanted to help the cause but had scruples about spying against his own government when he was on its payroll. He finally solved the ethical issue by leaving the State Department and joining the League of Nations secretariat. As Miss Lewis remarks, Field evidently thought that 'as an international civil servant he would not have anyone to betray.'
Review, 1323 words
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