Many a family has to put up with a black sheep, in your case it is a red one.
—Noel Field in a letter to his brother, Hermann
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained in us than lying to others.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
IN JUNE 1957, after six months of investigation and hundreds of interviews, a United Nations Special Committee on Hungary (made up of the ambassadors of the neutral states of Denmark, Australia, Ceylon, Tunisia, and Uruguay) reported that “what took place in Hungary was a spontaneous uprising caused by long standing grievances . . . led by students, workers, soldiers and intellectuals, many of them Communists or former Communists. Those who took part in it insisted that democratic socialism should be the basis of the Hungarian political structure. It is untrue that the uprising was fomented by reactionary circles in Hungary or that it drew its strength from ‘Imperialist circles’ in the West.”
On Radio Budapest, Noel still defended Soviet repression, and now attacked the UN. “Neither 400 nor 4,000 pages of dubious testimony,” Field said of the report he admitted he had not yet read, “by a hundred or ten times that number of defectors can hamper the forward march of Hungary and other countries of the Socialist camp along the high road toward communism, which all other nations will ultimately follow in their own manner and their own good time.” Mere facts never much mattered to this fanatic, who had spent the revolution in a hospital.
“It makes me so depressed,” Noel’s sister Elsie wrote Hermann on March 7, 1957. “I just want to cry and cry.” Hermann, however, was still unwilling to give up on their brother. “Don’t forget,” he chides Elsie, “you and I always loved in Noel his sense of dedication, and his strong character and feel of participation in the world he lives in. It has led him . . . to what to us seems indefensible and irrational . . . but it is still the same Noel.”
For a full year, however, his siblings stopped writing Noel. Then, on December 26, 1957, Hermann broke his silence. “[Your radio report on the UN] was a double blow for me, both in injecting the Noel Field controversy back into the public arena, and in a manner bound to destroy the last shred of sympathy [for you],” Hermann wrote. “It will be better to drop all correspondence. I feel sad about this as I had originally hoped that you would find enough fulfillment and satisfaction within the new life you have chosen, and allow the Field name to leave the international scene once and for all.”
Hermann still could not reconcile himself to the loss of his beloved brother. Noel was as adept as ever at manipulating him. “Feeling utterly torn,” Hermann laments to Elsie. “After Noel’s UN utterance I decided to continue the silence that existed since the Uprising. Then came his very brotherly, affectionate letter of last September with its note of yearning to keep in touch. . . . Oh, if only Noel . . . had his eyes opened and had humility in face of the crimes of the past . . . the deceit and dishonesty that has all but choked the original concepts [of Communism]. But instead everything points to a blind, irrational fanaticism with him. . . . Am I and my family,” he asks plaintively, “doomed to live on the receiving end of Noel’s activities for the rest of our lives?” The answer was obviously yes.
“It’s damnable,” Elsie wrote back. “I’m through doing his dirty work. He considers his value not in propagandizing in Hungary, as much as in propagandizing to the West.”
On December 27, 1957, Hermann matter-of-factly informed his brother that he and his wife, Kate, were “introducing two Hungarian refugees to the New England countryside.” For Noel, those refugees were traitors, deserving of the same fate as Ignaz Reiss and Walter Krivitsky.
Yet Hermann still clung to the faint hope of reconciliation. “Nothing is permanent at present,” he wrote his sister on November 28, 1959. “We as a family don’t want to cut the last ground under Noel if time came and he changed his mind and wished to return.”
In the aftermath of the revolution, János Kádár ordered mass arrests of striking workers and hunted down those freedom fighters who had not managed to escape to the West. Twenty-two thousand Hungarians were sentenced to long prison terms as “counterrevolutionaries.” In 1958, Imre Nagy and his “coconspirators”—briefly granted safe passage to Rumania—were abducted and returned to Hungary. Marshal Tito, now back in the Kremlin’s favor, played his treacherous part in this tragic affair—promising the revolution’s leaders safe passage, only to lure them into a Soviet trap. After a secret trial, Nagy and his two top aides, Pál Maléter and Miklós Gimes, were executed by hanging at dawn on June 16, 1958.
The shattered country retreated into sullen resignation. Now, even Noel’s colleagues at the journal—nominally Communists—distanced themselves from Field and his relentless defense of the Soviet invasion. “He used to say that the Soviets saved Hungary,” his colleague at the NHQ, Miklos Vajda, said, “and that rescue comes with sacrifice. Noel believed the Soviet propaganda about ‘counter revolution’ when almost no one else did. I liked to provoke him by pointing out the contrast between theory and practice in Marxism. But Noel always had an answer. ‘These are just temporary hardships,’ he would say.” Vajda recalled that when a Western journalist visited the journal, Noel would quickly scurry to his office, closing the door behind him.
If anyone still doubted Noel Field’s fanatical devotion to Communism, he himself erased that last shred of ambiguity in 1960. In an article meant to preempt a biography by New York Times correspondent Flora Lewis, Noel wrote a long autobiographical narrative in Mainstream, an American Communist Party publication. Field forgives Stalin’s crimes as “essential on the road to a Communism.” “They hate the same things and the same people I hate. . . .” he writes of those who abducted, jailed, and tortured him, his wife, brother, and foster daughter. “Given their belief in my guilt, I cannot blame them,” he said, adding, “I approve their detestation.” Like a monk justifying the atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition, he writes of Stalin’s rule, “Whatever mistakes . . . have been committed, they cannot affect the fundamental truths that began to dawn on me a quarter of a century ago. These truths will inevitably win out over temporary aberrations.”
Of the crushed revolution, Field writes, “Soviet troops have come in defense of socialism, the next stage in Man’s evolution towards greater freedom and happiness for all. Soviet troops—and not those poor, misled youngsters throwing away their lives in a hopeless struggle against them—are the real freedom fighters.” Field seemed to have forgotten that once he, too, was a “misled youngster throwing away [his life] in a hopeless struggle.”
Finally, and astonishingly given the bloody “justice” meted out to the revolution’s leader, Field claimed, “The wrongs . . . have been righted, the wrong-doers punished, our innocence recognized. . . . In the plain speaking of Khrushchev,” Field said, “we sense the consciousness of physical and moral strength—the prevalence, as the Chinese put it—of the East wind over the West wind.”
As usual, Noel had given his family no warning before the article hit newsstands. “I’m really sore about this,” Hermann fumed to Elsie, who had given up her practice as a doctor to focus on her brothers’ case. “Especially in view of our assumption all along of silence about his past. Now, it will look like a connivance—or that we were fools. . . . I’m not prepared to play along one further inch in a subterfuge or cover-up for Noel. . . . Surely, he knows . . . that I and my family will be the main victims.” Noel knew, but he didn’t much care.
Their brother was a Communist and, far worse, a traitor to his own country, and they had played a part of his cover-up. “Noel can’t tell all the truth,” Elsie wrote Hermann, “because he can’t admit to espionage. Some of this could have been prevented . . . by you and me and E[rica] but we chose a different path . . . mistakenly judging Noel’s intentions and capacity. . . . I know it sounds brutal . . . when I say that you must accept part of the responsibility.”
Now, after their public embarrassment, Elsie declared, “We would be damn fools to cover up for Noel, damn fools if we don’t make our disagreement clear,” Elsie wrote Hermann on December 28, 1960. “Noel writes well, sounds so reasonable, he will ensnare dopes and well-meaning liberals. . . . I suggest that you state your disagreement publicly.” Noel, unmoved by his family’s pain, blandly informed Hermann on December 26, 1960, “As you know, I have my convictions, and whenever these require me to speak out, I shall do so, however great the pain of causing unpleasantness to relatives I continue to hold dear.”
In the midsixties, Kádár tried to appease his disgruntled population by launching “goulash Communism”—a brand of consumer Communism that allowed a degree of free enterprise and private ownership. Shops suddenly offered unheard-of “luxury” goods such as oranges and bananas, and the choke hold of total surveillance was lifted. Arrests eased up as Kádár’s unofficial slogan became “If you are not [actively] against us, you are for us.”
Noel’s blind support of the Soviet armed intervention was now rewarded. In a rare personal appearance, in 1964, Kádár turned up to celebrate Noel’s sixtieth birthday at his office. “Comrade Field,” the Hungarian Communist Party chief addressed him, “what would you like for your birthday?” That’s easy, the American replied. “More office space for the magazine.” Within days, workmen from the Ministry of the Interior arrived, took measurements, counted heads, and set to work transforming a suite of rooms on Rákóczy Boulevard into spacious new editorial offices for the NHQ. The regime’s gesture was noted by the power elite of Budapest. For Noel, who had yearned for full acceptance for so long, it was the ultimate sign that he was finally a comrade.
With the passage of time, however, Noel’s dreams of life as a revolutionary evaporated into an illusion. He was of little use to Moscow as it experimented with a policy of détente with the West in the sixties. As the absurd language of “class enemy” was discarded, he increasingly seemed a relic of a reviled system, an embarrassing reminder of Stalin’s worst crimes.
Hermann’s story was dramatically different. After prison he, like Erica, achieved a remarkable serenity. “My experience taught me a great deal,” he said. “That one can survive if one preserves the will to survive, that a negative experience can have positive effects.” Hermann channeled his idealism into nonpolitical causes. Father of three children, internationally known as the director of Tufts University’s graduate program in Urban, Social and Environmental Policy, Hermann was an environmental pioneer. His autobiographical note in the Harvard Class of 1932 alumni report reveals his role in an embryonic field. “[After prison] I decided to return to my original career and dig myself out of the ruins. . . . Increasingly, I was appalled by the mindless despoiling of the physical environment essential to any quality of life. . . . I asked myself: to be good, must not architecture be environmentally sound? My focus was increasingly toward the central issues of preservation based on . . . sustainable resources whether at the local, regional, or the global scale. With travel to Senegal, Costa Rica, New Zealand and China. . . . My greatest satisfaction,” Hermann concludes, “comes at being able to live with Kate in our valley, thirty-five miles from Boston in our eighteenth-century farmhouse, converting the 200 acres gradually into a wildlife sanctuary . . . opening its fields once more to agricultural use and providing open house for our children and grandchildren.”
Hermann, the low-key environmental visionary—and not Noel, the delusional and devious Stalinist—became the real change agent in the Field family, “thanks to the search for meaning in that battle for survival,” Hermann said, “that cut across the middle of my life.” For his sons Hugh and Alan—who spent five years uncertain as to whether their father was dead or alive—the scars never completely healed. Even now, in their late sixties, their eyes can fill when the subject of their father’s missing years comes up. The sons still wonder at their father’s decision in 1949 to search for his older brother, over his own family’s welfare. Their sister, Alison, born after their parents were reunited, is blessedly free of those painful memories of a time when no one would discuss what happened to their father.
The next four years were among the most peaceful in Noel Field’s troubled life. His colleagues shrugged off his insistence that Marxism-Leninism was the wave of the future. “Very few people in Hungary had those illusions by the sixties,” Ferenc Aczél said. “There was a general cynicism about the whole fake system, which was so obviously unworkable.” The man who once marched down Pennsylvania Avenue arm in arm with the Bonus Army was now one of the privileged members of the Communist Party. The Fields vacationed in Hungary’s exclusive spas reserved for party bigwigs, and benefited from unlimited free medical care. This was of paramount importance for both Fields, plagued by endless post-prison health problems. Their consolation was no longer having to conceal their true beliefs, nor spy against their own country. Noel Field lived a quiet if diminished life as one of the last apologists of a decomposing orthodoxy.
An ocean away, Noel’s friend Alger Hiss’s life was far more complicated. Hiss had risen much higher in his nation’s service than Noel, thus his tumble from grace was more spectacular. An April 1945 photograph captures Hiss’s stunning reversal of fortune. The scene is the San Francisco conference that gave birth to the United Nations. President Harry S. Truman—beaming and triumphant—has just stepped off the podium after a rousing speech to delegates from around the world. The president is shown reaching out to clasp the hand of a smiling, handsome young man, sleek in a double-breasted suit. Proudly gripping the president’s hand is the chief organizer of the UN’s founding conference—Soviet spy Alger Hiss.
Hiss’s jail time coincided almost perfectly with his friend Noel’s. But Alger’s time at Lewisburg Penitentiary was dramatically different from Field’s. Routine visits from his wife and son, as well as a steady stream of correspondence, connected Hiss to the outside world. Hiss also enjoyed lively interaction with his fellow inmates and was admired by many of them. Still, prison is prison, and, later, Hiss said he wouldn’t wish it on anybody—not even his nemesis, Richard M. Nixon.
Alger Hiss strode out of Lewisburg on November 27, 1954, healthy and determined to “prove” his innocence. In an astonishing coincidence, Noel Field was released from Fő Utca Prison the very same day. Field, however, was a man broken in body and spirit.
The times, however, proved inauspicious for Hiss’s quest. Republicans, out of power for nearly twenty years, were back, and McCarthy was calling the Roosevelt-Truman era “twenty years of treason.” Hiss, former bright star of the New Deal—handy symbol of an era—was now barred from practicing law. Alternating periods of unemployment with low-paying jobs as a salesman, his marriage to Priscilla suffered and, in 1984, ended in divorce.
Richard M. Nixon, the man who helped to expose Hiss, gave Alger an unintended shot of new life in the midseventies. The multiple scandals of Watergate, which unmasked the president as corrupt, power-obsessed, and reckless with the Constitution, helped to revive Hiss’s fortunes. Journalists who recently revealed the abuses of Nixon and his thuggish inner circle of “plumbers” now rediscovered his early victim Alger Hiss. The two cases were conflated, and brilliantly served Hiss’s decades-long campaign of self-exoneration. To a new generation, Nixon embodied the McCarthy era’s shameful excesses, while Hiss became the symbol of endangered liberals and New Dealers. Speaking on campuses and in the media, ever persuasive in his insistence that he was the sacrifice of a fevered time, Hiss became a prominent public figure. There were those who simply refused to believe that Alger Hiss could betray his country. “Even if Hiss himself were to confess his guilt,” said a Columbia University professor, and neighbor of Hiss, “I wouldn’t believe it.”
Hiss continued to deny that he had ever been a Communist—much less Moscow’s spy—even as he praised Stalin. In 1986, he told a journalist, “In spite of knowledge of [Stalin’s] crimes, he was very impressive . . . decisive, soft spoken, very clearheaded. He almost always spoke without notes.” Occasionally, with a flash of irritation, Hiss revealed himself. When told that Irving Howe, a lifelong democratic socialist who had attacked both Stalin and McCarthy, considered Hiss to be a liar, Alger’s knife-edge politeness slipped. “Howe? I don’t consider him to be of the left.” Which is precisely how a Stalinist would dismiss a mere socialist.
Ambiguity shadowed Hiss’s case—but that was better than the stamp of “traitor.” In 1992, a lifetime of stony denial of his real affiliation nearly paid off. A former Soviet general, Dmitri A. Volkogonov, announced that he had not found “a single document that substantiates the allegation that Hiss collaborated with the intelligence sources of the Soviet Union.” No sooner did Hiss and his supporters begin celebrating than the general backpedaled. “What I said,” he corrected himself, “gives no basis to claim a full clarification.” Volkogonov admitted he felt great pressure from Hiss and his friends to clear the American’s record, so the eighty-eight-year-old could “die peacefully.” The Soviet archives are famously labyrinthine, and Volkogonov now confessed he had spent only two days searching, and only in the KGB files, not the archives of the Soviet military long held to be Hiss’s outfit.
In 1993, Alger Hiss and Noel Field’s narratives again intersected. That year, a Hungarian historian named Maria Schmidt found Noel Field’s “rehabilitation” file in the Budapest secret police archives. Field named Hiss as a fellow Soviet agent with whom he stayed in touch. Noel had nothing to gain by lying about this in 1954 to Major Arpad Kretschmer, who had access to all Soviet intelligence files. Moreover, in 1996, the Venona files—thousands of decoded Soviet intelligence cables from World War II—added further proof of Hiss’s treason. In these files, Hiss is mostly referred to by his code name “ALES.” But in a number of cables released subsequently, due to the efforts of scholars Allen Weinstein, Alexander Vassiliev, John Haynes, and Eduard Mark, Hiss is referred to by his full name. The Soviet secret services were not an integrated unit. The tight compartmentalization of the two branches—military and political—ultimately shattered the cone of secrecy surrounding GRU agent Hiss. Agents of the NKVD—the KGB’s predecessor—did not know the GRU’s code for its agent Hiss, so they repeatedly referred to him as Alger Hiss.
It is not the purpose of this narrative to re-litigate the Hiss case. For a shrinking but still-determined handful of people, the affair has ceased to be about evidence and a great deal to do with the liberal-conservative culture wars it ignited. Those political and media skirmishes continue. Nor is this the place to sort through the mountain of evidence—some of it circumstantial, a great deal of it factual—attesting to Alger Hiss’s service to Stalin.
One startling coda to the convoluted history is worth noting. It occurred during a conversation between Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. and Andrei Gromyko, Soviet envoy to the United Nations, on September 7, 1945. Postwar international organizations were the agenda item between Stettinius and Gromyko. For a number of reasons, the Soviet diplomat urged that the UN be located in New York, not Europe. The secretary of state inquired if Moscow had “given any thought to a person who would take the position of first UN secretary general,” Stettitnius wrote in his diary. “[Gromyko] said he would be very happy to see Alger Hiss appointed temporary secretary general, as he had a very high regard for Alger Hiss, particularly for his fairness and impartiality.” On its own, the Soviet endorsement of an American official would not be proof of Hiss’s espionage. In the annals of the Cold War, Gromyko’s recommendation of an American to head the world’s most important international organization is, however, without precedent.
In some ways, Noel lived a freer life in Budapest than his friend Alger in New York. Field lived life as a Communist, while Hiss spent the rest of his life attempting to prove he had never been one in the first place. Field’s freedom, however, came at a great price. Cut off from friends and family, and sidelined from the most dramatic—political, social, and cultural—events of the day, whatever contentment Noel found had to be within the borders of a small country, with its unique culture and impenetrable language. In the editorial offices of the New Hungarian Quarterly, Noel had the company of English-speaking Hungarian intellectuals, who preferred discussions about William Faulkner and Philip Roth, the shocking new talent in the American literary firmament, to politics. They considered Noel an eccentric from a time when believing the holy writs of Communism was not a sign of intellectual backwardness. “Once,” Ferenc Aczél said, “we counted the collected prison time served by our editorial board. It was thirty years.” Their boss, NHQ’s founder and editor in chief, Ivan Boldizsár, a shrewd survivor, somehow kept them all safe from the occasional party enforcers.
In yet another strange intersection between the Fields’ story and my own, I recall Boldizsár as an occasional presence in my childhood home in Budapest, and as a bemused witness to my swimming lessons in one of Budapest’s Turkish baths, the Lukács, where Ivan was a regular. I can still evoke his image in the steamy waters, like some ancient (to my child’s eyes) crocodile, spreading the water with his enormous hands and arms, a mysterious smile on his lips. He was a man, so my parents later told me, privy to all the state’s secrets, having survived the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the first communist revolution, the fascists, the Communists, and the failed 1956 revolution—still serenely enjoying his daily Turkish bath. Later, when we were settled in suburban Washington, DC, Ivan occasionally visited my parents. Over tiny cups of espresso, Ivan entertained them with a steady stream of the latest Budapest jokes. “Ivan has not been a true believer,” my father told me, “for many years. If he ever was.” That tepid faith was Communism in Hungary in the sixties and seventies.
Noel Field could never abandon the faith, which imbued his life with meaning. Where would he turn if his fatal choice proved to be a mistake after all? Captured early by a fantasy that no reality—however cruel—could ever shake, facts were the enemy of his beliefs. But reality kept intruding.
The deep schism between China and the Soviet Union—revealed at the CPSU Congress in 1961—shattered yet another of Noel’s fantasies about the united Communist front. The East wind, he had predicted in 1960, would prevail over the West, and now it hadn’t. But the following year, Noel took pleasure in the publication of a slim volume by an unknown Russian schoolteacher, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a searing portrait of a prisoner’s life in the Gulag Archipelago. For Noel, its publication was further proof that the “mistakes” of Stalinism were being corrected. Solzhenitsyn’s next, even more critical tome, however, and the one after that, were banned.
Noel’s brother and sister visited him twice. In their many hours together in Budapest, there was one subject that Hermann and Noel never broached: prison. Nor did they speak of the terrible ordeal the rest of the family suffered. Hermann still longed for such a conversation. “Kate’s account of the five years as it looked from her and Elsie’s end,” he wrote Noel, “their battle, their unbounded devotion, their hopes and despair. . . . Well, next time I’ll make an agenda of all the forgotten bits.” But the “forgotten bits” were left forgotten.
In Hermann’s view, Noel was still Noel: an idealist with a big heart. “Our days with you,” Hermann wrote Noel on July 21, 1964, “will stand out as something to be treasured for their tenderness and simple joy.”
The family member Noel most longed to see, however, never visited him in Hungary. Hermann tried to explain to his brother why Erica refused to come. “Erica,” he wrote on July 21, 1964, “has an overwhelming responsibility to do nothing which can in any way harm her children (and for that matter Bob). Her natural keenness to see you, and yours to have her come, must be kept secondary to this, after all the hurt that has been done. As painful as any such restraint may be, I can’t help feeling that any other yardstick would be ruthless and immoral. . . . I think you forget on what thin ice the present stabilization of her life rests, and how vulnerable she and her family are. . . . Meanwhile, let’s all hope that eventually your hope will be fulfilled and that she and you will have the reunion you long for.”
Noel never abandoned that hope. On May 18, 1964, in a chatty letter to “Dear Kid,” he describes his pleasant routine, interrupted only by trips to the hospital for endless health problems, including trips to Lake Balaton for weeks of spa treatment. In the margin, he scribbled, “And when will we be seeing you?”