Life of an Angel

Frederick Vanderbilt Field was news the day he was born, Apr. 15, 1905. He was a great-great grandson of Railroad Builder Cornelius Vanderbilt, marked by destiny and carefully drawn wills to be a man of wealth and solid respectability. But the tough, devoutly Republican old commodore was no model for Frederick Vanderbilt Field. Before his generation had begun to grow grey, Freddie Field had radically rewritten the family script.

At Harvard, young Field wavered elegantly between having a social purpose and having a good time. He edited the Crimson, but in the end devoted himself largely to having a good time.

One of his oddest devotions to the good time occurred during one of Freddie's lavish Prohibition-era parties. It was a Christmas dinner at Boston's staid Locke-Ober's. The company was high, the food and wines were perfect. Outside the snow fell. But there was one feature missing. Freddie hired a shivering newsboy to press his nose against the window and watch "as we attacked the groaning board."

Dilettanti Arise. After a year at the London School of Economics, social purpose was reborn in Field. Filled with his new learning, he created a furor by denouncing capitalism, the monopoly of wealth, the "narrow-mindedness of the wealthy students at Harvard." He formally joined Norman Thomas' Socialist Party and married sympathetic Elizabeth G. Brown of Duluth. They went off to study political movements in Communist Russia and the Far East.

Back in the U.S., Field devoted his attention to Asia. He worked hard for the respectable Institute of Pacific Relations. He took no pay; he was, in fact, one of the institute's most generous contributors.

Then Norman Thomas' Socialism began to pall. Field decided it was time to get up in the vanguard of the proletarian revolution. Whether he became a Communist card holder or not, he acted and talked like one, throwing himself with furious concentration into Communist activities.

His concentration was interrupted when his wife left him, divorced him and married his old crony from Harvard days, Joseph Barnes, who later became Moscow correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, then editor of the leftish, ill-starred New York Star. But the interruption was only momentary. Field poured money into Red activities, put on $100-a-plate dinners for C.P. causes, slavishly followed the party line--and married wealthy Edith Chamberlain Hunter of California, who was once a diligent worker in Red vineyards, but who describes herself vigorously as not a Communist.

One Roof. A little miffed when the U.S. Military Intelligence turned down his offer to serve as an expert in Far Eastern affairs, Field spent the war echoing Moscow's demands for a second front and helping plan and finance a scheme to bring the most active Red fronts under one roof. A busy hive of half a dozen front groups is the old three-story Astor office at 23 West 26th Street. Field supports it with his inherited wealth.

It was Field who was the most conspicuous of the delegation which turned up last fall with bail for the eleven Communist leaders in New York; he and friends of the Civil Rights Congress put up $260,000 in Government bonds. This is the role --angel of Communism--which Field still plays most satisfactorily for the Reds.

Since 1945, he has run what he calls a Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. The committee's aim: to get the U.S. out of China and leave that nation wide-open to the great revolution of the proletariat. A year ago, in the Marxist magazine Political Affairs, Field crowed over the strategy's success. "It is our task as American Communists," he proclaimed, "to help mobilize the forces of labor and all anti-imperialists to deal such further blows at Wall Street that the Chinese New Democracy may . . . move firmly on."

Last week Freddie Field got his name in the newspapers once more: Manhattan newspapers discovered that Field, quietly divorced from his second wife some time ago, had quietly married, in Nevada last July, Anita Cohen Boyer, divorced wife of Dr. Raymond Boyer. Dr. Boyer is serving out a two-year sentence (TIME, Dec. 15, 1947) for complicity in Russia's wartime espionage plot against Canada.

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