Talk:Noel Field

Untitled
I added the "cleanup" tag to this article. It needs a proper introduction paragraph with birth & death dates and section headings. It also contains some extremely unencyclopedic, unclear, and just plain weird writing, such as
 * "His early history---a Quaker with Communist sympathies who rose steadily in the world of American diplomacy---offers an informative window on its era. But it does not hint at the explosion to come, in postwar Eastern Europe, for which Field unwittingly would serve as the detonator." (Ay caramba!)

KarlBunker 16:15, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I added the POV check tag to the section on the Fields after arrest, which says:


 * "Noel and Herta Field, however, opted to settle in Budapest where they remained apologists for the regime that had tortured them. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had blocked Field's bid for OSS funds for a German communist front group during World War II, later said, "Field's simple-mindedness was indestructible.""

Use of terms like "apologists" seems entirely out of place here. For whatever reason, the Fields continued to believe in these governments. Whether they were apologists or not is a matter of opinion. Shankargopal (talk) 13:23, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I have attempted some small improvement. The quote by Field shows why some labelled him an apologist at the time. - Salmanazar (talk) 16:49, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


 * But the sentence User: Shankargopa singles out is also simply true from a to z. But it is so nice to see some stalinist sympathies here. There is a exhaustive treatment of the Field case (in german!) available (with the usual lacunae) on googlebooks.--Radh (talk) 07:27, 26 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Not called The N F Diaries, as mistakenly said in the edit comment; its called Der Fall N F (The Case of Noel Field).--Radh (talk) 09:26, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

In the last paragraph, under the heading "Later Life," there was this sentence: "In 1956 just out of prison he had published an angry apology of the Russian counterrevolutionary brutality in Hungary." I changed "apology" to "defense." If "apology" is used, it should be "apology for," not "apology of," but presumably Field was not apologizing for the behavior of Soviet troops but vigorously defending it.Unbestimmtheit (talk) 05:19, 6 December 2013 (UTC) I also inserted commas to set off "just out of prison" as a parenthetical clause.Unbestimmtheit (talk) 05:21, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Bias
I think the entire page needs a rewrite, starting with the assertion that he was a Soviet agent. He was clearly sympathic to communism, but the transcripts of his interrogations by the Hungarian secret police (under torture) clearly indicate otherwise. He was an American agent prior to 1945; it appears that his "handler" was none other than Allen Dulles, later head of the C.I.A. After his release from Hungarian prison, he stayed in Hungary because if he returned to the U.S. it was certain that he would have been tried during the McCarthy Era. Charles L. Smith (talk) 04:53, 10 April 2012 (UTC)Charles L. Smith

He worked for many people; the question is-where did his loyalties lie? With the soviets, it seems. Even after what they did. The article reflects that. 24.130.15.8 (talk) 08:03, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Book on Field
There is a massive book on Field and the whole trial thing - in German. Will find out the bibliographical details.--80.157.2.254 (talk) 10:57, 9 February 2017 (UTC)