Donald Niven Wheeler
Donald Niven Wheeler (1913–2002) was an American social activist, teacher, and Communist Party member, as well as an alleged Soviet spy. Background Donald Niven Wheeler was born on October 23, 1913, in White Bluffs, Washington. His parents were Francis Marion Wheeler and Jeanie Melissa Shaw. He had five siblings including sister Margaret Jean Wheeler Schuddakopf and brother George Shaw Wheeler. He was a graduate of Reed College. He was a brilliant scholar who upon graduation received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and there, spurred by what he learned through his studies in economics, he joined the university branch of the Communist Party. He did post-graduate work at the University of Paris but dropped out to join the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. There he met Mary Lukes Vause, a fellow graduate of Reed College, a new mother and the widow of his best friend, Clare Vause. They were married in 1938. He later returned to Oxford (1968) and completed his doctoral studies. Duncan Chaplin Lee, an Oxford classmate, described him as a really "progressive person". Career Government Wheeler was associated with various so-called "Comintern" organizations before being employed by the New Deal federal government, first in the