Laird Bell [SEP] educated at
US rule that proposed a "barbarous" dismantling of Germany. As president of the Alumni Association of Harvard University in June 1947 Laird Bell organized the commencement speeches where Secretary of State George Marshall launched the European Recovery Plan. (General Omar Bradley was the main speaker that day).
In the spring of 1949, Bell joined Columbia President Dwight Eisenhower and a group of other notables, chaired by Allen Dulles, in The National Committee for Free Europe, Inc, a private organization which gave aid to intellectuals and political refugees
having held a variety of legal and administrative posts in the British West Indies.
De Freitas was educated at Haileybury and Clare College, Cambridge, where he was a successful student and athlete, and was president of the Cambridge Union Society.
Two years at Yale followed, with a Mellon Fellowship in international law, and in 1936 on the voyage home he met his future wife, Helen Graham Bell, a Bryn Mawr graduate and daughter of Laird Bell, a prominent Chicago lawyer and Democrat.
In 1938 they married