Meet Alger Hiss: Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, Supreme Court clerk, left Wall Street to join a New Deal farming agency, counsel to a Senate Committee at age 30, aide to president Roosevelt at Yalta, Secretary General of the UN’s founding conference, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace . . . and the most highly placed traitor in American history?

Further Research:

Episode 1: About Hiss’s life before the HUAC hearings, see his own autobiography, Recollections of a Life (Seaver Books 1988) at 1-148; the definitive book on the Case, Perjury:  The Hiss-Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein (Hoover Inst. Press 2013) at 81-92, 107-10, 152-69, 211-46, 281-83, 369-96; AlgerHiss’s Looking-Glass Wars:  The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy, by G. Edward White (Oxford University Press 2004) at 3-39; Alger Hiss: The True Story, by John Chabot Smith at 1-151; and, especially concerning Hiss’s years at The State Department, Christina Shelton, Alger Hiss:  Why He Chose Treason (Threshold Editions 2012) at 11-137.

Further Research

Episode 2: About Chambers’ early and communist years, here are some references: 

1) Chambers’ autobiography Witness, the first 450 pages.  The book is still in print and, like most books about this case, can be found on Amazon and eBay.  One reviewer said that Chambers’ description of his middle class family’s wreckage was heart-breaking.  One might compare it to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman or Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.  Chambers’ description of his life in the Communist movement (above ground and underground and his attempt to escape) has been compared to Dante’s Inferno.

2) Professor Weinstein’s Perjury (referenced above) at 92-106, 110-42, 148-64, and 325-33.

3) Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, by Meyer M. Zeligs, M.D.  This is a psychobiography of Hiss and Chambers, painting Chambers in a lugubrious light.  See pages 27-132, 201-74.  I have no expertise in psychiatry or related fields, but to me this book seems a relic of 1950s/60s psychiatry, when Freud was compared to Aristotle and Copernicus.  The eminent liberal intellectual Lionel Trilling (an admirer of Chambers), wrote that “no other work does as much as this one to bring into question the viability of the infant discipline of psycho-history.”  I include it here, not only because it may have some value today, but mostly because it shows that the real facts of Chambers’ life can be used, by skillful hands and a determined mind, to make him seem lunatic.

If you were Chambers, how would you walk the tightrope, trying to alert the government about the Soviet underground without exposing your own role in its crimes and incriminating your best friend in those years, with whom you committed those crimes?

If Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers both witnessed an event and gave different accounts of it, which one would you be more inclined to believe?  Hiss, the public man, has the resume to die for and all The Top People vouching for him.  Chambers, the creature of the underground, has been a professional liar for years and loves to tell melodramatic tales.  But is there something too good to be true about Hiss?  Do you wonder who is the real man behind the resume?  And while no one would say that Chambers is the embodiment of moderation, he is painfully honest in many ways and he does not hide all his past sins. 

Even if your first inclination would be to believe Hiss, what would make you change to put more faith in Chambers?

Further Research:

Episode 3:  Professor Weinstein’s book and Chambers’ memoir, referenced above, contain much about what Chambers called “the tranquil years.”  

Re Chambers’ emergence from the Communist underground, interesting memoirs are “The Autobiography of Mark Van Doren” by Mark Van Doren at 218-19 (Harcourt Brace & Co, 1958), “Navigating the Rapids 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle” edited by Beatrice B. Berle & Travis B. Jacobs at 249-50 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1973), and “Eyewitness to History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century” by Isaac Don Levine at 179-200 (Hawthorn Books 1973).  Levine was the journalist who accompanied Chambers to see Berle the day World War II began.

The best books about Chambers’ career at Time are “Harry & Teddy: The Turbulent Friendship of Press Lord Henry Luce and His Favorite Reporter, Theodore H. White” by Thomas Griffith (Random House 1995) and “One Man’s America: A Journalist’s Search for the Heart of His Country” by Henry Grunwald (Doubleday 1997).  Look in each book’s index for references to Whittaker Chambers.

Concerning the disillusionment with Communism by intellectuals who had been bedazzled by it, see “The God That Failed,” edited by Richard Crossman (Columbia Univ. Press 2001, first published in London in 1950), “Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History” by John P. Diggins (Harper & Row 1975), and “A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals” by William L. O’Neill (Simon & Schuster 1982) 259-368 passim.  Chambers’ admirer in Columbia and later a great Comparative Literature Professor there, Lionel Trilling, wrote a novel about leftist disillusionment with radical leftism.  Originally published just before the Hiss-Chambers scandal broke, it was reissued in 1975 (around the time of President Nixon’s disgrace).  “The Middle of the Journey” by Lionel Trilling (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1975).     A major character in the novel, Gifford Maxim, is based on Chambers and the 1975 reissue contains an introduction by Trilling that describes his long relationship with Chambers.  

Photo: Craig Whitehead on Unsplash

Further Research Episode 4:  Podcast 4:  The great book of Communism is Das Kapital, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  I’ve always found it impenetrably dense and boring; to follow it you have to know a lot about 19th century factories.  The best short (and readable) works expounding Communist theory and action plans are two by Marx, The Communist Manifesto and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.  Among the many works from the Soviet Union describing Communism, the best short ones, in my opinion, are Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” and Stalin’s “The Foundations of Leninism.”  

The best books about the reality and results of Communism are the short “Communism: A History,” by Richard Pipes and the long “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,” by Stephane Courtois and others.

Two excellent descriptions of what it felt like to live in the 1930s and lose faith in laissez-faire Capitalism, and perhaps briefly to fall for Communism, are (1) Alistair Cooke's book about the Case, "A Generation on Trial: U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss" (Knopf 1950 and 1952), the first Chapter, titled "Remembrance of Things Past: The 1930s," and (2) Murray Kempton's essays about the radicals of the 1930s, "Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties" (Simon & Schuster 1955 and The Modern Library 1998), the first chapter, titled "A Prelude."

All these books are available on Amazon.

Questions:  What do you think was the appeal of Soviet Communism in the 1930s?  What did Communism have that fascism, socialism, and The New Deal lacked?

If you came to believe in Communism, what would make you lose your confidence in it?  The obvious lack of democracy in the Soviet Union, the American Party’s slavish adherence to every 180 degree change in the Party line from Moscow, the purge trials of 1936-38, and Stalin hopping into bed with Hitler in their 1939 Non-Aggression Pact? 

Does Communism sound like a secular religion — with its all-encompassing philosophy, sacred texts, worshipped founders, and martyrs?

Might part of Communism’s appeal in the 1930s, compared to conventional religion, be that (1) it claimed to be rational, even scientific, (2) it promised paradise here on earth in just a few years (you don’t have to wait for heaven), (3) you don’t have to work for it (it’s on the inevitable ‘timetable of history’), and (4) it frees the individual from any sense of personal sin?

If you devoted your life to Communism and the Party and became disillusioned, what would you do?  Decide you had a bad picker when it came to politics and move on to baseball or real estate?  Remain a Marxist but not a Party member — hope another group will form and be “real Communists”?  Become a Socialist, or ‘get real’ and join the Republicans or the Democrats?  Or, like Chambers and a few others, make anti-Communism the mainspring of the rest of your life?

Richard M. Nixon, Library of Congress 

Episode 6:  Robert Stripling’s book (largely ghostwritten by the popular writer Bob Considine) is “The Red Plot Against America” (Bell 1949); it describes Hiss’s testimony and reactions to it at 110-16.  More accounts of Hiss’s first testimony are; Nixon at 5-11; Smith at 161-83; Toledano at 151-54; and Weinstein at 21-28.  The full transcript of Hiss’s testimony is in the Alpa Editions reprint of the HUAC hearings at 642-59.

Alger Hiss’s memoir of the Case, “In the Court of Public Opinion” (Knopf 1957) describes at 3-14 Hiss’s reaction to Chambers’ accusations and his first testimony in response.  This book is so dry (in it, Hiss never once describes having a feeling) that it has been called the only boring book ever written about this Case.  More interesting pro-Hiss reading is the John Chabot Smith book referenced above and a pro-Hiss book that focuses on Nixon’s misstatements and craftiness (a territory almost as target-rich as Hiss’s testimonies), “A Tissue of Lies:  Nixon vs. Hiss” (McGraw Hill 1979) by Morton and Michael Levitt.  

Questions:  You’re Alger Hiss, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a minor luminary of America’s post-War foreign policy establishment.   Whittaker Chambers testifies to HUAC that the two of you were in a secret Communist chat group 10-15 years ago and that you two became best friends. 

What do you do?

Several options:  (1) Do nothing, because no one who matters to your life cares a fig for what goes on at HUAC; (2) appear before the Committee with both guns blazing, in the style of the Hollywood Communists (but remember they came to a sticky end); (3) admit, sheepishly, that back in the dark days of the Great Depression, when you were just out of grad school and had more youthful idealism than good judgment, you did something very foolish that, fortunately, did no harm in the long run and you stopped doing it years ago; and (4) calmly deny Chambers’ charges like a gentleman who will not stoop to wrestle in the mud; tough it out, hope Chambers gets tangled up in melodrama, and that, with your sterling reputation and friends in high places, you can emerge in two weeks as fabulous as always and with the added sheen of having repulsed a despicable smear campaign.  Hiss chose #4.

If you were Hiss, would your choice depend much on whether Chambers’ charges were true?  What if they were true and you knew that you two had also been in a spy ring, a major league crime that Chambers could blackmail you with for the rest of your life if you admitted to the chat group and the friendship?  But since he was in the spy ring, too, you could blackmail him for the rest of his life.

Extra Credit Question:  I assume that by now you have read parts of Hiss’s testimony and its dissection by Nixon and Stripling.  As you read Hiss for the first time, did you notice any of the suspicion-raising bits that Nixon and Stripling saw?