Whittaker Chambers: A Biography

National Review, Feb 10, 1997 by Terry Teachout

LEAFING through the introduction to the newly collected Holmes -Frankfurter correspondence, I found a passing reference to "the alleged Communist spy Alger Hiss." Time was when such lawyerly weaseling left me speechless with anger. Now I just shrug. As Dostoyevsky, Whittaker Chambers's favorite author, once put it, "Man gets used to everything, the beast!" Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in a court of law, and everyone who knows anything about the Hiss case knows perfectly well that he did what Chambers said he did. Allen Weinstein put the next-to-last nail in the coffin in 1978 with the publication of Perjury, and the coup de gr"ce came with the release last year by the National Security Agency of intercepted Soviet cable traffic from the Forties, which revealed that Hiss flew straight from Yalta to Moscow, where Andrei Vishinsky personally thanked him for his long years of service to the Soviet Union. But when Hiss died in November, no obituary writer was willing to say flat out that He Did It, and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw both went so far as to suggest he was framed. Such is the nature of Alger Hiss's posthumous victory: by lying steadfastly for a half century, he succeeded in hiding the truth behind the shadow of a doubt.

cepted Soviet cable traffic from the Forties, which revealed that Hiss flew straight from Yalta to Moscow, where Andrei Vyshinsky personally thanked him for his long years of service to the Soviet Union. But when Hiss died in November, virtually no obituary writer was willing to say flat out that He Did It, and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw both went so far as to suggest that he was framed. Such is the nature of Alger Hiss's posthumous victory: by lying steadfastly for half a century, he succeeded in hiding the truth behind the shadow of a doubt.

The truth which Hiss's lies concealed was not just that he was a Soviet spy, but that modern American liberalism itself bears the blood-red birthmark of complicity in the Communist cause. Once again, everyone who knows anything about the history of liberalism knows this. But it was (and is) the most inconvenient of truths for those liberals who understood (and understand) that an ideology whose legitimacy is rooted in the myth of its own absolute rectitude can ill afford to admit having partaken of original sin. So the liberal establishment shamefully turned its back on anti-Communism, and the inconvenient truth about Alger Hiss and his fellow Communists slowly vanished beneath a sea of qualifications, evasions, and outright lies.

What also vanished was the truth about Whittaker Chambers. To be sure, his memory was kept bright by those who had known him in his post-trial days, not least those who had worked with him at NR in the Fifties and the countless young Americans who had been converted to conservatism by reading Witness, his best-selling 1952 memoir. But until the appearance of Perjury, Chambers was visible only through the glare of partisanship. To his enemies, he was the spiritual leader of the dark legion of reaction; to his admirers, he was a symbol of the great moral cause of the postwar era. More than a few conservatives were thus understandably unnerved when Allen Weinstein revealed that Chambers was, like all human beings, all too human: one suspects they preferred the symbol to the flawed, confused man himself.

I doubt that Sam Tanenhaus's long-awaited biography of Whittaker Chambers will change anyone's mind about whether Hiss or Chambers was telling the truth. Nor is it intended to do so (though Tanenhaus includes a devastatingly efficient six-page appendix summarizing the additional evidence against Hiss which has emerged in the five decades since his conviction). For Whittaker Chambers: A Biography is not a rehash of United States of America v. Alger Hiss. It is, rather, the richly detailed story of a representative modern man, one who embodied in his tortured person all the tensions and complexities of the Thirties, and I know of no book that does a better job of explaining that low, dishonest decade.

Modernity, as Tanenhaus reminds us, was Whittaker Chambers's birthright: he was taught from earliest childhood that there is no truth, and he spent the rest of his life searching for it. His father was a bisexual magazine illustrator, his mother an arty, shabby-genteel agnostic. At Columbia University, he dazzled such teachers as Mark Van Doren (and such students as Lionel Trilling) with his literary gifts, but soon discovered that words alone could not fill the empty places in his soul. Tormented by inchoate homosexual longings, painfully aware of the squalor and misery in which the "other half" of America lived, Chambers sought deliverance in the secular religion that was Marxism, abandoning a promising career as a poet and translator to become a Communist journalist and, later, a spy. Idealism drove him into the arms of mass murderers, and idealism forced him in time to confront the enormity of what he and his Communist brethren had done: by choosing to testify against Alger Hiss, Chambers, in Arthur Koestler's striking phrase, "knowingly committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation."