Witness for the truth - the real truth about Alger Hiss's guilt in spying for the former Soviet Union

National Review, Feb 15, 1993 by Sam Tanenhaus

It has been Alger Hiss's face on all the front pages - but there were two players in the Hiss-Chambers case.

Now that General Dmitri A. Volkogonov has retracted his rash statement exonerating Alger Hiss, and Mr. Hiss himself has receded from the public spotlight, it seems fair to say a word about the man who was truly vindicated by the whole sorry episode. I mean Mr. Hiss's accuser, Whittaker Chambers. For the first fundamental fact of the Hiss case - and the wellspring of its great drama - is that it featured two major actors. We've heard a great deal about one of them, Alger Hiss, and about his public life. How he was one of the so-called New Deal lawyers, a junior member of President Franklin Roosevelt's brain trust, who later became a ranking member of the State Department, in attendance at the Yalta Conference of 1945 and at the founding conference of the United Nations, being named its temporary Secretary General. You may know too that Mr. Hiss left the government in 1947 to assume the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and that he still held that position the following year when he was identified as a onetime Communist by Whittaker Chambers in hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

But who was Whittaker Chambers? Who was this man who said he had known Alger Hiss intimately, had stayed for weeks in his house, and had been given the use of Mr. Hiss's car? This man who, even as he professed his affection for Mr. Hiss, claimed that Mr. Hiss had been, along with Chambers himself, a Communist in the 1930s, a loyal servant of the Soviet Union? And who, when challenged by Alger Hiss to repeat his accusations outside the protective immunity of a congressional committee, promptly did repeat them and found himself the chief witness in the perjury trials of Alger Hiss, the second of them ending in Mr. Hiss's conviction and sentencing to a jail term?

One answer came from Mr. Hiss's son in the pages of The New Yorker. Whittaker Chambers's story, says Tony Hiss,

is a very sad [one) about a sensitive, probably brilliant man . . . a deeply troubled person, who wanted to be important, and who, in his agony, repeatedly befriended men he admired, then turned on them and tried to destroy them.... If Whittaker Chambers had been a younger man, perhaps some of the pain in his mind might have melted away, and he wouldn't have had to endure so much guilt simply because he found himself attracted both to men and to women. He was also tormented by the suicide of his brother, Richard, in 1926, and by the thought that Richard might somehow have formed the idea that Whittaker, too, intended to kill himself, and therefore Richard's death could in some sense be described as a suicide pact gone wrong. I've thought that perhaps Whittaker Chambers felt drawn to my father not because he wanted to be with him but because he wished he could somehow be him, and possess his serenity and untroubled outlook.

No one can blame a son for coming staunchly to his father's defense. But Tony Hiss has done more than that. He has advanced reckless opinions about Whittaker Chambers, and these deserve a reply.

What strikes one first about Tony Hiss's remarks is their pretense of sympathy for Chambers - pretense, because nowhere does Tony Hiss mention the actual price Chambers paid for testifying against Alger Hiss. Nowhere does he mention, for instance, that just as Hiss's career was ruined by the case, so too was Chamber's; he was forced to resign his job, a very good one as senior editor of Time magazine, because of the publicity the case received. Nor does Tony Hiss mention that, while his father served nearly four years in a minimum-security prison, Chambers suffered the privation of exile. He was not, of course, incarcerated; he retired to his Maryland farm, and it would be disingenuous to equate its rolling acreage with a prison cell. Nonetheless it is well known that it hurt Chambers deeply to be cast out from the profession he loved and to feel the buffets of contempt from so many in the community to which he had belonged. These omissions make Tony Hiss's sympathy seem hypocritical.

It is also deceitful, for Tony Hiss uses the camouflage of his sympathy to sneak into his argument a glancing reference to Whittaker Chambers's self-professed homosexuality and to imply, with no evidence, that it had something to do with his feelings toward Alger Hiss. This motive was floated, as rumor, during the perjury trials before it was quashed at the insistence of Alger Hiss himself.

No less insidiously, Tony Hiss proposes an interpretation of Chambers's conduct first offered at the trials themselves, where it was part of the ad hominem counterattack devised by Alger Hiss's attorneys. They tried to portray Chambers not only as a liar but also as a fantasist afflicted with a disorder called "psychopathic personality." The strategy failed but in 1967 was rehabilitated in a book, Friendship and Fratricide, written by a San Francisco psychoanalyst, Meyer Zeligs. The doctor's findings have achieved a sanctity verging on the scriptural among Mr. Hiss's partisans. Tony Hiss knows this book well. He quotes Dr. Zeligs's conclusion that Chambers suffered from "a deeply ingrained need to accuse others and witness their destruction."