Concealed enemies. - television program reviews

National Review, June 15, 1984 by Ralph De Toledano

THE IRONY was manifest. Minutes after President Reagan addressed the nation on the Communist threat in Central America, Public Broadcasting presented the final installment of Concealed Enemies, a four-part TV series purporting to be an "objective" account of the Hiss-Chambers case. The President had a few weeks before awarded the Medal of Freedom post-humously to Whittaker Chambers. Alger Hiss, against the orders of his State Departmetn superiors, had years befor engineered the first postwar difficulties for the U.S. in Central America and seeded the UN with Soviet agents fleeing positions of influence in the Federal Government as the early Truman loyalty program began closing in on them.

Of this last there is nothing to be found in Concealed Enemies, a TV script that repeatedly confuses dramatization with fictionalization. Written by Hugh Whitemore, an accomplished TV and stage playwright, Concealed Enemies plunges into fiction in its opening sequences by falsifying the genesis of Whittaker Chambers's appearance before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HCUA). When Chambers took the stand on August 3, 1948, neither Representative Richard Nixon nor the HCUA had the vaguest idea of what his testimony would be, and the naming of Hiss as a Communist conspirator in the State Department rocked the committee as much as it did the nation.

Chambers, in fact, had been subpoenaed almost as an afterthought to corroborate the testimony of spy-courier Elizabeth Bentley on Communist infiltration of the Federal Government. The TV script, however, has a Catholic priest, given name identification only, pouring the poison of what he had presumably been told by Chambers into Nixon's ear before the most sensationally accurte of the HCUA's hearings had begun. Whitemore and executive producer David Elstein had been informed of the true facts by me, but they argued that this didn't really mattter and, after all, their falsification was more "dramatic."

In like manner, there are fictional conversations between John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen that impute corrupt political motives to their very marginal role in the case. Nowhere are we told that Hiss left the State Department after he had been self-trapped in some substantial lies to Secretary of state James F. Byrnes about his Communist complicity. Concealed Enemies also stands mute on the prejudicial conduct of the first trial judge and his refusal to dismiss the foreman of the jury despite solid information that he had declared, even before the unfolding of the evidence, that Alger Hiss would not be convicted as long as he sat on the jury. Interestinly, the gross impropriety of allowing a Hiss partisan to remain on the jury was part of the first version of the TV script but somehwo disappeared from the PBS production.

All of this is peripheral. Where Concealed Enemies strikes its strongest blow for Alger Hiss is in those sequences dealing with the Hiss Woodstock on which the incriminating State Department docuemnts that Hiss delivered to Chambers for transmission to the Soviet Union were typed. The typewriter was the "immutable witness" in the case--and defense and prosecution witnesses agreed during the two trials that the State Department documents had been copied on the same machine as correspondence written by Priscilla Hiss at the time. There was never, during the trial or since then, the slightest doubt that Priscilla Hiss's letters and the State Department copies had emerged from the same typewriter.

But Concealed Enemies would have none of this, so a fictional conversation of this, so a fictional conversation between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and two of his colleagues--a conversation in which Hoover orders them to suppress evidence concerning the Woodstock--pops up in the script, playing the serial-numbers game that Hiss and his lawyers attempted in their unsuccessful efforts before the courts to win a new trial on the basis of a mythical "forgery by typewriter." Hiss's first mvoe to flank the damning testimony of the "immutable witness" was to tell the grand jury which indicted him that Chambers had crept into the Hiss home undetected in the dead of night to type the hundreds of pages of documents and then to disappear by dawn's early light.

Yet for all of these transgressions, this pandering to Hiss and his benighted supporters, Concealed Enemies has its virtues. The Whittaker Chambers I knew never comes through, but at least he is shown as a man of principle and compassion, not the plotter and conniver so dear to the polemicists of the liberal press. Being a PBS production it could not say forthrightly that Hiss was guilty of treason, which both Whitemore and Elstein made it clear to me that they believed, but at least it suggested that Chambers might have been telling the truth. It missed the root meanings of the case--the meanings that were so eloquently expressed in the Chambers autobiography, Witness--reducing it all to cops-and-robbers melodrama. But it did adumbrate a little of the nature of the accusing protagonist. For this, from a script approved by Alger Hiss and bearing the dubious imprimatur of PBS, we may be thankful.