Hiss-Chambers 101
On Thursday NYU’s Center for the United States and the Cold War hosted a day-long conference with the title Alger Hiss & History. To mark the occasion the Washington Post published a remarkably stupid 1,700 word profile of Alger Hiss's stepson by reporter Lynne Duke. The AP provided the perfect companion piece to Duke's walk down memory lane with Hiss's stepson. The AP story reported that a Russian researcher who was also to speak at the conference had reviewed "dozens of documents" and "found no evidence that Alger Hiss spied or that Soviet intelligence had any particular interest in him." In the event, the conference featured Kai Bird's discovery that Hiss had not committed the espionage for which he was convicted of perjury, but rather that the miscreant was one Wilder Foote.
The alleged exculpation of Alger Hiss has long been a cause of the left. The case is one that has spawned a prodigious literature including Whitaker Chambers's classic memoir Witness (1952). Historian Allen Weinstein was a Smith College professor who believed in Hiss's innocence when he began work on Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (1978). With the help of a Freedom of Inforamtion Act lawsuit brought on his behalf by the ACLU Weinstein won access to FBI papers on the case. Hiss himself also granted Weinstein access to his lawyer's defense files and Weinstein conducted more than eighty interviews for the book. As his research progressed he was able to identify the other members of Hiss's Communist cell. Contrary to his initial take on the case, Weinstein concluded that Hiss was guilty as charged.
Weinstein returned to the subject (with Alexander Vassiliev) in The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era (1998), based on his access to KGB archives. (Hiss had worked for Soviet military intelligence -- the GRU -- but the KGB archives also proved valuable.) Weinstein rewrote Perjury for a new edition in 1997 based on archival discoveries.
The documents deriving from the National Security Agency's interception of encrypted Soviet communications, the so-called Venona documents, added to the story when the NSA released them in the mid-1990's. Hiss is part of the story that John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr tell in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999). Sam Tanenhaus, now the editor of the New York Times Book Review, rounds out the story in his superb 1997 biography of Chambers.
Haynes and Klehr reconsider the Hiss case in the context of revisionist historiography in In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (2003). Haynes and Klehr conclude their chapter on the Hiss case with a comment that applies to the NYU conference:
[W]hen it comes to defending Hiss or others, too many academic gatekeepers abandon minimal requirements of logic or fidelity to fact, and publish essays that ignore evidence and offer fanciful conjecture as reasoned argument.Over the years, no magazine has covered the case of Alger Hiss with more sobriety than Commentary. In light of the NYU conference, Contentions editor Sam Munson has retrieved several of Commentary's essays on the case and posted them here. Every one is worth reading or rereading, from Leslie Fiedler's 1951 essay "Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence," to Irving Younger's essay on the two Hiss perjury trials, to Michael Ledeen's essay on Weinstein's book, to Eric Breindel's essay on Hiss's autobiography, and, finally, to Tanenhaus's "Hiss: Guilty As Charged."
Fiedler's 1951 essay really demands rereading in light of the NYU conference. Even in 1951, Fiedler understood that the left's belief in Hiss was a phenomenon requiring explanation:
American liberalism has been reluctant to leave the garden of its illusion, but it can dally no longer: the age of innocence is dead. The Hiss case marks the death of an era, but it also promises a rebirth if we [liberals] are willing to learn its lessons. We who would still like to think of ourselves as liberals must be willing to declare that mere liberal principle is not in itself a guarantee against eveil; tht the wrongdoer is not always the other -- "they" and not "us"; that there is no magic in the words "left" or "progressive" or "socialist" that can prevent deceit and the abuse of power.Fiedler concluded that "what the Hiss case tries desperately to declare" is that, without a reckoning with the truth, "we will not be able to move forward from a liberalism of innocence to a liberalism of responsibilty." The NYU conference suggests that if, as Fiedler hoped, left liberalism moved forward to responsibility, it has slid backward to stupidity and cynicism.
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