Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  What remains is the altogether more interesting case of Whittaker Chambers. The events that brought Whittaker Chambers to public notice are well known, and in a fascinating biography Sam Tanenhaus recapitulatesthem in gripping detail.15 A courier for the Communist underground from 1932 until 1938, Chambers “defected” from the party and told his story in 1939 to Adolf A. Berle Jr., an assistant secretary of state in the Roosevelt administration and the president’s liaison for intelligence matters. Berle passed along Chambers’s information, which included the names of the party’s sources in the American government, among them Alger Hiss, a rising star in the State Department who had served in the early Roosevelt years in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

  For some years nothing more was done, though Chambers was investigated and interrogated by the FBI in 1941 and again after the war. Then, in July 1948, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called Elizabeth Bentley to testify. Bentley, who had succeeded Chambers as the underground Communist courier in Washington, D.C., offered testimony that for the first time corroborated Chambers’s earlier information. Chambers was called before the committee. His own testimony implicated Alger Hiss and seven others as members of a Communist network operating in the inner circles of the New Deal administrations. At that time, Chambers did not claim to have knowledge of any espionage undertaken by the group, nor could he furnish documentary evidence in support of his testimony. Belonging to the Communist Party in the 1930s was not in itself a criminal activity.

  Hiss, too, was called to testify before the committee. He made a good showing and denied ever having known Chambers. In later sessions Hiss conceded that he had indeed known him “under a different name”; and Hiss’s own version of their meetings in the 1930s contained a number of contradictory details. All the same, a series of encounters between the two men, in closed and open sessions of the committee, did little to advance the case against Hiss. But when Chambers repeated his charges—that Hiss was a Communist and might still be a Communist— on a radio program, without benefit of the legal protection afforded by the House hearings, Hiss (confident that Chambers had no proof with which to back his assertions in court) sued him for slander on September 27, 1948.

  Obliged now to come up with something more than his recollections, even if they were confirmed by at least one other ex-Communist witness, Chambers finally recanted his earlier denial and affirmed that Alger Hiss and others had been engaged in espionage. He backed up his claim by retrieving from their hiding place documents and microfilms that he had stashed away at the time of his apostasy in 1938 as insurance against Soviet retribution. This material was temporarily reburied in a hollowed-out pumpkin on Chambers’s farm (hence the notorious “pumpkin papers”) before being dramatically offered up to HUAC in evidence. HUAC then passed the material, reluctantly, to a grand jury, and on December 15, 1948, Alger Hiss was indicted on two counts of perjury: for denying under oath that he had seen Chambers after January 1, 1937, and for claiming, also under oath, that he had never transmitted government documents to him. On both these points, the evidence of the new material was decisive. Hiss could not be charged with espionage, since the statute of limitations had passed, but the charge of perjury stood in for such an accusation.

  Hiss’s first trial, which lasted from June 1 to July 8, 1949, ended in a hung jury. A second trial began on November 17, 1949, and lasted until January 21, 1950, when Hiss was unanimously found guilty of perjury and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He eventually served forty-four months. For the rest of his long life (he died in 1996), Hiss maintained that he was not guilty. His application for a retrial was refused, but for many people, his protestations of innocence rang true. The onus, it has sometimes seemed, was on Chambers, and on his supporters, to show why Hiss would continue to deny the charges if they were true, and to provide more than just a few documents and a partially damaged microfilm. Many suggested that there had been a miscarriage of justice, a frame-up, a conspiracy. But as Tanenhaus demonstrates convincingly, the proof is now overwhelming. The material evidence itself was damaging enough, not to mention Chambers’s memory of copious crucial details about Hiss and his activities, and nobody has successfully called it into question.

  The idea that the whole charge was concocted in the overheated atmosphere of the postwar years was laid to rest by those, such as Sidney Hook, who recalled Hiss being named by Chambers in private conversationas early as 1938. In Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, published in 1978, Allen Weinstein concluded, from the evidence then available, that “Alger Hiss [was] guilty as charged.” Since then, the government has released the “Venona traffic”—cables to Moscow sent by Soviet agents in the United States—and these show not only that there were indeed spy networks in the American government, and that they included high-placed New Dealers such as Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss; but also that Hiss may have been an active agent well into the 1940s. Even Laurence Duggan, a State Department official who killed himself (or was killed) on December 20, 1948, following rumors about his Communist allegiance, and whose death prompted Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to call for an end to HUAC’s investigations, now turns out to have been among the agents who can be identified from the intercepted Soviet messages.

  From recently opened Soviet archives, moreover, we have further confirmation that Chambers was telling the truth about Communist sources in the United States government and about the sort of material that they were supplying. In particular, the Russian evidence corroborates Chambers’s claim that his whole group was run by a Hungarian named Josef Peters. Which brings us back to Maria Schmidt. What she found was a detailed debriefing in 1954 by Hungarian intelligence operatives of one Noel Field, a former Soviet agent in the United States, who had fled to Prague from Western Europe in 1949 to avoid extradition to America and was imprisoned for five years (without trial) in Hungary, caught in the entrails of the great Stalinist purges of the era.

  Field makes it unambiguously clear that Hiss, like Field himself, was a Communist operative. Field had no reason to lie, since what he said was not for public consumption. In any case, he was telling his story to men who knew more about it than he did, and who could (and did) check it out in Budapest and Moscow. After his release, Field wrote openly to Hiss from Budapest in 1957, offering to exculpate him. Hiss politely declined. Hiss’s supporters made much of this letter, but it now turns out to have been a minor exercise in disinformation, with several earlier drafts kept filed away in Hungarian party archives until Schmidt came across them. Finally, Schmidt saw a handwritten autobiographical note for the Hungarian secret intelligence services by the same Josef Peters whom Chambers had identified, confirming everything the latter had said.

  And so to Whittaker Chambers himself. In death as in life, he has been pursued by unfavorable comparisons with the man he brought down. In The Great Fear, David Caute’s history of the McCarthy years, Chambers is described as “humped, shambling . . . shifty, hesitant, podgy” while Hiss is “a gentle, inquisitive, quasi-encyclopedic gentleman.” The obituaries of Hiss in November 1996 obligingly echoed the emphasis on Chambers’s unprepossessing physique: “portly, rumpled,” according to the New York Times, and “overweight and unkempt” in the Washington Post version. As Arthur Koestler once observed, the roles in this drama were apparently miscast. Eleanor Roosevelt noted approvingly at the time of the first perjury trial that “one gets the feeling . . . that Mr. Chambers is on trial and not Mr. Hiss.”

  Chambers had few friends, owing to his solitary disposition and his renegade Communist past. He was also notorious for a lack of attention to his appearance, from his teeth to his shoes. Hiss, by contrast, was tall and handsome; he looked good in a suit, and he could call on references from everyone from the ghost of Oliver Wendell Holmes (for whom he clerked) to John Foster Dulles. Just as Maurice Barrès had concluded from Alfred Dreyfus’s Jewishness that he must be capable of treason, so Hiss’s admirers inferred from his social quality that he co
uld not be capable of treason.

  And yet, as Tanenhaus reminds us, the two men were almost eerily alike in certain respects. Both came from insecure, turn-of-the-century, lower-middle-class families, with the Hiss clan at best one step up the unstable social ladder. Chambers’s father, Jay, was a journeyman graphic artist in New York; Hiss’s father worked in a Baltimore importing firm. The two men, who were born three years apart (Chambers in 1901, Hiss in 1904), suffered parallel family tragedies. Chambers’s brother Richard, four years his junior, killed himself in 1926 at the age of twenty-two, while his father died three years later, in 1929, of liver disease. Hiss’s father slit his throat in 1907, when Alger was just two and a half. His brother Bosley, his senior by four years, was an alcoholic and died of kidney failure in 1926. Hiss’s older sister took her own life just three years later.

  Despite the patina of Harvard Law School and a glittering résumé, Hiss had a lot more in common with Chambers than contemporaries appreciated. And Chambers himself believed as much. He described Hiss in 1948 as “the closest friend I ever had in the Communist Party,” and over time he came to understand their conflict as the stuff of high tragedy. In Witness, Chambers’s extraordinary narrative of his life and his times, he claims nothing less: “At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time—Communism and Freedom—came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men. Indeed, it would have been hard, in a world still only dimly aware of what the conflict is about, to find two other men who knew so clearly.”

  This, as Philip Rahv noted at the time, is pure bathos. And it does its author a curious injustice: He was much more interesting than that. In the early 1920s, after wandering through a series of pickup jobs in the lower depths of New Orleans and Washington, Chambers had enrolled at Columbia University long enough to come to the notice of Mark Van Doren, who judged him to be the best of his students in that era—from a class that included Meyer Schapiro and Lionel Trilling. One of his contemporaries, Jacques Barzun, would note later that “we were convinced he would leap into fame,” and Trilling himself wrote in 1975 that although Chambers was given to “large solemnities” and “portentous utterance,” he had a mind that “was not without force” (high praise in Trillingese). Chambers’s early writings—poems and short stories—are skillful and sometimes moving. Can You Hear Their Voices?, a play based on the Arkansas drought of 1931, was well received, and not only by the theater critic of the Moscow-based International Literature, who thought that it gave a “revolutionary exposition of the problem of the agricultural crisis and correctly raises the question of the leading role of the Communist Party in the revolutionary farmers’ movement.” Chambers abandoned his literary ambitions to devote thirteen years of his life to the Communist movement.

  He joined the party in 1925, went underground in 1932, and worked assiduously for the cause for six more years. For him, as for so many others, the party offered a substitute for family, community, and faith. But Chambers came to Communism after unsuccessful efforts to find God, one of a number of ways in which he remained an outsider even in the party. In the United States, as in Europe, the early ranks of Communism were drawn disproportionately from radicalized immigrants, many of them Jewish, for whom conventional religion was not an option, before or after their entanglement with Leninism. When they abandoned the Communist movement, they tended to drift into Trotskyism, scholarly neo-Marxism, even liberal anti-Communism, as well as engagement with non-Communist labor organizations.

  For Chambers, such paths of retreat were closed. It was all or nothing. This uncompromising mentality served him well when it came to understanding, ahead of most other commentators, that Stalinism was no mere perversion of the Leninist utopia, but its very essence; yet it left Chambers more isolated than ever, with few sympathizers and fewer friends. Even after the Hiss affair—during which he tried to kill himself with rat poison and thus put an end to his self-imposed calvary—he remained a loner, admired by people whose reactionary and nativist obsessions he did not share and despised by almost everyone else.

  Since 1939, he had been working at Time, first as a book reviewer, briefly as foreign editor, and then as a senior editor of the magazine. Some of his political writings from those years have weathered well, notably a little fable from May 1945 called “The Ghosts on the Roof,” in which Chambers imagined the Romanovs looking approvingly on as Stalin fulfilled their centuries-old ambitions. Yet even Henry Luce was uncomfortable with the publicity that followed Chambers’s summons before HUAC, and in 1948 Chambers lost his job at Time. He would never again find steady work as a writer and journalist. During the 1950s, his daughter was blackballed from admission to Swarthmore (despite Chambers’s own involvement with the Quakers). He died in July 1961 as lonely as he had lived.

  It is understandable that Chambers should have been so hated by so many in the 1950s, and not only because of his apostasy. It was the Hiss affair that gave the decisive impetus to Joseph McCarthy and his supporters;the latter’s notorious speech in Wheeling, West Virginia (“two hundred and five known Communists in the State Department”), was made on February 9, 1950, just two weeks after Hiss’s conviction. And Chambers himself was not above the occasional unsubstantiated charge. In the discussion over “who lost China,” he once claimed, with no firsthand knowledge, that the presence of Communist agents in Washington had “decisively changed the history of Asia.” (As Irving Howe pointed out at the time, “Mao, alas, recruited his armies in the valley of Yenan, not the bars of Washington.”)

  But Tanenhaus, who is remarkably evenhanded in his discussion of the McCarthy era, shows very convincingly that Chambers himself was no witch-hunter. He did not initially want to appear before HUAC, and when he did appear, like Walter Krivitsky before him, he was shocked at the ignorance and the lack of political sophistication of his interrogators. He was sufficiently committed to the cause of anti-Communism to realize very quickly that McCarthy was its worst enemy, and he retained enough of his Marxism (or at least what Tanenhaus calls a “dark historicism”) to see that the clever young men of the National Review were flying in the face of reality in their call to undo the New Deal and in their failure to distinguish between Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev.

  And Chambers stands out from his contemporaries in another respect as well. His literary and moral sensibilities were untainted by his political affiliations. Writing in 1957, he attacked Ayn Rand for her arrogance and “dictatorial dogmatism”: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding ‘To a gas chamber, go!’ ” Two years later he wrote to William F. Buckley Jr. that “the spectacle of an artist like Paul Robeson, denied a passport by his own government, makes us traduced of other nations.”

  Still, even those who were forced to concede that Chambers was probably telling the truth about Hiss found his behavior inexcusable. For such people, Hiss was innocent even if he was guilty. The New Deal, receding into the glow of memory, was sacrosanct for liberals. If the idealistic New Dealer had given secrets to the Soviet Union, he had done so on selfless grounds. (No one ever suggested that Hiss received money for his services.) And was the Soviet Union really so unworthy a cause? Was it proper to read back into the atmosphere of the 1930s (Chambers’s knowledge of espionage and the Communist underground was confined to that decade) the sour mood and the political acrimony of the cold war? Journalists such as Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, and James Reston all took up these points, neglecting to mention something already widely acknowledged in Europe: that many of the political and military secrets passed along to Moscow in the years 1934-41 found their way fairly quickly into Nazi hands.

  OTHERS DID NOT NEED to read the evidence to know what they thought about Chambers. He was an ex-Communist and perforce a man of the Right, and so he had no place in the world of American letters. Mary M
cCarthy, whose authoritarian proclivities were restrained only by her intellectual indiscipline, urged Hannah Arendt to do a hatchet job on Witness. This is not just a book to be reviewed, she told her friend: “The great effort of this new Right is to get itself accepted as normal, and its publications as a normal part of publishing—some opinions among others, all equally worthy of consideration—and this, it seems to me, must be scotched, if it’s not already too late.” Arendt reviewed the book, but wisely declined her friend’s invitation to attack the man.

  Thus there were many forms of “McCarthyism” in the 1950s. Chambers was tainted as much by association with Nixon and his colleagues as by anything he himself said or did. Few gave heed to the admonition that Koestler delivered in a lecture in Carnegie Hall in 1948. “Bad” allies, he reminded his audience, are unavoidable. “You can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons. . . . This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.” As Chambers wrote in Witness, anticipating precisely the reaction of people like Mary McCarthy, “It was the ‘best people’ who were for Alger Hiss . . . the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis.”