A Tissue o Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss
Levitt, Morton & Levitt, Michael
A TISSUE OF LIES NIXON S. HISS Morton Levitt and Michael Levitt / McGraw-Hill / $14.95 Herman Belz Even considering the low standards and frequently meretricious quality of commercial publishing...
...In truth, the appeal of a legalistic, "civil liberties" defense of Hiss is that it enables those who employ it to remain agnostic on the question of Hiss's Communist involvement and the larger issue of Communism in American life...
...Trite, superficial, and badly written, it rather luridly purports to be the first study of the "strange vendetta" that existed between Richard Nixon and Alger Hiss, Cold War enemies whose careers have stood in a historically symbiotic relationship for 30 years...
...The need to lie about the nature of his relationship with Chambers, the Levitts write, "for whatever disquieting reasons," accounted for Hiss's conviction...
...David Levift has argued, for example, that neither Hiss nor his supporters are under any obligation to explain how the government documents got into Chambers' hands, or any other mysteries about the case...
...The even-handedness of this conclusion is illusory, however, for it is merely a gimmick for yet another attempt to exonerate Hiss of the perjury charge on which he was tried and convicted in 1950...
...Yet this is precisely the strategy that Levin, Victor Navasky, and now Morton and Michael Levitt employ and offer up as the search for historical truth...
...Rather, the explanation would seem to be that to accept the facts of Communist espionage and activity would, given the values of American political culture, justify anti-Communism...
...Perhaps if the evidence against Hiss becomes even more conclusive, his defenders will discover that he was insane after all and hence not responsible for his actions...
...The authors, a California psychiatrist and his writer/editor son, offer the novel and seemingly judicious assessment that both Nixon and Hiss were liars who came to ruin through deep-seated character flaws...
...The significance of Weinstein's book is that it is the first comprehensive study of the case based on the methods of critical historical scholarship...
...It needs to be said that it is not this at all...
...Hiss's .defenders have of course for different reasons been interested in the question of guilt or innocence, with the result that most writing about the case has approached it from an evidentiary-and frequently partisan or polemical-point of view...
...With positively affecting restraint, the authors profess to be quite at a loss to know what dark secret initially kept Hiss from acknowledging that he knew Chambers, and even now prevents him from arriving at an honest self-awareness of his responsibility for his fate...
...Morton and Michael Levitt's strategy differs from the customary pro-Hiss account, in part no doubt because of the strength of Weinstein's work...
...A tedious work that has nothing even of the ingeniousness of a well worked out conspiracy theory-such as John Chabot Smith's-to redeem it in an aesthetic sense, A Tissue of Lies is intended as a rejoinder to the devastating conclusions of Allen Weinstein's Perjury...
...They have believed that a judgment about Hiss was pertinent to the larger task of ascertaining the facts about Communist influence in American government...
...This reaction complements another favorite pro-Hiss line of reasoning: that it is impossible to conceive of a sane person perpetrating a quarter-century of deceit and jeopardizing the welfare of family and friends...
...Hiss typed for her college alumnae association and the documents that Chambers got from Hiss...
...For the crucial identification that was so...
...This is all well and good as a legal defense, but it is hardly satisfactory as historical explanation...
...As is well known by now, Weinstein found that Hiss did indeed transmit State Department documents to Whittaker Chambers in the 1930s...
...Hiss's father, whereas Woodstock N230099, which the FBI said belonged to Hiss, was not built until 1929...
...Both men, the authors state, dissimulated, lacked candor, and acted as .though a crime had been committed yet refused to take any responsibility for it...
...If the authors think the evidence against Hiss is "flimsy," their evidence for an FBI frame-up is phantasmagorical...
...It was Hiss's persona and demeanor that did him in, not the evidence introduced in court against him...
...A TISSUE OF LIES NIXON S. HISS Morton Levitt and Michael Levitt / McGraw-Hill / $14.95 Herman Belz Even considering the low standards and frequently meretricious quality of commercial publishing in the United States, it is remarkable that this book was published...
...Millions of ordinary citizens, and some scholars, have thought otherwise...
...Challenging Weinstein, they claim to have proved that the famous Woodstock typewriter, introduced at the second trial as the machine on which the stolen government documents were prepared, was not Hiss's...
...The Levitts seek to clear Hiss of the Communist charge by attacking the evidence against him as controvert-ible and, by today's standards, unconvincing...
...Unwilling to speculate about Hiss's motives, the authors show no similar reluctance to hypothesize about an FBI plot to frame Hiss by building a fake typewriter on which agents produced documents to match the private Hiss papers...
...And the trouble with anti-Communism, from the standpoint of the Left, is that it iden tifies private property, individualism, middle-class values, and bourgeois liberties as the essence of American nationality...
...What is gained by denying the existence of a Commu nist problem in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, as so many liberals and radicals still seem in clined to do...
...He did not, in other words, lie about being a Communist or passing documents to the Soviet Union...
...Both sets of documents were typed on the same machine...
...There is, alas, a very large catch in all of this, for while the Levitts call Hiss a liar, they say he lied only in denying that he knew his accuser, Chambers...
...The Hiss machine, they argue, was in use in 1927 in the insurance office of Mrs...
...damaging to Hiss came from comparison of papers that Mrs...
...Astonishingly, considering that it is mainly the intellectual class that has been affected, this reevaluation has proceeded entirely independent of the evidence...
...Although one assumes that more skilled apologists will take up the challenge, the Levitts' book shows how much more difficult the task of exoneration will be now that Weinstein has weighed in with his findings...
...Support of Communism is probably not the answer, although agnosticism on the Communist ques tion may, paradoxically, be necessary to sustain faith in the general ideal of socialism...
...Weinstein has shown this evidence to be unreliable, but even if we accept it the case against Hiss is not, as Morton and Michael Levitt seem to think, blown sky high...
...We built one in the Hiss case...
...Nor is it an adequate basis for criticizing a historical account such as Weinstein's...
...Although this book comes nowhere near perceiving it, Nixon and Hiss have had a historical relationship that has brought favor on the one in direct proportion to the execrations that have been heaped upon the other...
...The most effective defense of Hiss proceeds on the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty...
...This became most vividly apparent when after years of obscurity Hiss's reputation was suddenly refurbished owing to Nixon's disgrace...
...To support this contention they point out that the government by 1948 was entirely capable of forging typewriter evidence, having done it during World War II...
...This strikes one as an apt characterization, and suggests the possibility of transcending the usual lines of ideological division on this seminal Cold War issue...
...As historian David Hollinger quaintly puts it, whether Hiss actually engaged in espionage was deemed a "parochial" concern...
...The mere fact that Nixon was involved in the original case, as any spot survey of half a dozen college professors will show, has become sufficient warrant for concluding that Hiss was innocent...
...Before the publication of Perjury, historians generally ignored the question of Hiss's guilt or innocence, preferring instead to focus on the social and cultural values expressed in the case and its pivotal importance in the emergence of anti-Communism as a political movement...
...With seeming boldness and impartiality they call Hiss a liar and place him in the same boat with the reviled Nixon...
...This contention rests mainly on the testimony of the typewriter salesman who claimed to have sold the machine to the Fansler-Martin insurance agency...
...Principally, however, they rely on Nixon's Watergate maunder-ings: his tape-recorded words, "We got Piper," which the Levitts say really means "typewriter," and the statement attributed to Nixon by John Dean, that "typewriters are always the key...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
