The Talkies / The Trials of Alger Hiss
Podhoretz, John
"The Talkies / The Trials of Alger Hiss" Zbigniew Brzezinski and Warren Christopher went to Islamabad. Brzezinski aimed a rifle down the Khyber Pass. Christopher talked a bit. There seemed to be no clear picture of what we were...
...He claimed that: he was the victim of an insane homosexual whom he knew as George Crosley, but who turned out to be Whittaker Chambers...
...but it is a country's behavior, not its words, that must be the standard by which it is judged...
...It's a pity, because we will undoubtedly see many more such acts in the near future...
...But the power and appeal of the movie do not lie in its marshaling of evidence...
...Last summer the Pakistani Ambassador to Washington ran all over town telling everyone who would listen (and in most undiplomatic language) that he had been transferred to Moscow...
...The man whom the Times' Vincent Canby saw as the Son of Sam's teat spiritual father, Whittaker Chambers, wrote 30 years ago: So long as it was humanly possible, I shielded Alger Hiss and the others from the consequences of their past acts...
...So it seems that it was simply a dispute about money, haggling over the final price...
...at another, someone mentions Stalin...
...That campaign, he claimed, made possible a "witch-hunt," an attempt to prove that Communists were secretly controlling the destiny of this country by their access to the highest members of the government...
...Following his release in 1954, Hiss sought with ferocious determination to prove himself innocent...
...the AP writer said that Zia called Carter's various promises "empty talk" and went on to make the basic point: "Since the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, more than two months have p a s s e d . . . What tangible has happened since then...
...There was no such thing as Communism, there was no Communist influence in this country, nobody liked Stalin anyway, and besides, HUAC was doing the same thing Stalin did in the Moscow purges...
...Chambers was crazy, Chambers was a homosexual, Hiss's work for Roosevelt clearly defines him as a New Dealer, Nixon hated Hiss, the FBI knew about the problem with the typewriter, the FBI did p!v the servant, and yes, oh yes, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 23 Alger Hiss was the victim of a conspiracy...
...he was the victim of a massive FBI cover-up...
...Thirty-two years after the astonishing accusation, Alger Hiss is still trying to clear his name, and has just been immeasurably aided by the appearance of a two-and-one-half-hour documentary called The Trials of Alger Hiss...
...But in this case, the character and spirit of its "villain," who was, after all, a real person, are horribly distorted...
...Did Nixon have it in for Hiss because of Hiss's obvious patrician contempt for the young Republican congressman from California...
...Chambers' evidence of H i s s ' s Communist activities was not merely circumstantial, but circumstantial in such detail that he would have had to have been the most brilliant of all maniacs to have thought it all up, not the dull maniac The Trials of Alger Hiss shows us...
...That is it...
...Were television to make a "docu-drama" of the Hiss-Chambers Affair, there would be no reason to look any further than Hiss himself for the actor to portray him...
...The Soviet Union uses the moralistic terminology of the Left...
...The more abstract issues are handled in the film's first half...
...Hiss still would have proclaimed his innocence, for his role then, and his role now in his never-ending search for exoneration, was, and is, to discredit the idea that Communist influence existed, and exists today, in this country...
...Alger Hiss was, and is, by t h e s e lights, the victim of a hoax designed merely to provide the leaders of the United States with a scapegoat as they went, and go, about their own nefarious doings...
...The evidence for this is not in the movie but in Chambers' private testimony, his magnificent confessional autobiography, Witness...
...Did the FBI know that there was a problem with the serial number of the typewriter...
...Among o t h e r things, Witness tells the story, quite simply, of a Communist, and of a Communist's devotion to an ideal "Fortunately, Witness is back in print, in a papcrback edition issued by Regnery/ Gateway, Inc...
...One would scarcely know from watching The Trials of Alger Hiss that there was such a country as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, much less that it was a country with every good reason to want to subvert the government of the United States...
...Hiss sought to clear his name, and save his career, first by testifying before HUAC and then by suing Chambers for libel...
...And it is corrupting...
...in South Bend, Indiana...
...For examples of this last, shockingly irresponsible comparison, one need only read Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time or see Martin R i t t ' s The Front...
...by John Podhoretz And the film builds its case for Hiss's innocence logically and deliberately...
...Absolutely nothing...
...So what did Zia do...
...He realized that Jimmy Carter cannot be relied upon to defend him against his enemies, so he is making his peace with the polar bear...
...In lending them the force of his silence, he is adding to his offenses, an offense against the human spirit...
...This analysis, widely endorsed in Washington among foreign policy experts, did not make it into the press until much later in the month, and no one to my knowledge reminded the public about the theatrical gesture of the Islamabad regime last year...
...For The Trials of Alger Hiss is a movie, and it is subject to the special set of rules which govern a movie...
...THE TRIALS OF ALGER HISS T h i r t y - t w o years ago, a former Soviet espionage agent named Whittaker Chambers made the astonishing accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Alger Hiss, a key figure among Roosevelt's New Dealers, a participant at the Yalta Conference, and at the time President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had actually been a member, with Chambers, of the Soviet Underground in Washington in the 1930s...
...Hiss, with that miraculous glint in his eye, is Hero, while Chambers, with his bad teeth and unpleasantly diffident manner, is Crazed Psycho...
...he was then a 41-year-old man who looked 30...
...But the Baltimore Sun carried a short AP story two days later that put the matter in quite a different light...
...As a result of the evidence Chambers then brought forward, Hiss was indicted for perjury...
...As a movie star, Hiss could no more play the villain than Paul Newman could...
...Did the FBI secrete documents in which Chambers confessed his homosexuality...
...He shines on the screen the way Paul Newman shines on the screen...
...But neither Oberdorfer nor the New York Times' Bernard Gwertzman (who wrote a similar piece on March 10) bothered to remind their readers that the relations between Carter and Pakistan have been bad for some time, primarily because the Islamabad regime has decided that the United States has become the number two power in the world...
...It will, on the contrary, appear to him as a moral act, the more deserving the more it involves him in personal risk, committed in the name of a faith (Communism) on which, he believes, hinges the hope and future of mankind, against a system (capitalism) which he believes to be historically bankrupt . . . . It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgement, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man's fate and future are ,nvolved, and, hence, their conflict is irrepressible...
...In addition t o Hiss, those interviewed in the film include Nathan Witt (a government official whom Chambers accused of being at one time the head of the Washington "apparatus" to which he and Hiss belonged), Hiss's three lawyers in the libel and perjury cases, Robert Stripling (the FBI liaison with HUAC), Ralph de Toledano (Newsweek's correspondent on the Hiss Case and a man who has an extraordinary regard for Chambers), the Catletts (Hiss's servants, one of whom found the famous typewriter on which Hiss's wife Priscilla was said to have typed the secret documents that ended up in Chambers' hands), and two people who had served on the juries of the perjury trials...
...He got in touch with the Soviet Union...
...The movie is a series of interviews, which are separated and clarified by newsreels describing the Hiss-Chambers confrontations, by still photographs, by footage of the open session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (which was the first official encounter between accuser and accused), and by footage of a question-and-answer session held by Hiss at Johns Hopkins University in i978...
...In the view of this movie and of almost all devoutly left-wing literature concerning the "witch-hunt" that is said to have victimized Hiss, Communism is merely a Phantom, to use the comic-strip term applied to Communism by Robert Coover in his disgusting novel about the Rosenbergs, The Public Burning...
...The reduction of this century's greatest crisis to the level of personal vendetta is dangerous and horrifying...
...John Lowenstein, who directed it and conducted the interviews, is a firstrate documentarian with an almost inspired knack for cutting just at the point when anything gets dull...
...The act will not appear to him in terms of a betrayal at all...
...Was Chambers insane...
...In the Washington Post on March 8, Don Oberdorfer gave a long analysis of what had gone wrong...
...The Trials "of Alger Hiss is a compelling piece of work...
...So Zia, who now fears a Carter embrace (it ma.y hasten the arrival of Soviet forces in his country), called the American President a name, and sat down for some friendly conversations with the Soviets...
...The film's second half takes a long look at the evidence for Hiss...
...President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq immediately denounced the sum as "pean u t s , " but the United States insisted that it would not be increased...
...He didn't...
...He is now a 73-year-old man who looks 50...
...This blindness takes the form of a ludicrous optimism in the face of Soviet imperialist behavior, and has its roots in the failure of the American Left to face up to the implications of the Hiss Case...
...And finally, was Hiss the victim of a massive conspiracy involving all of the above, by the FBI and by Thomas F. Murphy, the lawyer for the prosecution in the second perjury trial...
...Zia rejected it...
...victim of a campaign of political hysteria, begun by Harry Truman, continued by Richard Nixon and the o t h e r members of HUAC, and brought to its apex by Joseph McCarthy...
...For, as Leslie Fiedler says in his wonderful essay of 1950 on the case,t the understanding that the Soviet Union is as evil as any fascist regime is the difference between childish political innocence and mature political responsibility...
...For Whittaker Chambers, ungainly and unprepossessing as he was, was a man of great moral strength and almost terrifying courage...
...I do not think that "Russia" or the "Soviet Union" is mentioned once throughout the movie...
...This transfer, he said, was intended to signal to Carter that Pakistan considered Moscow more important than Washington...
...2.1 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980...
...I t is a .self-imposed and suicidal blindness to believe in Hiss's innocence, the same blindness that has led this country into its pusillanimous relation to t h e Soviet Union...
...This movie, like all romantic movies, glorifies its hero and makes a devil of its villain...
...Hence, if Jimmy Carter wanted Zia to help in containment, the American President had to act as if he were serious about challenging the Kremlin...
...t " H i s s , Chambers, and the Age of Innocence," Commentary, December, 1950...
...His first trial ended in a hung jury in his second, he was found guilty, and sent to prison to serve a five-year sentence...
...The interviews gracefully segue into the appropriate newsreel, the appropriate photograph, the appropriate interview...
...It is an offense in which, unwittingly, John Lowenstein joins as well with his The Trials of Alger Hiss...
...He is Rhett Butler, he is Rick the Saloon-keeper, he is Cool Hand Luke...
...Zia's complaint was not merely that the money was not enough...
...If one believes the words of the Soviet Union, then of course there is no Alger Hiss, no Washington apparatus, but only a fat, crazy homosexual with bad teeth who was denied love...
...At one point someone derisively mentions the GPU, Stalin's secret police...
...End of story...
...There seemed to be no clear picture of what we were offering, aside from the total amount (the wellknown "bottom line...
...The movie's answer to all of the above questions is: Yes...
...and, most important, he was the John Podhoretz is a student at the University of Chicago...
...He recounted the background, and then, in the next-to-last paragraph, wrote something that I have seen nowhere else, a real breakthrough: The tight-fisted Office of Management and Budget reportedly had a major role in establishing the figures, which leaked to the press before Pakistan was informed...
...which is distinct from, and in opposition to, what Chambers calls the "secular J udeo-Christian tradition": Faced with the opportunity of espionage, a Communist, though he may sometimes hesitate momentarily, will always, exactly to the degree he is a Communist, engage in espionage...
...Quoting an article in Der Spiegel (why do these stories come out in the European press so much more often than in our own...
...Doesn't Hiss's work with the Roosevelt administration, his reputation, count for anything...
...And Hiss--gloriously handsome, elegant, wry, witty, charming - - i s , of all things, a movie star...
...According to the film, among those who refused to be interviewed were Esther Chambers (Whittaker's wife), Richard Nixon, and Henry Julian Wadleigh and Lee Pressman, both self-proclaimed members of the same apparatus to which Hiss and Chambers were affiliated...
...Did the FBI ply Hiss's former servant with beer at a county fair, in order to find out i~" the missing Woodstock typewriter was back in Hiss's possession...
...In his failure publicly to deny those lies, Alger Hiss is shielding no one but himself...
...And his nemesis, fat, uncomfortable, plodding, inarticulate Whittaker Chambers, is the child murderer in M. It is no surprise to read in the New York Times that Chambers "reminds us of the Son of Sam...
...One would not know, merely from watching this film, that there were questions involved in this case--questions, for instance, of national loyalty and of the government's ability to withstand infiltration-which went, and go, beyond personal drama and beyond questions about the behavior of Richard Nixon and the FBI...
...But it would not matter if Chambers had proved that Hiss's fingerprints were on the strip of microfilm that came to be known as the Pumpkin Papers...
Vol. 13 • May 1980 • No. 5
