Presswatch: Hiss America
Corry, John
PRESSWATCH by John Corry Hiss America T he press reported the death of Alger Hiss at age 92 with what surely had to be a feeling of relief. He had long been a burden, especially to the prestige...
...It mentioned the statements that Noel Field made to the Hungarian police...
...He may have been suspect, but his enemies—Richard Nixon, in particular—were worse...
...patch in Maryland, but in secret police archives in Hungary, intercepted Soviet cables, and the recollections of old Stalinist thugs...
...And the answer is, they did not know, or did not care, or lacked the nerve, or thought a higher goal would be achieved by ignoring it...
...Navasky, of course, is frozen in place, and he will never change his mind about Hiss...
...Thomas was referring to the 1950's, but the feelings lingered, and the Times remained the establishment newspaper...
...On the other hand, even if they were aware of damaging information, they would hesitate to report it...
...Network news is knowledgeable only occasionally, and its producers, directors, writers, and even anchors are not nee46 January 1997 • The American Spectator The American Spectator January 1997 essarily serious...
...The question now is why they could not do this...
...None of this was accurate, of course, and a fewnights later Brokaw and Jennings made on-air corrections: The Russian general had not really cleared Hiss, and Yeltsin had never been involved...
...Was there a Nixon character...
...It has a different set of archives...
...Probably it was a little of all of this...
...It touched on the newly declassifed cable traffic in which Hiss is identified by the code name "Ales...
...Tony Hiss also writes about the day he represented his father at the East Dover Elementary School at Toms River in New Jersey...
...The New Yorker assumed, possibly correctly, that its readers felt pretty much the same way it did: Hiss had been wronged, but even if he had not been wronged, there was no point in bringing it up now, and none of those other things mattered...
...Therefore it should be noted now that the Russian general had looked in the KGB archives...
...The rules there for political journalism are porous, and being on the right side of an issue is not necessarily the same as being right about the issue...
...Quoting someone like Buckley in the final paragraph of an obit, he said, was "a measure of the partisan passions that still surround the Hiss case...
...in the obituary's last paragraph...
...Did an unattractivelittle fat boy play Chambers...
...Navasky, in a way, was right...
...Predictably, this upset Victor Navasky of the Nation...
...He had long been a burden, especially to the prestige news organizations, and in recent years the burden grew...
...By any reasonable standard, though, Hiss was certainly guilty...
...The networks are based in New York, and so are the Times and the news magazines, and there is a New York attitude about Hiss...
...No matter how strong the evidence against them, he never seemed to be able to change his mind about the Rosenbergs, either...
...Indeed, Navasky is one of the foremostpartisans, and his real objection to seeing Buckley quoted was that he would have preferred seeing himself quoted instead...
...the evidence against Hiss has been conclusive, and the Times touched on much of it, even if gingerly, throughout the obituary...
...neither is Whittaker Chambers...
...All the evidence, however, indicates that Hiss worked for Soviet military intelligence—the GRU...
...He could not have been a Soviet spy...
...Navasky wrote that Buckley was "Hiss's most ardent adversary," and that he had "built a career, a magazine and a movement on the assumption of Hiss's guilt...
...On ABC, Peter Jennings reported that even Boris Yeltsin had said the KGB archives upheld Hiss's claim to innocence...
...What evidence did the kids hear...
...Perhaps they did not know much about Hiss...
...When Torn Brokaw reported Hiss's death on NBC, he said he had been "caught up in a spy scandal" and eventually imprisoned, but that at his death he felt vindicated: "A Russian general who controlled the KGB archives" said Hiss had never been a spy...
...You could never believe what they said...
...Nonetheless, old habits die hard...
...Nonetheless, the Times really was better off with Buckley...
...It did say Hiss had been "convicted of perjury in an espionage case that became one of the great riddles of the Cold War," which was not quite hue, The case has not been a riddle for years...
...Tony Hiss says his father "was moved" when he heard about it...
...Did the most popular boy in the class play Hiss...
...Whose nutty idea was it to have sixth-graders do something like this anyway, and did any of the parents care...
...To believe otherwise was to believe in a conspiracy on a scale so immense, as Joe McCarthy once said darkly, that it could plant evidence against him almost anywhere at will: not only in a pumpkin JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...The paper's failure to report on much of the case against Hiss has long been a journalistic scandal, although in its obit on Hiss it made some small amends...
...In the same editorial in the Nation in which he decried partisan passions, Navasky also mentioned the general who supposedly had established Hiss's innocence...
...The Times was guided by this for years...
...Navasky, though, did not say what they were complaining about (or what a professional anti-Communist was...
...He would pick a book "they'd both get a kick out of"—Madame Boyar'', say, or Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Iphigenia in Tauris...
...In New York that was regarded as something like an endearing eccentricity...
...It became increasingly hard not to acknowledge he was a great liar, and that he had spied for the Soviet Union...
...They had been studying the evidence for a year, and at the trial they found Hiss not guilty...
...As Evan Thomas wrote in Newsweek, "It sometimes seemed as if the entire Eastem establishment was ready to rise to Hiss's defense...
...Sixth-graders, "dressed in period costumes—which meant suits, ties and fedoras for the boys and dresses and short white gloves for the girls"—staged a mock trial of the Hiss case...
...Thus in "Going Gently," a kind of eulogy in the New Yorker by his son, Tony, Hiss is described as a warm, caring intellectual whose great joy as his eyesight failed was to have a friend read to him...
...The general had backed away from this, Navasky wrote, only because he had come under "a barrage of complaints from professional anti-Communists...
...The reference to the mock trial is the only indication that Hiss was a public man...
...T he Times did something else...
...It's probably understandable that he would feel that he had let too many people down," Buckley said, explaining why, if Hiss was guilty, he had never admitted it...
...Partisan passions still do surround the Hiss case...
...Probably he did not want to...
...He and the Times were always in agreement about Hiss, but now the Times had abandoned him...
...However, neither of the anchormen, or whoever it was who wrote the stuff they read off the teleprompter, could bring himself to tell the whole truth: Hiss had been a liar and a spy...
...it quoted William F. Buckley Jr...
...Nixon is not mentioned in the piece...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 1
