A Life of Deception

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W were living in France and, like much of the country, were caught by surprise by the German blitzkrieg...

...But not before General Dmitri Volkogonov, formerly the official historian of the Soviet Union, issued a statement that he had examined "a great amount of materials" and found nothing implicating Hiss as a spy...

...As George Will so eloquently said, in his review of Perjury, "Clinging to their belief in martyrdom in order to preserve their belief in their 'progressive' virtue, [Hiss's supporters] were drawn into an intellectual corruption that hastened the moral bankruptcy of the American left...

...What damage did Hiss's espionage cause the United States...

...He was a graduate of the Harvard Law School...

...Chambers was a lower middle-class intellectual who spent his younger years working for the American Communist Party...

...betray his country as a spy...

...and that he lied about his treason for the rest of his life...

...The reaction to Perjury even stunned Hiss, who was becoming accustomed to sympathy from the left, as the likes of Garry Wills, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin reviewed the Weinstein book favorably...

...Unfortunately, this book is a prime example of the biographer getting in the way of the biography...

...Later, with a couple of FBI agents at his side, Chambers retrieved the "pumpkin papers" for the grand jury...

...The Hiss case has come to exemplify America's 50-year Cold War with the Soviet Union, and it continues to shed more light on the bankruptcy of the American left than any other incident possibly could...

...Hiss was part of the American elite...

...and helped to draft the U.N...

...The Great Divorce: The U.S...

...Within weeks, however, Volkogonov retracted the statement, admitting that he had looked no further than certain KGB files (Hiss had worked for the GRU, which was military intelligence and did not share its files with the KGB) and that he had foolishly reacted to pressure from Hiss's supporters in making the initial statement...

...and, if convicted, to maintain their innocence for the rest of their lives...

...And as he drew his willing audience of liberals into his campaign, he certainly hastened the collapse of the American left...

...held a series of high-level jobs in the Roosevelt administration...

...Wodehouse foolishly accepted and recorded five such broadcasts...

...McCrum skews the portrait of his subject with suspect psychoanalysis, and that flaw is fatal...

...The penalty, aside from being personally crushed and his career, apparently, ruined, was an official investigation (which cleared him of the treason charge...

...With the addition of G. Edward White's book, there really isn't...

...his wife Priscilla advised that he change his name, move to some remote place, and start his life over again...

...The questions White asks are really much more interesting than the details of Hiss's guilt—questions that have not, until now, been adequately addressed, or answered...

...and Europe After the Cold War Ew AMERICANS NOTICED the great split that was taking place in European-American relations until the months before and after the U.S...

...accompanied FDR to the Yalta Conference...

...Wodehouse: A Life is well researched and rich with detail...

...His writing rarely displayed discernible political messages, but his late pre-war work recognized and clearly ridiculed the British fascist movement (as in the character of Roderick Spode, leader of the "Black Shorts...

...Hiss accompanied FDR to Yalta, and it is believed briefed the Soviets at the end of each day of talks on everything that transpired on the U.S...

...But not quite...

...He spent his final 27 years—writing to the end, consciously out of step with a post-war culture he viewed as degenerate—as a de facto exile in America...

...is a quest for love" is absurd...

...But as Weinstein got deeper and deeper into files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, did more interviews, and understood the ins and outs of the case, Weinstein concluded that Hiss was guilty as could be...

...Supreme Court...

...That assertion had been met with hallelujahs from the liberal media, with ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and NPR all sighing with relief that Hiss had finally been found innocent...

...White, a law professor at the University of Virginia and a biographer of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, became interested in Hiss through his father-in-law, who in 1948 had represented Hiss before the House Un-American Activities Committee and who maintained his belief in Hiss's innocence throughout his life...

...Hiss later served as the U.N.'s temporary secretary general...

...was a protege of Felix Frankfurter...

...MAY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 B O O K S I N R E V I E W IW TH THE FALL of the Soviet Union, secrets supposedly buried forever slowly emerged and finished the job that Allen Weinstein started...

...They then discovered, with considerable disgust, that two of our closest allies in the Cold War, and one ally in the war David Aikman is the author of Jesus in Beijing (Refinery Publishing) and A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush (W Publishing...

...Hiss's campaign started to unravel with the publication, in 1978, of Allen Weinstein's masterpiece, Perjury...

...White was not blinded by family ties, however, and leaves no stone unturned in making the case for Hiss's guilt...

...he could not find a job...

...Hiss found, in the liberal establishment of the 1950s and 1960s, a willing audience for his campaign of vindication...

...Or at least until the demise of Hiss's old employer...

...Hiss was tried twice, the first case resulting in a hung jury, and was ultimately convicted in January 1950 and sentenced to 44 months in federal prison...

...But as his friend Malcolm Muggeridge noted, Wodehouse's temperament made him "ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict...

...After Chambers accused Hiss of being a spy, Hiss sued Chambers for defamation of character, and shortly thereafter a grand jury was empanelled by the Justice Department to investigate Chambers's charges...

...Like Chamberlain, Wodehouse was too trusting of some people and got hoodwinked...

...Why did Alger Hiss join the Communist Party in the first place...

...that he stole documents from the State Department and transmitted them to Moscow...

...Wodehouse was labeled a "Goebbels stooge" and a "traitor...

...A thumbnail sketch of the case will remind readers what the case was all about...

...Hiss was indicted for perjury in December 1948...

...Wodehouse spent almost a year separated from his wife in a series of internment camps with other male expatriates caught behind enemy lines...

...But the claim that "the theme that animates Wodehouse's work...

...We don't know what secrets he gave to Stalin, but we do know that he stole classified documents from the State Department for nearly ten years during World War II, many of them with military importance, so it is logical that they gave the Soviets plenty of useful information...

...Wodehouse was no more detached from world events than are a good many other people...

...To White, it is per- Reviewed by Alfred S. Regnery fectly clear that Hiss was a member of the Communist Party...

...Rising to the top levels of the Roosevelt administration while stealing state secrets and turning them over to his Soviet handlers took an enormous amount of skill and aplomb, and in doing so Hiss became averygood liar...

...Assuming this information all went to the Soviets, the damage was considerable...

...Though educated for a time at Columbia University, Chambers was not part of the American elite...

...side...

...But one does not need to search so far for explanations for political naivete...

...In perpetuating the lie, Hiss was really continuing the life he had led as a spy...

...and, after he was caught, convicted, and had served 44 months in federal prison, proceed to lie about his treason for the rest of his life—even bringing his former associates, friends, and his family into the lie...

...The old joke was always that even if Hiss confessed, the old lefties would still insist on his innocence...

...It keeps you out of the saloons and gives you time to catch up with your reading...

...The reaction to his broadcasts in Britain, which by this time was being regularly showered with German bombs, was furious...

...It is a national outrage that this essentially decent and patriotic American went to prison as a consequence of the demagoguery of Nixon and the ignominious House Committee on Un-American Activities...

...invasion of Iraq in March 2003...

...During that investigation, Chambers, afraid that evidence he had would be stolen, hid in a hollowed-out pumpkin several rolls of microfilmed State Department documents that he had purloined in 1938 and which implicated Hiss as a spy...

...Little by little, he was able to persuade much of the left-of-center world—and the media—that there was at least a valid question as to his guilt...

...His license to practice law had been revoked...

...Weinstein, then a professor at Smith College, set out to look at the evidence in the Hiss case with the intention of showing Hiss's innocence...

...Charter...

...State Department records also indicate that Hiss requested secret information from the Office of Strategic Services on post-war atomic energy policy and the internal security of the UK, France, China, and the Soviet Union...

...When the Germans finally released him they took him to Berlin and slyly offered him the opportunity to broadcast some humorous stories about his experiences to his American (still neutral) audience...

...All Hiss needed to do, said Chambers, was to persist in his campaign until the convention-al wisdom would say, "I don't see how Hiss could brazen it out that way unless he were innocent...

...When Hiss was released from Lewisburg Federal Prison in the fall of 1954, he was considered, by most Americans, to be a traitor and a liar...

...McCrum again sees in this misstep the workings of Wodehouse's childhood, which caused him to become "detached" from the realities of disagree-able world events...

...Though genuinely shocked by the reaction, he freely admitted, "I made an ass of myself, and must pay the penalty...

...The retraction got far less attention...

...McCrum does make some interesting observa62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 tions, and Wodehouse's work does reveal the hand of a gentle sentimentalist...

...Wodehouse's pre-war views, as evidenced in private correspondence, showed the same naivete regarding Germany as those of Neville Chamberlain...

...that he was a spy for the Soviet Union...

...The subsequent release, by the National Security Agency, of the Venona files—intercepts made during WWII of cables from the Soviet Union to its American agents—positively identified Hiss as a Soviet Agent once and for all and brought an end to Hiss's campaign...

...clerked for Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy by G. Edward White (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 297 PAGES, $30) Alfred S. Regnery is publisher of The American Spectator...

...13 V O K 5 I N K t V I t W Oliver Wendell Holmes on the U.S...

...In 1998, after all had been revealed, George McGovern claimed that "I have always believed that Hiss was a victim of the `Red Scare' and of Nixon's political rapacity...

...There is a good deal to be said for internment...

...The three-year statute of limitations for espionage had run, so the Justice Department instead charged Hiss with lying, because he testified, under oath, that he had never given State Department or other documents to Chambers...

...14 A Life of Deception TT IS HARD TO IMAGINE, AFTER SO MANY YEARS and after so much written about the case, that there would still be any question of Alger Hiss's guilt...

...In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, then a senior editor at Time magazine, in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, named Alger Hiss, then the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former member of FDR's State Department, as a member of the American Communist Party's underground who had spied for the Soviet Union...

...More importantly, White points out that together with the famed British spy Donald Maclean, who was then working at the British Embassy in Washington, Hiss kept the Soviets apprised of much of U.S...

...He went on to become a senior editor of Time, and ultimately ran a dairy farm in Westminster, Maryland, which included a pumpkin patch...

...and British post-war strategy and goals before and during the Yalta Conference...

...And they did...

...As the Vietnam War got underway, as Nixon became embroiled in Watergate and subsequently resigned, and as the country became weary of the Cold War, there was an increasing admiration for Hiss's indefatigable fight for vindication, and Hiss eventually almost accomplished exactly what Whittaker Chambers had predicted would happen once Hiss was released from prison...

...But Hiss's old stand-by, the Nation's Victor Navasky, in a nine-page defense of Hiss, was able to cast enough doubt on Weinstein's scholarship to give Hiss another shot at vindication...

...Eventually, most of the British public forgave him—culminating in his knighthood awarded shortly before his death in 1975...

...He was very much a part of that world and had a cadre of die-hard defenders...

...By involving in his lie old colleagues in the Roosevelt administration, friends, and even family—he co-authored a book with one of his sons furthering the lie—Hiss became the most despicable kind of liar...

...As he continued 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 the lie, he was also continuing his life as a dedicated Communist, for Soviet agents were instructed, by their handlers, never to reveal their covert existence and, if exposed, to deny categorically any complicity whatsoever...

...Wodehouse honestly, if naively, did not recognize the propaganda value to the Germans of a prominent Englishman broadcasting over Nazi radio...

...Instead, Hiss launched a campaign to further the lie and to convince the world that he was innocent of spying, had never been a Communist, and that the case against him was a frame-up conceived by Richard Nixon, Whittaker Chambers, and J. Edgar Hoover—a campaign that would last until Hiss's death in November 1996...