Distorting the Clinical Approach

...Zeligs his entire file...

...of how the flower of New York's intelligentsia was seduced by that Soviet power...

...Were this fact to be told in its proper place in the story ????on the eve of Hiss' indictment and the subsequent trials????it would have a powerful weight against Hiss...

...Zeligs justifies concluding: "No one can say with authority, on the strength of Chambers' own conflicting reports and those of others, precisely how or why Chambers went underground...

...They could never be sure, in many situations, of the accuracy of Chambers' assertions...

...Or should he continue to mystify, remain magically omnipotent, and act out the accompanying guilt...

...This frees Zeligs for his own hypothesis, totally unsupported by the facts: "But if the historical determinants are cloudy, I suggest that the psychic determinants are clear????and at least as important...

...Neither Hiss nor Zeligs answers these crucial questions...

...But for Chambers, who was so deeply disturbed, so lost in the world of reality, so unsure of his own existence, tormented by the rejection of his homosexual love, it would indeed be sufficient...

...Zeligs, then...

...A few examples????there are dozens????must suffice...

...But there can be no question that in reality it is a passionate and partisan attempt to find Hiss innocent of Chambers' accusation that he was Chambers' co-conspirator in espionage...

...In trying to understand one batch of his non-sequiturs and inaccuracies, T have elsewhere written that he tended to sing or weep rather than think...

...and that Pressman's immunity from prosecution implies that privately he provided the government with sufficient information to insure his being left undisturbed in private life...

...A great many of them, I am certain, Zeligs has characterized correctly, thus illuminating the aspect of Chambers which remained puzzling to his personal and political friends and allies...

...Chambers could not remain at his country house with a comfortable job and a devoted wife...

...perhaps most important of all, Dr...

...Here his partisanship ruins the author...

...Since he makes no claim to special competence in fields of evidence other than psychoanalysis, the author, a practicing psychoanalyst, grants at the outset that his "analytic biography" could not "confirm the guilt or establish the innocence of Hiss...

...Zeligs' characterization of these "massive emotional discharges" as "fusions of fact and fantasy repressed and then selectively remembered," helps us understand much better this long-puzzling aspect of Chambers...

...Zeligs makes no case for Hiss...

...The book purports to be an impartial clinical inquiry...

...Would this parting be sufficient to inspire a lifelong grudge...

...Zeligs casts further doubt on Chambers' claim that he was in charge of the New Masses by noting that Chambers was merely one of a long list of editors on the masthead...

...Not, to be sure, in an ordinary man...

...It is questionable how much of it is legitimately psychoanalytical, since Hiss did not submit to psychoanalysis, and a good part of the examination of Chambers' writings and public conduct is clinical examination only in a Pickwickian sense...

...Zeligs turns to Trachtenberg...

...I am thinking particularly about a very important category of friends: those who had been his classmates at Columbia, or who knew him in early years and shared his Communist political convictions for some time before breaking away too...

...Equally unconvincing is Zeligs' attempt to draw clinical material from Hiss' version of his break with Chambers (Crosley): "Hiss realized that he would be sponged on again, reminded Crosley that he had not paid him what he owed him, and told him that he did not want to see him again...

...The cooperation also enabled Dr...

...Meyer Schapiro, Clifton Fadi-man and Herbert Solow are quoted to cast doubt on Chambers' credibility, while the fact that they were and remained on Chambers' side on the question of Hiss' espionage is not reported...

...The most ridiculous example of this method is the following paragraph, based on nothing more than Chambers' telling a friend of burning manuscripts he was dissatisfied with, including a book half the size of Witness: "Was the book Chambers had written and then burned, which he says was 'half the size of Witness,' his true confession????a second Witness impeaching Witness...

...and of how at least half of Alger Hiss' friends and associates in New York and Washington named in this book gave their allegiance to it in those years...

...Zeligs serves Hiss best by divorcing the whole story from its historical context...

...Zeligs to gain access to the enormous files prepared for Hiss' two trials by his attorneys, investigators and friends...

...Chambers was not forced, he forced himself to go...

...Every irregularity in Chambers' life is clinical material to the author, but Chambers' unblemished marriage and family life for 30 years is given no significance, nor are Hiss' family problems...

...Either he was engaged in underground activities or he wished he was...

...But by what authority could Chambers, an underling, command such technicians and facilities, and how could he have possibly gotten permission to have the job done...

...Zeligs has no special competence and his psychoanalytic tools are irrelevant...

...Zeligs understood that historical context, he would have also found it necessary to add two other things about Lee Pressman, Hiss' close friend since their Harvard Law School days: that Pressman's Communist affiliations came out into the open only because the party made him expendable, causing him to resign as general counsel of the cio and to support the Progressive party candidate for President...

...What is worse, he seems to lack elementary layman's common sense where evidence is concerned...

...Zeligs spared no effort in seeking out many of Chambers' friends, former classmates, associates: "Most related to me freely, and some reluctantly, what they remembered about him...

...Address: BOOKPLATES...

...Reviewed by FELIX MORROW The form of this book is an impartial clinical inquiry into the lives of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers...

...By any reasonable concept of evidence, the typewriter was Hiss' original and no rational argument has ever been adduced against it...

...Chambers had said what dozens of us can confirm on the basis of personal knowledge, that he was put in charge of the New Masses by the late Alexander Trachtenberg who, among other things, was the party's cultural commissar in control of such institutions...

...This is high praise, indeed, for the clinical method and for Dr...

...more accurately, he makes one foolish case after another...

...He provides no picture of the blinding attraction of Soviet power in the midst of the 1929-39 Depression period...

...This is simply one of dozens of examples of the Pickwickian sense in which the author uses the clinical method...

...The late Herbert Solow's conclusions typified the feelings: "It was always an ambiguous matter with Chambers, i.e., about his Communist activities...

...The new ground, in my opinion, is indicated by Dr...

...He was in the throes of indecision????to do or undo...

...There are numerous instances, too, where Zeligs weighs the scales in favor of Hiss...

...He simply waves away the fact, well-known to anyone who understands the Communist movement and the professionals in it, that Chambers went where he was told...

...In addition to his presentation of the materials on Hiss' side...

...Nor is Zeligs any more satisfying on the subject of why Chambers went to work in the underground...

...As a trained historian, Solow put it more severely than some might have, but his uneasiness about Chambers' veracity or accuracy in any given instance was shared by many other friends...

...Instead, it appears at the close of the book, quite parenthetically, in a section about Hiss and his friends today...

...He remembers Chambers working there as a clerk and occasionally having conversations with him in German...

...But no, Dr...

...his only contact with Chambers, other than a vague idea of seeing him around, was in the newspaper room of the New York Public Library...

...No more successful is his advocacy of Hiss' claim of "forgery by typewriter"????that the typewriter used to type the State Department documents, which was found and introduced into the trial by the Hiss defense attorneys (Zeligs neglects to mention that they obviously did so to forestall the prosecution's introducing it first 1, was not Hiss' original typewriter but a fake fabricated by Chambers...

...An anonymous person reports a homosexual incident with Chambers, and it becomes thereafter the main evidence for attributing homosexuality to him...

...Once the book is understood for what it is, it is well worth reading if one has the faintest interest in the Hiss-Chambers story...

...This, in oversimplified terms, is the meaning of the ongoing struggle within him...

...Had I been asked to prove that he was engaged in underground activities, I would have been unable to do so...

...William Marbury, Hiss' lifelong friend and attorney in the libel suit against Chambers, broke with him when Chambers produced the State Department papers and the memoranda in Hiss' handwriting...

...Carl Binger, the distinguished psychiatrist who testified for Hiss, gave Dr...

...Should he recant and absolve himself...

...Without the picture of the generation which gave its allegiance to Soviet power, the Hiss-Chambers story cannot be understood...

...Many beautiful designs...

...Chambers' attorneys provided nothing...

...For Dr...

...But that lack of understanding propitiously serves Dr...

...Special designing too...

...Even where this had to be mentioned, as in the case of Lee Pressman who later testified to his Communist affiliations, Zeligs fails to note that Pressman's career was no less distinguished than Hiss' yet did not prevent him from doing what he was told by the Soviet power, as did Hiss...

...Had Dr...

...Zeligs' description of Chambers' book, Witness: "It was a compilation of massive emotional discharges, fusions of fact and fantasy repressed and then selectively remembered...

...In spite of this reductionism, however, Friendship and Fratricide, taken cum grano salis, is well worth reading...

...He offers scores of examples of statements he believes Chambers made after no longer knowing where truth ended and fantasy began...

...Zeligs also follows the pattern of Hiss' defense attorneys in seeking the testimony of still highly-placed Communists to attack Chambers' veracity, and with the same absurd results...

...To this Zeligs responds: "Trachtenberg told me that, of his own knowledge, he never knew Chambers was a member of the Communist party...

...And by giving equal weight to the evidence of ex-Communists and Communists, Dr...

...Chambers, who died July 9, 1961, two years after the author began the work, refused to see him or to answer his letters or phone calls...

...and he accepts Hiss' hypothesis that Chambers must have done this when he was still in the Communist underground and had the necessary technicians and facilities available...

...Yellow Springs, Ohio Dr...

...That Friendship and Fratricide is not what it pretends to be does not invalidate it however...

...Yet a simple method of verification lay at hand: The author merely had to ask all contributors during the period in question (so many are no longer Communists) who accepted their articles...

...BOOKPLATES FREE CATALOG...

...Zeligs' need to reduce the whole story to Chambers being a mental case...

...Though I consider Pickwickian much of the so-called clinical material about Chambers, enough of it breaks new ground to justify the method even in the author's partisan hands...

...The point is relevant, since Zeligs informs us Pressman refused to cooperate with him...

...I was a friend of Chambers and I belong to this category...

...Zeligs, like Hiss, offers no sensible reason why Chambers had to fabricate a typewriter...

...He tries with his clinical tools to invalidate the material evidence Chambers finally provided????the copies of State Department copies, the memoranda in Hiss' handwriting, the microfilm????but the result is ludicrous...

...On these and other questions of legal and material evidence Dr...

...Nevertheless, on the decisive matter of whether or not Hiss committed the acts of espionage attributed to him by Chambers, Dr...

...One of the two principals cooperated quite enthusiastically: Over the six years that the author was preparing this volume, Hiss gave a great deal of time in interviews and correspondence...