One More Denial

...Although in our more enlightened age we know that homosexual tendencies have nothing to do with whether or not someone is a stable, truthful person, Hiss' belief that his juries would have rendered a "not guilty" verdict if they had known Chambers was homosexual is quite plausible...

...Hiss exhausted the appeals process several years ago—hounded at every step, he assures us, by judges whom Nixon and Gerald Ford had appointed...

...Hiss' first trial for perjury (the statute of limitations on espionage had run out), which ended inahungjury...

...Oliver Wendell Holmes ("the most profound influence in my life...

...indeed, one has the impression he would happily have paid good money for the chance to persuade a new generation of Americans of his innocence...

...Still, Hiss remains impressed that at Yalta Stalin waited in line with him and the other "lesser fry" to use a public lavatory, while FDR and Winston Churchill retired to their private accommodations...

...It may be part of what keeps them both alive...

...Simply declaring that Chambers was insane would leave unanswered the question of why he targeted his old friend...

...Hiss faults the FBI for not airing all it knew about Chambers' homosexuality, and has doubts in retrospect about his defense team's decision not to raise the issue during the trials...

...The author's regret that he did not exploit the sexual prejudices of the day stands in marked contradiction to his outrage over the "public passions" of the Cold War that made his case "more a trial by ordeal than by rules of law...

...Wells (whom Hiss and his New Deal associates found disappointing, owing to what Hiss now concedes was "a self-importance that even our youthful zealotry did not excuse...

...Reviewed by George Sirgiovanni Assistant professor of history, Rutgers University Forty years after the sensational confrontation that made them famous, Richard M. Nixon and Alger Hiss are both trying to restore shattered reputations and reverse the judgments of history...

...Was this, one wonders, the sort of pure egalitarianism that inspired the author's own actions...

...Then we hear again about the more serious charges of espionage that followed: the extraordinary contents of Chambers' hollowed-out pumpkin...

...Is it that a confession now, after so many have stood by him so long, would be too traumatic for a man in the winter of his life...

...reporters will surely seek him out for a comment, and he will gladly oblige...

...Their numbers seem to be dwindling, however, partly because he has become an anachronism...

...As always, Hiss' coterie of sympathizers will rally to his side with the publication of this book...

...the accusation by Chambers that he had participated in Communist "cell" activities...

...Nearly all Leftists now recognize—if at times dimly or grudgingly—that the Soviet Union is not a precise model of the society they wish to create...

...The answer to that question is known to him alone, and he will never tell...

...No doubt Nixon realizes this...

...More eye-catching than these trite appraisals is Hiss' assertion that "Until now, except on rare occasions, I have not expressed my feelings publicly about these three men...

...and the young Congressman Nixon's early determination that it was Hiss—superficially more credible than Chambers—who was lying...

...In Recollections of a Life Hiss continues to deny his Communist past and the treasonous activities he engaged in a half-century ago...

...the Ford roadster Hiss gave to his acquaintance "George Crosley" (the name by which he finally admitted knowing Chambers...

...Franklin D. Roosevelt (at the Yalta sessions the dying President sat "with regal composure...

...Hiss' iron-willed determination to maintain his ruse over the years certainly invites speculation...

...Hoover was "the ultimate bureaucrat," Chambers "the perfect pawn" and Nixon "the power-hungry politician...

...Has he lied so often that he has finally deluded himself...

...No one would argue that the Cold War hysteria of 1949-50 strengthened Hiss' case...

...How Hiss must have relished his appearance on that premature 1962 ABC broadcast, The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon...

...Perhaps appreciating that Recollections adds little to the record, Hiss tries to liven things up by inserting character vignettes of his "unholy trinity" of persecutors: J. Edgar Hoover, Chambers and Nixon...

...Hiss has never missed an opportunity to denigrate his trio of adversaries...

...But he did not lack powerful supporters during his "ordeal," and he did not receive unfair trials...

...He does not—he cannot—refute the mass of evidence against him (definitively compiled by Allen Weinstein in his Perjury: The HissChambers Case...

...his ardor for the New Deal...

...The former President, having abandoned Watergate as a lost cause, is writing books and granting television interviews at a heady clip...

...Knowledgeable readers will surely do a double-take...

...his denial under oath of ever having known Chambers...

...Now 83 years old and plagued by failing eyesight, he probably views Recollections as his final serious attempt to sway the court of public opinion...

...the Hiss family's Woodstock N230099 typewriter, used to retype many of the State Department documents Chambers produced...

...and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who graciously admitted Alger into "her charmed circle...

...Hiss, by contrast, offers us yet another wearisome coverup in the guise of his memoirs...

...Chambers' admissions concerning his homosexual past solve that problem, and have the added advantage of embarrassing conservative defenders of the Witness...

...Either possibility might arouse our pity...

...It is significant that Hiss has never managed to get his conviction overturned, not even in the détente era, when "the phobias of the Cold War" had faded considerably...

...If Hiss is reticent about what most occupied his energies during his years in the government, he has much to say about the great and powerful whom he met, befriended, admired, worked for, and betrayed...

...Chapter by chapter, he spoons out obsequious tributes: to Felix Frankfurter ("He flew from book to book, magazine to magazine, like an adult Peter Pan...

...The four documents in Hiss' own handwriting produced by Chambers are also a sticky wicket for the defendant, as are so many other pieces of evidence that weighed against him during his trials and continue to do so...

...He does not, however, explain how Chambers managed to obtain State Department papers with type matching letters by Hiss' wife, Priscilla...

...Roosevelt's Administration, including a stint with the State Department in the 1930s and '40s...

...Chambers' electrifying testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities set in motion the chain of events that would put a "generation on trial," the generation of New Dealers whom Hiss came to symbolize...

...Today's spies—the Walkers, for example—are in the dirty business only for the money, while Hiss committed treason out of blind ideological commitment to Soviet Communism—a phenomenon he seems to have mistakenly regarded as New Dealism inabig hurry...

...How sweet must have been the hero's welcomes he received on college campuses after the President's resignation, posturing as "Nixon's first victim...

...Predictably, Hiss trots out the theory that Chambers framed him out of frustrated homosexual love...

...Naturally, Hiss tells us, he "did not earn very much in fees...

...Vyacheslav M. Molotov and the "enigmatic" Joseph V. Stalin receive more measured assessments...

...Could the parting reference he makes to having worked hard to achieve "a better world" be a sly wink to those he hopes will "take heart from what I stood for...

...This has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that as a State Department official-turned-spy, Hiss passed along documents of potential interest to the USSR via Whittaker Chambers, a fellow Communist who would later forsake the party and publicly expose him in 1948...

...As for the few unregenerate extremists, they are hardly likely to risk the cushy academic or institutional posts they have attained in order to serve the Kremlin under cover...

...He will get one more moment of glory, though, if he manages to outlive his surviving nemesis, just turned 75...

...and his conviction at the conclusion of a second trial in January 1950, a verdict that Senator Joe McCarthy and other Republicans cited as "proof of their Red-baiting accusations against the Democratic Party...

...the dramatic confrontation between the two...

...A favorite with his forces, this motiveis the only remotely credible one they have come up with to explain Chambers' elaborate machinations against the "innocent" Hiss...

...In the final chapter Hiss resurrects his contention, based on some early FBI confusion, that the Bureau withheld information suggesting the crucial typewriter he himself claimed as his own was the "wrong" one...

...Yet it cannot be ruled out that Hiss remains a true believer, committed to doinghis duty as he understands it...

...Manfully Hiss retraces the now familiar public record: his several jobs inFranklinD...

...Because so much has been written about the Hiss case, there is little, short of a confession, that the defendant could add...

...In fact, he has made something of a career out of capitalizing on Nixon's public disasters...

...Despite his unique perspective, there is nothing fresh or interesting here...

...he is repackaging himself, apparently with some success, as America's foremost foreign-policy sage...