ALGER HISS TAKES THE STAND AGAIN
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr.
Alger Hiss Takes The Stand Again In the Court of Public Opinion, by Alger Hiss. Knopf. 424 pp. $5. Reviewed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. IT IS one of history's ironies that within a week Alger...
...But Hiss does not give any full or fair account of the government's reply to Lane's motion for a new trial...
...On the surface, the narration is cool and controlled, as if every personal emotion were studiously suppressed...
...Hiss may be an innocent man...
...It confines itself, in the main, to an analysis of the hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee and of the record of the two trials...
...Reading In the Court of Public Opinion, I found myself irresistibly reminded of a novel which is surely no more irrelevant to the case than Wer-fel's Class Reunion...
...Only occasional twists of phrase disclose the depths of tension and, indeed, of vindictiveness beneath...
...The leading figure, in special and somewhat extenuating circumstances, commits a murder...
...Hiss was at best an exceedingly minor New Dealer...
...At times, Hiss' argument becomes too overwrought for its own good...
...In the sense that one felt Chambers' Witness to be a full and heartfelt confessional, deeply revealing of the man whether fact or fantasy, one feels nothing of this sort about In the Court of Public Opinion...
...Still, the very form chosen for the book is itself revelatory...
...The motion for a new trial submitted by Hiss' counsel, Chester Lane, spells out in detail how the evidence against Hiss in the so-called pumpkin papers might have been forged by the deliberate fabrication of a typewriter...
...Yet will this book satisfy even Hiss' friends that he has come clean and told all he knows...
...The book, both in its omissions and its distortions, lacks a sense of history, as if Hiss were somehow abstracting himself from his own life and from the times in which he lived...
...Nor does the suggestion that in some way Hiss was the New Deal martyr—a victim of a conspiracy to discredit the Roosevelt Administration—seem either convincing or in good taste...
...Whatever the attitude of the Committee on Un-American Activities—and here his case for bias is more plausible— public opinion was at first on the side of Hiss and swung against him only slowly and grudgingly...
...The book is dry and legalistic in form...
...Alger Hiss, innocent or guilty, still has his book to write about the Hiss case...
...The attempt to account for Chambers' motivation because in 1929, long before he knew Hiss, he translated Franz Werfel's Class Reunion, a novel describing the attempt of one man to destroy another, is simply ludierous Werfel knew neither Hiss nor Cham-bers...
...and, after 1935, his role was that of a smooth and aspiring functionary, not that of a creative reformer...
...His evocation of the atmosphere in which he was tried reminds us of the extreme importance in a free society of insulating the processes of justice from the gales of opinion...
...In the Court of Public Opinion is a singular work...
...Hiss' conviction made McCarthy possible: if so normal, clean-cut, and successful a young American could have been a Communist agent, then the eye of suspicion could fall anywhere...
...His analysis of the record does undeniable damage to the various stories of Chambers and to the case made against him in Congressional hearing rooms and the courts...
...He never explains what his actual relations were with Noel Field, for example, or with Lee Pressman...
...Then some years later, in different circumstances and on the basis of false and fabricating evidence, he is brought to trial for the very murder which, indeed, he had committed...
...World Enough and Time described an episode in Kentucky in the 1820's...
...It swung against him essentially for reasons within his control—because even Hiss' own friends reached the reluctant conclusion that he was not telling the whole truth...
...The author tells about everything but himself...
...He does not deal satisfactorily with the testimony of Nathaniel Weyl or Hede Massing, who claim to have known him as a Communist...
...But the climate of motivation had changed so much in the interval that, on trial, he fights the prosecution with all the passion and pride of an innocent man...
...Now, in a different atmosphere, McCarthy has died, a broken and disappointed man, and Hiss has raised important questions about the great symbolic trial of our time...
...And when he objects—rightly so—to the campaign waged by those who demanded his punishment, he forgets the campaign waged by his own adherents against Chambers...
...That novel is Robert Penn Warren's World Enough and Time, which was published in the year of Hiss' conviction...
...and holding Chambers responsible for the content of Class Reunion is about as sensible as holding him responsible for the content of Felix Salten's Bambi, which he also translated...
...In a careful and minute dissection, it reveals an unsuspected amount of contradiction and discrepancy in the case made against Hiss by Whittaker Chambers...
...There is, moreover, a certain strain of disingenuousness in the argument...
...Hiss writes as if he were convicted at the height of McCarthyism...
...He never makes clear what he really did believe and do in the Thirties...
...His peroration about "the satisfaction of having had a part in government programs in which I strongly believed...
...in the creative efforts of the New Deal" strikes a doubtful note after 418 pages in which he confides to his reader nothing in which he strongly believes, except his own innocence...
...Yet, if Hiss is innocent, who would not understand an urge to be vindictive...
...Nor, for that matter, does he give a convincing explanation why Chambers should have fixed on him as a target, or how Chambers could have done in a few weeks in 1948 what even the Hiss defense itself did not think conceivable until well into the second trial—that is, build a fake typewriter capable of producing the incriminating documents...
...Obviously any book about this case by Alger Hiss—as any book by Whittaker Chambers—is bound to be ex parte...
...In point of fact, his conviction preceded McCarthyism and to a considerable degree made it possible...
...He goes out of his way to drag Adlai Stevenson into the case and then describes him as a "character witness," whereas Stevenson testified only to Hiss' reputation...
...He never defines his own attitude toward Communism or the Soviet Union...
...Hiss' alternative explanation for the evidence which convicted him remains technically but not humanly plausible...
...His general thesis that public opinion imposed a finding of guilt on the court is greatly exaggerated...
...IT IS one of history's ironies that within a week Alger Hiss should publish a book in his own defense and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy should die...
...He never states whether he cared—or cares—about the existence of a Communist underground apparatus in the United States, except insofar as involvement in it can discredit men who testified against him...
...Moreover, it asserts that the typewriter produced in the courtroom was a fake, and that the so-called evidence of the pumpkin papers was wholly misread...
Vol. 21 • July 1957 • No. 7
