THE RECENT DRAMA surrounding FBI agent Robert Hanssen comes at a time when we are reminded of another famous American spy case. April 1 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Whittaker Chambers, one of the true heroes of the 20th century’s long twilight struggle against tyranny — and March 22 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the imprisonment of Chambers’s antagonist, Alger Hiss, in whose honor the New York University Libraries have just launched a website.
Titled “The Alger Hiss Story: Search for Truth,” the website was created with grants from, among others, the Nation Institute — a spinoff of the Nation magazine and home of the last sorry band of believers in Hiss’s innocence — with participation from the Hiss family, including Hiss’s son Tony, a visiting scholar at NYU.
A press release from Vintage Books, which published Tony Hiss’s 1999 memoir The View From Alger’s Window, declares that the site “takes very seriously its scholarly responsibility to present all the charges against Alger Hiss fully and without distortion.” Its mission is to be “a reliable, factual, and even-handed source of information” about the case for scholars, archivists, teachers, and all who “Search for the Truth.”
Well. The front page of the site features a few newspaper clips of headlines announcing the 1950 guilty verdict in Hiss’s perjury trial, accompanied by the question: “Justice . . . or just the beginning?” A perusal of the site quickly makes clear that this “Search for Truth” is really a tendentious simulacrum of scholarly inquiry. The site does provide a substantial number of digitized primary documents from the case, mostly defense files that were previously available only at the Harvard Law School Library. But beyond that, the “even-handed” scholarship turns out to be mostly a collection of screeds, many of them articles from the Nation written by longtime Hiss apologists like John Lowenthal and Victor Navasky.
They recycle the usual canards offered by Hiss’s defenders — for instance, that the FBI forged incriminating documents to make them look as though they had come from Hiss’s Woodstock typewriter — and pro-Hiss interpretations of the other famous elements of the case: the Bokhara rug, the prothonotary warbler, the Pumpkin Papers. The Hiss case, it becomes clear, was part of some tremendous and sinister effort — a vast rightwing conspiracy, you might say — designed to frame Hiss, and led by that 1950s Kenneth Starr, a young congressman named Richard Nixon.
The site won’t do much to change the minds of those who have read Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, Allen Weinstein’s definitive 1979 account, or Sam Tanenhaus’s critically acclaimed 1998 biography of Chambers, or the several recent books on the mid-1990s release of the Venona transcripts — which convinced all but the most unreconstructed of leftists that Hiss was exactly what Chambers claimed he was: a Communist, a spy, and a traitor.
You can’t really fault Tony Hiss and other members of the family for clinging to the fantasy of Alger Hiss as First Victim of right-wing yahoos. But what is shameful, if not surprising, about this belated effort to rekindle agnosticism over Hiss’s treason is that it has the imprimatur of a major university.
Fortunately, all their efforts cannot gainsay Chambers’s monumental book Witness, which, despite the occasional bitterness that creeps into its prose, demands recognition as one of the great American literary achievements of the 20th century. But conservatives looking for lessons from Chambers should also remember that on two points he proved to be staggeringly wrong: first, his pessimistic conviction that in leaving communism to defend the West he had switched from the winning side to the losing one (a view he modified somewhat later in life); and second, his belief that “in the struggle against communism, the conservative is all but helpless.”
What Chambers could not possibly have known when he wrote Witness was that a struggling B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan would one day become a conservative; and then become president; and would then defy the liberal establishment by calling the Soviet Union an Evil Empire and awarding Chambers a posthumous Medal of Freedom in 1984; and would, most importantly, provide the statesmanship and strength of purpose to help bring Soviet communism to its knees.
Reagan, with his quintessential optimism, recognized something that Chambers could not: As he noted in his first inaugural address, “We must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.” Chambers himself demonstrated that courage, in a powerful act of witness that he knew would ruin his career and subject him to obloquy from the likes of the NYU Libraries. Such courage, of course, is ultimately what makes our freedom possible, and worthwhile.
Lee Bockhorn is managing editor of the Public Interest and an Abraham Lincoln fellow at the Claremont Institute.
