You have to give the New Yorker credit for not assigning its review of the new biography of Whittaker Chambers to the last person it had writing about the Hiss-Chambers case: Tony Hiss, son of Alger. But it did the next best thing and got Sidney Blumenthal, a writer who embarrassed the magazine with his slavish coverage of the Clintons and has now embarrassed his parents, his English-composition teachers, and any human being with a brain in his head with an astoundingly witless and tortuous piece of writing that suggests, among other things, that “the evolution of Cold War conservatism” was basically the result of homosexual panic.
Here’s the crux of Blumenthal’s piece: Chambers was gay. The end. Really.
Oh, and he also argues that “the focus of the mystery is no longer whether, as Chambers charged in 1948, Hiss was a Communist and a spy in the 1930s. On that question, the room for reasonable doubt continues to shrink.” Let us repeat that last phrase: “The room for reasonable doubt continues to shrink.” Even now — even now — that Soviet archives leave no possible question as to Hiss’s guilt, a leftist like Blumenthal cannot actually use the words “spy,” ” guilt,” and “Alger Hiss” in a single sentence. Could this have anything to do with Leslie Fiedler’s brilliant observation that when the Rosenbergs protested their innocence, they believed it not because they had never spied but because they had — because they thought spying for the Soviet Union was noble? Could it be that Sidney Blumenthal sort of believes this too?
Maybe. But there is another explanation: Maybe he’s just a fool. Hard to know which of the two Blumenthal would prefer.
