THE GREAT WITNESS

Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers is the first full-scale study of the mid-century American intellectual who made his signal mark in history as the man who exposed the espionage activities of a well-connected and high-ranking State Department official named Alger Hiss. With a graceful expository manner and an unusual eye for relevant detail, Tanenhaus has produced an absorbing book — not a narrative of the Hiss case, but rather a biography of Hiss’s accuser, a man whose life and work have long been neglected.

When Chambers, a Time magazine editor and self-confessed former Soviet agent, told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948 that Hiss and various other ex-government officials had been secret Communists, he forced members of the liberal elites to choose sides in an ideological battle many would have preferred to avoid. The Hiss-Chambers case helped open the fissure on the left between “progressives” who wanted U.S.-Soviet amity to continue into the post-Second World War era and “liberals” who recognized the geopolitical and moral importance of resisting Stalin.

Chambers, a product of shabby WASP gentility, came of age in the first two decades of the 20th century — in a bizarre, anxiety-ridden household visited by both mental illness and suicide. His family circumstances undoubtedly contributed to melancholia that forever marked his sensibility. But, as Tanenhaus explains, Chambers was also blessed with literary and artistic talents that enabled him to escape the stultifying confines of suburban Long Island. (A gifted linguist, he was the original translator of Felix Salten’s 1920s novel Bambi.)

After three unhappy days as a freshman at Williams College, Chambers found his place among the precocious urban Jews who dominated undergraduate intellectual life at Columbia University in the early ’20s. He established enduring friendships with Meyer Schapiro, later the nation’s leading art historian, editor-to-be Clifton Fadiman, and Lionel Trilling, eventually America’s preeminent literary critic. Tanenhaus is at his best as he traces the steps that led the young Chambers to distance himself from the sponsorship of critic and poet Mark Van Doren in favor of a role as a rising literary star in the American Communist subculture — a subculture that flourished in and around such publications as New Masses.

After a period of ideological indecision, Chambers’s early Communist inclinations solidified themselves into a revolutionary faith. And this sense of fervor prompted the Party to send him into its secret world. He underwent training and — bearing the underground name “Carl” — was dispatched to New Deal Washington, where he supervised secret Party cells composed of young and promising government officials, among them Hiss. “Carl” collected Party dues, passed on career-related “guidance” provided by Moscow and, as an agent of Soviet military intelligence, secured copies of classified documents for transfer to the Kremlin.

Chambers’s doubts about Communism and the U.S.S.R began to haunt him in 1937 and led him to flee the Party in 1938. He spent a year hiding from altogether real would-be Soviet assassins before finding a new home at Time Inc. Chambers rose at Time, entering its rarefied senior ranks. In discussing this period, Tanenhaus offers a sensitive portrait of an able, industrious, highly ideological editor who produced some notable writing of his own, including high-toned cover stories on Reinhold Niebuhr, Arnold Toynbee, and Albert Einstein.

Tanenhaus explains that Chambers, who made no effort to conceal his ferocious anti-communism, became the principal target of a vocal Time Inc. caucus dominated by Party members and fellow travelers. In 1945, Time published a genuinely prophetic piece by Chambers — “Ghosts on the Roof” — in a form entirely novel for the magazine. In “Ghosts,” the murdered Russian royal family looks on from heaven with admiration as Stalin, negotiating with Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, seeks to consolidate the very imperial designs that animated the Romanovs.

Chambers’s adversaries inside Time were correct in arguing that, after the conclusion of World War II, he was bent on using his formidable editorial skills — as well his standing as a favorite of Time Inc. chief Henry R. Luce — to wean the magazine from its support for the wartime U.S.-Soviet alliance. Chambers sought to replace this enthusiasm with a healthy skepticism regarding Stalin’s global aspirations; toward this end, he fought (and often lost) internecine ideological battles with liberal, highly talented correspondents, including Theodore H. White and John Hersey.

At the same time, according to Tanenhaus, Chambers was haunted by his inability to fulfill a perceived moral duty: persuading U.S. authorities that Moscow had realized extra-ordinary successes in its effort to penetrate the U. S. government. He was first rebuffed in 1939, when, through assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle, Chambers sought to inform FDR about the scope of the Washington-based Soviet underground. He rehearsed his story for the benefit of the FBI in 1942, 1945, 1946, and 1947 and repeated it to a State Department security official in 1946. On every occasion, Chambers said that Alger Hiss was an underground Communist; but Chambers continually refrained from reporting that Hiss had engaged in espionage.

Only in 1948, as the Washington political climate underwent a sea change, did Chambers find a sympathetic ear. The House Committee on Un-American Activities proved eager to hear him out. At the initial hearing in which he was featured, Chambers named eight former government officials as members of underground Party cells. Six of these men refused to answer central questions when they were summoned before the committee and, instead, invoked the Fifth Amendment.

Only Alger Hiss (and his brother Donald, a decidedly less important figure) stepped forward to deny the charges outright. Alger Hiss had left government service a year earlier to take on the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He had been a protege of Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, a law clerk for the elderly Oliver Wendell Holmes, and an FDR adviser at Yalta. Thus, when Hiss denied any knowledge of a Whittaker Chambers — “so far as I know, I’ve never laid eyes on him . . . the name means absolutely nothing to me” — most members of the House committee were inclined to ditch the inquiry.

But, though few were aware of it, Hiss had been called the previous year to testify before a New York-based grand jury probing Communist infiltration of the federal government. Unbeknownst to the committee, Hiss had also been interviewed by the FBI in 1946 and 1947 regarding his alleged Communist ties. Indeed, recently released documents indicate that Hiss was all but forced from the State Department — he’d fallen under a serious security-related cloud.

During the hearing, the Un-American Activities Committee’s youngest member, California congressman Richard Nixon, had been struck by the careful, lawyerly manner in which Hiss denied past contact with Chambers. Nixon was fascinated by the specificity of Chambers’s testimony about Hiss, whom the former had described as his “closest friend” within the Communist party. In addition, the freshman Republican had some knowledge of the suspicion under which Hiss had come.

Soon after, in the face of the extraordinary detail provided by Chambers about Hiss and his family, the ex-State Department official acknowledged having known his accuser briefly in the mid-1930s. But he had not known Chambers as “Carl,” the Communist-cell leader; no, Hiss knew Chambers as ” George Crosley,” a would-be free-lance journalist and professional freeloader to whom he’d been foolishly generous. Hiss claimed he had loaned “Crosley” his apartment and had given this man he barely knew a Ford automobile.

As his position began to weaken, Hiss brazenly challenged Chambers to repeat his charges outside the legally protected confines of a congressional hearing room. Chambers promptly did so on a Meet the Press broadcast. ” Alger Hiss was a Communist,” said Chambers, “and may be one now.”

After some delay, Hiss followed through on his challenge and filed a slander suit. This development led Chambers to overcome his reluctance to raise the espionage issue. In support of his new charge, Chambers produced long-hidden copies of classified 1938 government documents. Some had been typed on a machine the Hisses had owned; others were near-verbatim renditions of documents copied in Hiss’s own hand.

In the end, because the ten-year statute of limitations on espionage had lapsed, Hiss was indicted on federal perjury charges, convicted, and sentenced to a five-year prison term. Chambers had succeeded in exposing the evil inherent in the cause he’d served. But in rising to bear witness against it, he wittingly sacrificed the quasi-anonymity in which he’d taken refuge, thrust himself into a limelight he feared, and imperiled the social and financial security afforded him by his post at Time. Chambers died in 1961, having produced an autobiographical masterpiece: Witness. Two books of essays were published posthumously.

Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers is an insightful and thorough study of a man whose personal significance was obscured by Alger Hiss’s relentless 45- year quest for “vindication,” and by the willingness of the establishment media to give the convicted perjurer the benefit of every doubt.

Surprisingly, however, Tanenhaus fails to emphasize important new evidence that points up the certainty of Hiss’s guilt. And Chambers’s biographer would have done well to seize the opportunity to close the case once and for all.

Tanenhaus does take note of an intercepted and decrypted 1945 KGB cable (declassified only last year) confirming that Hiss’s involvement in espionage continued well after 1938, when Chambers left the Communist underground. The author also reviews the findings of the 1946 State Department security probe: It pointed up an inexplicable interest on Hiss’s part in securing sensitive documents on matters unrelated to his job — and caused secretary of state James Byrnes to restrict the former’s access to classified material. Tanenhaus also discusses the 1948 interrogation in Budapest of Hiss’s State Department colleague (and fellow Communist agent) Noel Field. In this material, which was discovered only recently in Hungarian and Czech archives, Field reviews Hiss’s 1930s espionage activities. Alas, Tanenhaus gives the new evidence relatively short shrift, shoving it into an appendix.

Moreover, he fails to explore questions left unsettled in Allen Weinstein’s magnificent 1978 study of the case, Perjury — even though resolving these issues would further have demonstrated Chambers’s credibility. Take the case of Maxim Lieber, a literary agent and Chambers crony in the Communist underground. Lieber told the FBI in 1948 that he had never encountered either Alger Hiss or his wife, Priscilla. This was significant in that Chambers told the committee he had personally arranged for the Hisses to spend time one summer with Lieber at the literary agent’s Pennsylvania farm. In the course of Perjury research, Weinstein discovered that Lieber had told Hiss defense-team representatives that he knew and liked both Alger and Priscilla Hiss. (To avoid testifying at Hiss’s trial, Liebet fled the country for Communist Poland.) It may well be that more information concerning this episode simply isn’t available; but there’s no indication that Tanenhaus even tried to probe the matter.

He also fails fully to deal with the ramifications of Weinstein’s most explosive discovery: Chambers’s homosexuality. Tanenhaus seems to take at face value his subject’s claim that, after four years of tempestuous and promiscuous homosexual conduct in the mid-1930s, Chambers had “managed to break” himself of homosexual “tendencies” even as he fled the Communist cause. Chambers told FBI agents about his sexual history ten years later, fearing that Hiss’s lawyers might expose his “darkest personal secret” in an effort to discredit him. Although he acknowledged, even in 1948, that he wasn’t ” immune to [homosexual] stimuli,” Chambers claimed that he’d lived “a blameless and devoted life as a husband and father” for more than a decade.

A measure of skepticism would seem appropriate here. Is it commonplace for homosexuals simply to decide to change their orientation — and to succeed in doing so merely by force of will? The accuracy of Chambers’s 1948 account doesn’t matter only to readers seeking a fuller understanding of this largely unstudied historical figure; Chambers’s homosexual history may have had a more direct bearing on the Hiss case than has heretofore been noted.

Recall that when Hiss finally acknowledged having known Chambers in the 1930s, he insisted that the latter had represented himself as freelance writer “George Crosley.” Chambers denied using the “Crosley” alias in his underground political work. Still, Hiss didn’t pick the notion of a “George Crosley” out of thin air; indeed, Chambers later said he had used “Crosley” as a literary pseudonym some years earlier.

Meanwhile, the Hiss team had discovered that Chambers — using the ” George Crosley” pseudonym — had submitted poems on gay themes to a controversial publisher in the late 1920s in hopes of getting them into print. (Hiss and Co. abandoned the strategy of discrediting Chambers by exposing his homosexual activities after the FBI made it plain it would retaliate by outing Hiss’s stepson, Timothy Hobson.)

Was “George Crosley” a name employed by Chambers in the context of his secret homosexual life? By claiming to know Chambers not as the Communist cell leader “Carl,” but as “Crosley,” was Hiss delivering a veiled threat of exposure to his accuser? Was there a homosexual component to the Hiss- Chambers relationship? These and related questions remain unexplored.

All in all, a certain fastidiousness in Tanenhaus’s study prompts the thought that the author isn’t entirely comfortable with the Whittaker Chambers legacy. At one point, for example, Tanenhaus suggests that Chambers ” helped bring McCarthyism about.” This is unjust. Chambers regarded senator Joseph McCarthy as an undisciplined vulgarian whose work undermined the anti- Communist project. And when it came to Chambers’s own testimony, “guilt by association” played no role: Virtually every accusation leveled by Chambers appears to have been accurate.

Furthermore, Tanenhaus fails to convey Chambers’s nuanced and ambivalent attitude toward informing authorities about his former comrades. He contends that Chambers wanted to “resign” from the “informing business,” noting that the latter considered the enterprise “repellent.” And it’s true that Chambers denounces “informers” at one point in Witness — “The informer is a slave. He is no longer a man.” But it’s equally true that Chambers believed ex- Communists had a moral duty — “in this moment of historic jeopardy” — to provide authorities with information. If “informing” was a repugnant burden, it was one former Party loyalists were obliged to bear to make up for prior sins. In fact, one of the reasons Chambers deserves to be recognized and celebrated is that he was willing to make choices others sought to avoid. He a saw a personal obligation to “testify mercilessly against myself.” And he believed his duty as a citizen meant he could not but identify Hiss and other Communist colleagues.

Tanenhaus, who labored at this formidable and impressive work for some eight years, sees the terrible beauty in Chambers’s plight, recognizing that his subject was a genuine casualty of the Hiss case: “Scarcely a word has been written about Chambers’s tribulations — on the career he sacrificed; on the manifold insults he withstood.” With his important book, Tanenhaus has done his part to ensure that Chambers does not fade into obscurity. He has given us another opportunity to recognize the wisdom in Lionel Trilling’s insistent observation that Whittaker Chambers was a “man of honor.”

Eric Breindel is senior vice president of the News Corporation and a columnist for the New York Post.