36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not Just Another Alger Hiss Book, May 13, 2004
This review is from: Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy (Hardcover)
As is true with all of his books, Professor White's new volume on Hiss reflects stupendous research, thoughtful analysis, and clarity of expression. However he has set himself a somewhat impossible task--to try and determine why Hiss spent 60 years arguing that he had been wrongfully convicted and was not a Soviet agent. Certainly this is one of the key questions about Hiss; the more interesting question, to which much less attention is devoted, is why did Hiss become a Soviet agent in the first place given his extraordinary Establishment credentials: e.g., Harvard Law, Clerk to Justice Holmes, the AAA, the Department of Justice, the State Department, and the Carnegie Endowment. Given that White cannot get into Hiss's head for answers, the book largely is devoted to recounting Hiss's campaign for vindication, the counter-campaign to nail him as a Soviet agent, and the crucial contribution of the recently opened Russian archives in definitively resolving the issue. While much of the material is familiar, there are some important new insights as well. For those who have not been exposed to the mounds of literature on Hiss, Chambers, Nixon and HCUA, etc. this volume is probably the most compact treatment to bring one up to speed on the entire controversy. For those already conversant with the Hiss drama, it superbly discusses recent developments which have proven definitive in resolving the dispute. All readers interested in the Hiss debate can profit enormously from this volume.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Why Did He Lie?, December 21, 2006
Those who believe that that human understanding progresses over time may take comfort in the fact that for all but the most ideologically besotted and intellectually corrupt the question of Alger Hiss's guilt is no longer of much interest. For G.E. White, the Traitor Hiss was self-evidently just that and the real issue instead: why did he lie, lie for 40 years after his conviction and imprisonment for perjury, lie to his supporters, lie to his friends and, most of all, lie to and thereby debauch his own son, enlisting filial devotion in his selfish and ultimately futile quest for a thoroughly underserved vindication? White, the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, organizes his study around these psychological questions, but also he supplies an admirably concise review of the Hiss case, and, most importantly, describes the intellectual climate in which the traitor and his allies succeeded for a time in muddying the historical waters, not least for a younger generation of Americans raised on tales of America's Cold War perfidy.
Alger Hiss, for those schooled after the Vietnam War persuaded much of the American Left that anti-Communism merely licensed McCarthyite hunter-gatherers to trample civil rights and cut doe-eyed New Dealers from the pack, transcended relatively humble origins to fashion an identity as a rising star of the old Eastern Establishment. As Clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston and New York attorney, and Agriculture Department price regulator, Hiss cultivated the erect posture, firm handshake and sincere bearing that carried him to the Department of State, where he again rose through the ranks, numbering among his friends future Secretaries of State Edward Stettinius and Dean Acheson, attended the Yalta Conference, then presided over the San Francisco Conference that created the United Nations, then as now the collective repository for mugwumpish internationalist idealism.
Hiss also was a Soviet agent, and eventually was fingered as such by former Party operative Whittaker Chambers. Chambers was portly, religious, dentally challenged--- hardly the sort for whom John Foster Dulles would arrange, as he did for Hiss, a golden parachute at the Carnegie Endowment when Alger's State Department career dimmed. But Chambers had stashed away typewritten copies of purloined State Department documents, as insurance against retribution when he broke with the Party. Those copies, the FBI concluded, had been typed
on the Hiss family typewriter. A perjury conviction and 44 month jail sentence followed, after which, in 1954, Alger Hiss began his life-long campaign to re-write the history books.
White's calls this campaign Hiss's `looking-glass wars.' A natural spy, Hiss "appears to have taken pleasure in the pursuit of covert goals and in the creation of devices to shield that pursuit from others." His strategy was to cultivate a persona of temperate reasonableness; in other words to convince others that "he was not the sort of person who could conceivably have such secrets." White traces this theme through four phases of Hiss's life: his Supreme Court Clerkship, when he dissembled his way past Justice Holmes' mandate that clerks remain unmarried during their term of employment; his `pillar of the establishment' defense to Chambers' charges; his term in Lewisburg federal penitentiary, where Hiss gradually earned the respect of his fellow prisoners; and finally, the serene countenance he subsequently presented, an invitation to all who gazed upon it to conclude that a man so at peace with himself (so different in this respect than his two principal tormenters: the at-times suicidal Chambers and the tenebrific Nixon) surely was innocent.
To the extent that internal peacefulness was genuine, its true source was of course Hiss' ideological commitment to Communism and political loyalty to the Soviet Union. A traitor to the end of his days, Hiss adhered to the standard Moscow demanded of all its agents: if exposed, deny; if convicted, maintain innocence all your life. Thus, while White is persuasive on the tactics of Hiss's campaign, the most interesting parts of his book explain instead how Hiss persuaded so many of his innocence in the face of mounting evidence from U.S. and Soviet archives to the contrary. The Hiss defense, it helps to recall, amounted to the assertion that Hiss was more credible than Chambers, toward whom the Hiss forces directed a notably vigorous whispering campaign alleging among other things Chambers' homosexuality, coupled with the lame hypothesis that it was all a set-up, involving the FBI and assorted other baddies (one that rather improbably required a duplicate typewriter and a decade-long conspiracy, all to frame one self-important mid-level official). Given the weakness of Hiss's case, the thorough and damning 1978 study by Allen Weinstein (appointed Archivist of the United States by President Bush in the face of an ad hominem attack not unlike the one Hiss's allies launched against Chambers), the documents that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union and finally the release of the "Venona Papers," transcripts of coded Soviet transmissions deciphered by the National Security Agency, all of which supported Chambers' allegations, the question remains: how could any one have been taken in?
As Hiss recognized from the very first, he at least was fortunate in his enemies. Chambers was a quixotic character, and his supporter was the Prince of Darkness himself. A Democrat congressional staffer once remarked "I don't think we can clearly nail Nixon as a liar, although he undoubtedly is one, in this instance, as in all others." Given the sheer venom that much of what we today call "Blue" America directed at Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and their ilk, Hiss shrewdly positioned himself as one of their many victims: were his accusers' reputations to suffer, ideally for misconduct toward real victims, Hiss would benefit. By depicting himself as the victim par excellence of rabid anti-Communism, Hiss similarly reaped the post-Vietnam rewards when American liberalism, with a few honorable exceptions, went AWOL for the balance of the Cold War.
By draping his cause in ideological standards, Hiss freed his supporters from contesting the still unfriendly facts of the case. And there should be no doubt that those supporters cared about defending Soviet Marxism and not the truth. When Allen Weinstein began work on Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, he was somewhat sympathetic to Hiss and expected to argue for his innocence. When the evidence persuaded Weinstein otherwise, friends of Hiss regretted bitterly their decision to cooperate with the project. "Weinstein came to see me under false colors," said one, "I never would have said a word to him if I'd known he was friendly to Chambers." Another announced tartly that the purpose of his assistance was "to prove that Alger was framed and a victim of McCarthyism. Otherwise, I was given a bum steer and my time and trouble was for nothing."
Hiss's campaign sought far more than his personal vindication. Were he to persuade Americans that prosecution of a Communist and genuine traitor was instead anti-Communist persecution of a liberal New Dealer, he would discredit anti-Communism as fundamentally illiberal and serve his Soviet masters even beyond their own ignominious demise. Among the segments of American society most susceptible to this anti-anti-Communism were the academy and the liberal media. While White does not address the former, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage more than amply plumbs how some American historians continue to prostitute themselves, debase their profession, and sully the cause of truth, the better to brand opponents of social collectivism as "McCarthyites" and worse.
White devotes considerable attention to "mainstream" media coverage of Hiss, contrasting nicely PBS's 1983 Hiss-friendly American Playhouse offering with the Reagan Administration's
decision to award the Medal of Freedom posthumously to Whittaker Chambers. Still worse was the Pavlovian response to the 1992 Volkogonov incident. In that year, Hiss cleverly wrote a number of Russian officials, asking that they attest he had never served the Soviet Union. One, the historian and former General Dimitri Volkogonov, on the basis of a mere two days research in the KGB archives (Hiss had spied for Soviet military intelligence, not the KGB) and after some prodding by a Hiss confederate issued the desired clean bill of health, which Hiss's allies released to the press on October 29.
With the publication of Volkogonov's letter, the liberal media was quick to trumpet Hiss's triumph. All three "major" television networks reported the story that very evening and CBS followed the next morning with the assertion that Hiss had been "apparently exonerated." "Hiss never spied," added USA Today while Newsweek announced the "bittersweet vindication." CNN aired a commentary asking why the U.S. government had not yet exonerated Hiss. The New Yorker afforded Tony Hiss a platform for "My Father's Honor," and, least surprising of all, National Public Radio reached into its stable of "experts," finding one who duly confirmed that the "vindication" of Hiss revealed the excesses of anti-Communism.
Unfortunately for the media pack, it only took a few weeks for Volkogonov to issue a damning retraction. "What I saw gives no basis to claim a full clarification," he wrote on November 24. His motives for writing the letter had been "primarily humanitarian" and an accommodation to Hiss's agent, who argued that Hiss "wanted to die peacefully" and "pushed me to say things of which I was not fully convinced." None of the television networks...
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