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Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy

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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.

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 that reported Volkogonov's first letter, White observes, ever covered the retraction. No newspaper mentioned the retraction until December 17. As late as December 13, The New York Times still reported that Volkogonov had exonerated Hiss and that Chambers had never been a Soviet agent. The Palme d'Or, though, must be reserved for Peter Jennings, favorite news mannequin of Americans who otherwise take their news from the BBC. On Hiss's death in 1996, Jennings reported: "Hiss... protested his innocence until the very end.... And last year, we reported that the Russian president Boris Yeltsin said that KGB files had supported Mr. Hiss's claim."

Alger Hiss had the good sense to pass away just before the floodgates opened. In 1997, Allen Weinstein published the second edition of Perjury, grounded in primary research in the Comintern archives, and a subsequent analysis of KGB files. By 1999, these and the aforementioned VENONA transcripts had put paid to all but the most slippery claims for Hiss's innocence.

Even so, the name Alger Hiss retains enormous significance. Stripped of any respectable claim to innocence, Hiss remains a useful tool for those who would discredit his opponents--- not for accusing an innocent man but for defending freedom from a murderous ideology and the United States from an aggressive totalitarian adversary. For this reason their successors--- academic fellow travelers and media dupes--- seek to muddy the historical waters. We must not let them.

There is one undeniable truth regarding Alger Hiss. He was a communist and a soviet spy. Although he very well may have morphed and changed, he did in fact serve the Russian government for a time, and these records have clearly come to light following the opening of KGB archives in the 1990s.

This book is a look at the Hiss case, the ultimate `trial of the century' which pitted the anti-communist crusaders like Nixon, Chambers and Mcarthy, against the eastern establishment's pretty boy Alger Hiss and his leftist allies. The case, its details are all in dispute and so are all the semi-important `facts' regarding the defense and prosecution. This book tries to peel away the layers of propaganda that have pervaded the Hiss case over the years and instead shed light and the actual details of what happened. A heroic effort, this book will be enjoyed by many and will open the eyes of those that think Hiss was an unwitting victim of paranoia.

Seth J. Frantzman

White attempts to get behind why Alger Hiss, a Soviet spy code-named "Ales", fought so hard and was able to convince so many leftists in the US (who apparently wanted to be convinced) of his innocence. Unfortunately for them (and Hiss), he was conclusively identified in the decoding of the Venona intercepts to be a Soviet spy. This information was released in 1995 & is now available to anyone who really wants to know in Romerstein & Breindel, "The Venona Secrets" (2000) and Haynes & Klehr, "Venona, Decoding Soviet Espionage in America" (2000).

My criticism of White is that he skips over this information in five pages even though White's book wasn't published until 2004. The 50 year-long discourse on Hiss between those who wanted to believe that a patrician Harvard grad could not be a Communist or Soviet spy is now over. He was, and anyone (read the 1 star review) who still maintains he wasn't is delusional or has his own agenda. After all, there are still close to 200 Soviet spies found in the Venona transcripts that haven't been identified.

But I.F.Stone (much respected by leftist journalists) was one (code-named Pancake), along with Julius Rosenberg, Laurence Duggan, Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Frank Coe, Lauchlin Currie, Ted Hall, Klaus Fuchs, Duncan Lee, Maurice Halperin, Harry Hopkins (yep, Roosevelt's most trusted advisor -- see Romerstein & Breindel) and Victor Perlo. The list goes on and on, a veritable "who's who" of leftists in the US.

White's book as a psychological study of Hiss also throws light on the other spies and their stonewalling of the truth about their activities. The mystery is that so many people still believe that this was all a vast right-wing witch hunt. Maybe so, but the witches were there & they now (about 1/2 of them) have been conclusively identified. Watch out for those who "doth protest too loudly" about their possible activities, whether it's taking steriods or their patriotism.

When Alger Hiss was interviewed by the Washington Post in 1986, he answered in the affirmative when asked whether he admired Stalin. "Oh yes. In spite of knowing the extent of his crimes...." G. Edward White reports this incident without comment, as if it were of no import. This light-headedness about Hiss's hard-core Communist commitment makes this important book less useful than it could have been.

The essential work about Alger Hiss, of course, is the book entitled "Perjury" by Allen Weinstein (second edition, 1997). The present volume adds additional details that buttress Weinstein's conclusions that Hiss was guilty of espionage for the Soviets. But White is particularly strong in biographical and psychological details. Hiss is shown to have been a particularly intelligent, well-spoken, urbane, educated, and kind-hearted person. The fact that this man was also a traitor to his country and a persistent, life-long liar about his espionage is treated by White as a psychological puzzle. But White's psychological explanations are not convincing. There are, after all, many well-educated, charming WASP Americans who never become traitors. Why did Hiss ?

Hiss spent many decades of his life insisting that he was "inncocent" and wrongfully convicted. In this campaign he was assisted by The Nation magazine and others with connection to the political Left. For former and continuing Communists especially, it remains an absolute article of faith that both Hiss and the Rosenbergs were "innocent," despite the completely air-tight proof that they were intelligence agents for Stalin. What accounts for this discrepancy between the evidence on the one hand and these persistent, apparently sincere, self-righteous professions of "innocence" ?

In the case of the Rosenbergs, it has been suggested (and unfortunately I cannot remember by whom) that from the point of view of committed, devoted Communists, there was nothing more heroic and moral, and therefore completely innocent, than service to international Communism (in the days when there still was such a thing). So the self-righteousness of Hiss was perfectly sincere. He was innocent in every possible way that makes sense to a Communist. In fact, anyone who doubts this supreme innocence is himself a depraved red-baiter, anti-Communist hysteric, McCarthyite, and so forth.

To White, living in a mental word in which treason and perjury are crimes, Hiss's self-righteousness is a problem to be explained psychologically. But once the nature of Communist devotion is understood, the mystery vanishes.

This is one the best books ever written about the treason case of Alger Hiss. It is also the one that does the best job of explaining just what Hiss's motives were. According to White, Hiss had an incredible knack for manipulating people and took huge risks and literally thrived on living on the edge. In other words, Hiss's espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union was motivated as much by the thrilling experience of being a spy as much as any ideological sympathies that he may have had for Communism.

This book is recommened reading for everyone with an interest in recent American history.

Judging from the reviews posted to date, I seem to be the first reviewer who actually read this! I found Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars to be a well-informed, and well-thought out analysis of Hiss's motives for spying and, for nearly fifty years, denying his guilt.

Despite what some wish to believe, Hiss's guilt was definitively established by the archival releases of the mid-1990s. These include not just Venona, but documents from the Soviet and East European archives. Thus, the remaining question of the Hiss case is why he did it, and why he never admitted it.

White begins by looking at Hiss's personality. Much of the information here draws on previous books (in particular, Weinstein's Perjury and Zeligs's Friendship and Fratricide), and tells little that is new. White does, however, draw a convincing portrait of a secretive and manipulative man, who compartmented much of his life. In other words, Hiss had the classic personality of a spy.

As for Hiss's reasons for never admitting guilt, White also shows him to be a controlling, highly disciplined man. It comes as no surprise, then, that Hiss decided early on that he would seek vindication and never deviated from his pursuit of this goal. This is the best part of the book, as White shows how Hiss used different strategies--each taking advantage of changes in public perceptions of the cold war--and used the people around him to try and build his case.

I've read almost all of the books on the case, including Witness, Perjury, Friendship and Fratricide, several pro-Hiss books from the 1950s through the 1970s, and Sam Tannenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers. White's book is a valuable addition to the literature of the case, as his analysis of Hiss's motives and strategies is the first to address those issues. My major criticism is that White writes like the lawyer he is--smetimes his prose is a little repetitious or convoluted.

Nonetheless, this is an insightful, interesting, and well-researched book. It is well worth the time of anyone interested in Hiss or the history of espionage.

A recent but very welcome trend in the study of the Cold War era is the emergence of books that don't seek to rehash worn out partisan fighting. The authors are going back to the source material, seeking out new source material and weighing the facts rather than resorting to received wisdom. In doing so they don't claim that everyone subjected to HUAC or other investigation as a "communist" was wrong accused (although some clearly were) or automatically "guilty. They investigate both sides and seek to answer why the accused were unfairly or unreasonably treated, without punishing the accused for their political beliefs or granting them absolution based on the politics of their accusers. Perhaps more importantly they seek to learn what those dark events mean for our times and what fueled the motivations of all sides. This is what real history is supposed to do.

A Shadow of Red is one fine example of this trend and Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass wars is another, even better example. White thinks and writes like the legal scholar that he is. He's weighed the evidence and determined that Alger Hiss was correctly convicted of perjury and that Whittaker Chambers was truthful when he accused Hiss of being a spy for the Soviets. The question he seeks to answer in this book is "why did he going on claiming to be innocent for so long regardless of the emotional or reputational costs to everyone else?" Given the preponderance of evidence, this is a question worth asking.

White traces the source of this deception back to Hiss's youth when he argues he needed to create secret places in his life in order to deal with the stress and demands of life with his widowed mother. This isn't a hatchet job by any means, White doesn't treat Hiss like a monster, instead he seems fascinated by Hiss's calm and cool ability to lie and manipulate and raise the stakes while doing so.

Still Hiss becomes even less likable under this scrutiny. I've long found his willingness to exploit the prevalent homophobia of his times to discredit Chambers particularly loathsome. He allowed supporters to insinuate and ultimately flat out claim that Whittaker Chambers falsely accused him because a) Chambers was gay and b) Hiss reminded Chambers of his dead brother for whom he'd harbored homo-erotic longings. "He's gay, so he must be a lunatic and a liar." To allow others to question Chambers sanity based on the suicide of his father when Hiss's own father and sister were suicides was equally sensitive. Now I can add to this Hiss's trashing of his wife - why stop at homophobia when you can add a little misogyny? Courtly, gentlemanly Alger intimated that he was trying preoccupied with preventing anyone from finding out that his wife, Prossy, had an abortion before they married that when he was questioned by the FBI. Not that there's a shred of evidence that the FBI ever questioned Hiss about his wife's health or anything that happened to his wife prior to their marriage. And he didn't want the FBI to find out but he's willing to have that fact published in a book? Emily Post would be proud, Alger. He seems to have passed this on to his son, Tony, who aside from claiming that living with his mother made him gay (I kid you, not) suggests that dear old dad "went to jail to get away from Prossy." There's a fresh conspiracy theory!

It would be easy to write Hiss off as a sociopath but White, to his great credit, goes deeper. He views Hiss's sympathies with the Soviet Union, hardly unique during the Depression, coupled with his ability to manage those "secret places" made him willing to become a spy. White makes a convincing case that Hiss's continued claims of innocence were simply his way of staying true to the spying game and that he took a perverse pride in never breaking. A greater pride, one suspects, than he did in the beliefs that lead him to spy.

If you harbor a belief in Alger Hiss's innocence, don't read this book. It will simply annoy you as White takes Hiss's guilt as a given. He assembles the evidence and presents it clearly but there's nothing new here.

The tone is lawyerly through and through but still highly readable. If you are interested in understanding the times better or in delving behind the many masks of this American enigma, this is a good book although probably not for someone new to the case. Highly recommended for those interested in Cold War politics and American History.

Kindle note: the e-book version retains the type-set of the printed version which can result in some odd hyphenation.

Everyone should read the devastating Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars and ponder its implications. White does not waste our time speculating about Hiss's guilt or innocence; Hiss, it is now as firmly established as it seems possible to establish, was guilty. Instead, White concentrates our attention on the implications of Alger Hiss and his saga that are of profound and timeless importance.

First, there are human beings who live among us with no conscience and who are utterly devoid of morality. Not everyone has something good and decent about them. And such people are not limited to the dictators, murderers, and rapists. Alger Hiss lied brazenly, publicly, and repeatedly, and as a matter of course over nearly 60 years, he took shameless advantage of the trust and affection of his countrymen, his friends, his co-workers, and his family. He was a thoroughly evil man.

Second, liberal institutions - academia and the media - have become purposefully blind to the mendacity and depravity of anyone deemed to be a friend to liberal causes (or an enemy to conservative causes). The extent to which such institutions go to re-write history and manipulate public perceptions of such cases has become bold and radical. Hiss represented a pinnacle of these efforts, as his reputation was resurrected by the time of his death - with, as White points out, not a shred of exculpatory evidence. Only the irrefutable evidence of his un-encoded name discovered posthumously in the Soviet GRU archives ended the charade for most, but not all (e.g., Bard College), of his defenders. And, as is becoming routine, our liberal institutions betray no remorse, no shame, and no soul-searching for having been so wrong and having contributed to such deceit.

And so, the cycle repeats itself. Before his name was uncovered in the GRU archives, Alger Hiss was the noble victim of a psychologically imbalanced accuser, Whitaker Chambers, and an out-of-control and paranoid right-wing prosecutor, Richard Nixon. Before the blue dress, President Clinton was the noble victim of a psychologically imbalanced accuser, Monica Lewinsky, and an out-of-control and paranoid right-wing prosecutor, Kenneth Starr. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

While not suggesting anything about President Clinton, Amazon should offer Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars in tandem with his My Life.

This was an excellent review of the material and good psych profile of Alger. Obviously, partisans of the left will disagree but history has answered the question of his guilt.