A Regular Bull

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 17 · 4 September 1997

From Sam Tanenhaus

In his analysis of Whittaker Chamber’s testimony against Alger Hiss, Christopher Hitchens implies that it arose ex nihilo amid the hysterias of the early Cold War (LRB, 31 July). Not so. As my biography of Chambers clearly states, in summer 1939, within days of the Soviet-Nazi Non-Aggression Pact, Chambers met with Adolf Berle (Franklin Roosevelt’s chief intelligence officer) and confessed his secret Communist activity in 1932-38, naming many New Deal contacts, including Hiss, and making it very clear they were espionage agents. His reason for tattling was his fear – encouraged by his fellow defector Walter Krivitsky – that intelligence data sent from Washington to Moscow would now also find its way to Berlin. After hearing Chambers out, Berle, no alarmist, promptly put the White House and the FBI on alert. But to Berle’s dismay and Chambers’s astonishment, no meaningful steps were taken. The spies remained in place; indeed some, principally Hiss, soared ever higher up the State Department ladder. Chambers concluded, not unreasonably, that the Government was more interested in protecting spies than in prosecuting them and might choose to settle the problem by punishing informers like himself. No wonder he later toned down his allegations, releasing only bits of the story – until, of course, Hiss, after a delay that proved embarrassing to his supporters, at last lodged a slander suit in response to Chambers’s testimony to Nixon’s committee in 1948. Thereupon Chambers produced incriminating documents whose authenticity was conceded by the Hiss defence in the first perjury trial.

Hitchens compliments me on making ‘the demented sequence and evolution of Chambers’s actions into something intelligible’ but, as he grudgingly concedes, the sequence was not ‘demented’ at all. At each stage, Chambers reacted plausibly to events as they dizzily piled up. Sometimes he overdid it, but not irrationally. Even his celebrated formulation ‘that the Communists were on the winning side of history’ was not inconsistent with the prevailing wisdom of the day, at least to judge from the public statements of Dean Acheson and George Kennan, the chief architects of the ‘containment policy’ adopted by the United States in the late Forties, when it looked as if Stalin might be set on a course of empire-building in imitation of Hitler’s prior efforts. If Chambers was crazy, then so were many others. Hitchens mentions Chambers’s influence on Koestler and Milosz. He might also have mentioned those who expressed their admiration for Chambers’s literary and intellectual gifts, and who shared his intense anti-Communism: Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Meyer Schapiro, Rebecca West, Murray Kempton. Not one of these doubted the truth of Chambers’s testimony against Hiss.

It is true, as Hitchens says, that Chambers lived ‘a series of lies for almost a decade’. But what about Hiss, whose duplicities were sustained for more than sixty years, from the time he joined the CP in 1934 (at the latest) until his death last year, aged 92? Through it all, he remained impenitent, insouciant, arrogant – to the detriment of his own credibility and of the reputation of such distinguished supporters as Acheson and Felix Frankfurter. Worse still, Hiss badly damaged, and at a crucial time, the larger cause of New Deal liberalism, an offence not lightly forgiven by a much younger liberal (not ‘neo-conservative’) such as myself.

According to Hitchens, ‘Tanenhaus simply makes the assumption … that Hiss was lying and Chambers was telling the truth.’ This is absurd. Nearly half of a very long book, with 77 pages of closely printed notes, is given over to the complex evidential questions of the Hiss case, including the issues raised by new documents from Budapest, Moscow and Washington. This research underlies my conclusion that Hiss was guilty as charged. It is Hitchens, not I, who remains impervious to the claims of evidence.

Incidentally, it was a novel by Heinrich Mann, not Thomas, which Chambers brought into English.

Sam Tanenhaus
Tarrytown, New York

From Robert Ostermann

Christopher Hitchens’s salute to Murray Kempton recalls an ‘encounter’ I once had with the great journalist. Kempton inspired my newspaper years, as he did those of many novices. In a manner that would have amused him, he was also instrumental in my dismissal from the editorship of the Catholic Review published by the Baltimore Catholic archdiocese. The year was, I think, 1960, and national health insurance was a red flag to the defenders of privilege and of a doctor’s right to unlimited prosperity. Borrowing Kempton’s arguments for my editorial one week, I said poor and underpaid Americans should have necessary medical treatment even if they could not afford it and that help from the Government was long overdue. The Baltimore establishment, with the help of affluent local John Birchers and other ilk, rolled out a few heavyweight patriots to call me a ‘Communist’. The Archbishop, deciding such thinking was out of place in the archdiocese, fired me. My citing Murray Kempton as a witness for the pertinence of my editorial position was not applauded by the Archbishop’s minions. In my spectacular ignorance, I had not realised that establishments elsewhere were busy maligning Kempton with the same label.

Robert Ostermann
Chandler, Arizona

Vol. 19 No. 18 · 18 September 1997

From James Hamilton

Christopher Hitchens, in his review of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (LRB, 31 July), notes Alger Hiss’s testimony before the House Un-American Affairs Committee in August 1948 that he had not technically known Chambers during their association in the mid-Thirties, only ‘George Crosley’, one of Chambers’s pseudonyms. Hitchens observes that ‘not since Oscar Wilde regretted the ugliness of his serving boy while under oath has any cleverly crafted reply exacted such a stiff price.’ What he does not mention is that while Chambers at first denied to the Committee ever having resorted to using a pseudonym with Hiss, he admitted to the FBI in June 1949 that it was ‘entirely possible’ he had done so. Chambers also claimed that he had never used the ‘Crosley’ alias during his years as a member of the Communist underground and insisted that he had always been ‘Carl’ to his espionage contacts in the Federal Government, which he alleged included Hiss, speaking to them in a heavy European accent at all times. If Chambers used ‘George Crosley’ rather than ‘Carl’ with Hiss, for whatever reasons, it suggests that Hiss was not a Russian spy.

James Hamilton
Albuquerque