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What the media missed
Alger Hiss was one of this century's most revealing cultural icons
by Dan KennedyBY THE TIME Alger Hiss died, last Friday at the age of 92, just about everyone conceded that he was guilty; that the brilliant, suave, well-educated, well-connected lawyer-diplomat had indeed been a Communist and a spy for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and '40s. Allen Weinstein's massive 1978 book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case had convinced even pro-Hiss liberals of that.
Hiss, whose misfortunes had once evoked such passions, and whose innocence was at one time an article of faith in left-wing circles, died not only without the vindication he had long sought, but also without much hope of a posthumous reconsideration. Indeed, just last spring the National Security Agency released old KGB files that showed Hiss was almost certainly a Soviet agent who supplied to his totalitarian masters crucial details of the US negotiating position at the Yalta Conference of 1945. Hiss's defenders have dwindled to a small handful of true believers; their arguments have taken on the bright colors of ludicrous conspiracy theories.
Thus, the front-page obits that appeared on Saturday in such bastions of the liberal establishment as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe were striking in their dispassionate acceptance of Hiss's guilt (a "near-certainty," wrote Mark Feeney in the Globe). Even more striking is that not a single editorialist or op-ed columnist has yet seen fit to weigh in on the case in any of the three papers. (This past Tuesday, the Times did offer an op-ed by Sam Tanenhaus, who's writing a sympathetic biography of Hiss's persecutor, Whittaker Chambers.) And on the ultraconservative editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal no one has bothered to offer so much as a pro forma "we told you so." Time magazine, Chambers's former employer, ran a thumb-sucker by columnist Lance Morrow; Newsweek's "Conventional Wisdom Watch" awarded Hiss the big cosmic down arrow.
Too bad, in a way. Because the mid-century showdown between Hiss and fellow-traveler-turned-accuser Whittaker Chambers -- and, more to the point, between Hiss and a young congressman named Richard Nixon -- was a supremely important episode in a 200-year (at least) culture war that shows no signs of ending. The truth, though, has robbed the Hiss-Nixon confrontation of its controversy, and thus of much of its mythic power.
Chambers was a shambling wreck of a man, an ex-Communist who'd become a writer for Henry Luce's rabidly anti-Communist Time magazine, when, in 1948, he leveled a spectacular charge: that he and Hiss had served together as party members in the 1930s, and that Hiss had supplied him with numerous secret documents. The patrician Hiss, a protégé of Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Felix Frankfurter, and an alumnus of the State Department who'd just taken a job as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was an unlikely villain. "Suspecting Alger Hiss was somehow, on the face of it, indecent," the journalist-historian Garry Wills wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1978.
But Chambers eventually triumphed, and in a bizarre manner at that. He led investigators to his Maryland pumpkin patch, where he'd hidden film of the documents Hiss had given him, produced on a typewriter traced to Hiss. The statute of limitations for espionage had expired, but Hiss was tried for perjury. Following a first trial that ended in a hung jury, he was convicted at a second trial in 1950. He served nearly four years in prison.
The driving force behind the investigation was Nixon, a first-term Republican on the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Imagine the impression Hiss, who moved in the highest circles with ease and grace, must have made on Nixon, even then an embittered man who nursed the poverty of his youth like an infected sore, and who despised those he perceived as his social superiors.
Tom Wicker, in his biography of Nixon, One of Us (1991), relates a flip remark Hiss reportedly made to Nixon that must have cut to the bone: "I graduated from Harvard. I heard your school was Whittier." If Hiss had intended to ensure Nixon's undying hatred, he couldn't have done better; and Nixon's own writings on Hiss betray not just his belief in Hiss's guilt, but his overwhelming sense of resentment. In a memo, for instance, Nixon wrote that Hiss "was rather insolent toward me . . . and from that time my suspicion concerning him continued to grow."
Thus on one level, at least, Nixon was perfectly clear in understanding the real power of the Hiss investigation. Even more than the serious crimes Hiss almost surely committed, his case stood as a classic example of the populist rabble rising up against the cultural elite, whom they suspect -- sometimes rightly, sometimes not -- of having secret plans in store for them that will not be to their liking.
"Alger Hiss was just the perfect symbol," Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley was quoted as saying in the New York Times's Hiss obit. "He epitomized everything that the reigning Democratic, liberal, elitist establishment seemed to be. Bringing him down was a way of bringing the whole thing down."
It's a theme that goes back to the late 1700s, when the agrarian Jeffersonians wrested power from those effete Federalists; to the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson and his supporters dismantled the Bank of the United States; to the 1890s, when William Jennings Bryan ran against the Eastern establishment banking interests that were emblematic of the modernity he loathed. And this populist resentment continues to have considerable power, from Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot's presidential campaigns, to Rush Limbaugh's snide lampooning of "elitists" in the Clinton Administration, to the paranoid delusions of the far right about the Trilateral Commission, black helicopters, and, inevitably, the Jews who control the Zionist Occupation Government (i.e., the federal government).
Allen Weinstein once attributed Hiss's staying power to the putrescence of his enemies. "For Hiss, generations come and go, and since his accusers were [J. Edgar] Hoover, Chambers, and Nixon, he can always revive his own myth," he told the New Yorker's David Remnick in 1986. Well, Hoover, Chambers, and Nixon are gone, and now so is Hiss, too.
Sort of.
When I did an AltaVista Web search for "Alger Hiss," the very first item I turned up was http:// pages.nyu.edu/~jy209/alger/algerhiss. html, the site of a band by that name. "Alger Hiss grafts arty harshness onto modernist progressive rock. Or maybe modernist progressive rock onto arty harshness," read the promo. No explanation for the name, but clearly the mythic power of the Hiss case continues.
Check out the Don't Quote Me archive.
Dan Kennedy's work can also be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/