Towards an Objective Hiss Story?

There is a certain irony that in America's bicentennial year almost as much ink has been spilled over Joe McCarthy and the witch-hunts of the 1950s as on the virtues of George Washington. Woody Allen stands up against the blacklist and prying Congressional Committees in The Front; Lillian Hellman provides her view of the period, often scathing, in Scoundrel Time; and a spate of books, articles and film has appeared dealing with the Hollywood Ten trial, the Hiss and Rosenberg cases. Professional historians are also now taking a closer look at McCarthyism and America's entry into the Cold War.

One such historian, Allen Weinstein, a professor at Smith College, has found himself in the middle of a literary brouhaha in the pages of The New York Review of Books and The New York Times over his maverick stand in the now re-ignited Hiss case controversy.

In 1948, Alger Hiss, New Deal whiz kid, Harvard Law graduate, head of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, was accused by an ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers first of being a Communist, then later of passing State Department documents during the 1930s to the Communist underground. Chambers, a senior editor at Time, made his initial accusations in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where Hiss vigorously denied the charges. Despite Chambers' somewhat sordid past, the weight of evidence seemed on his side in the two perjury trials that followed; Chambers produced State Department documents allegedly typed on the Hiss' Woodstock typewriter and four memos allegedly in Hiss' handwriting. Hiss, convicted and sentenced to a prison term, has to this day unequivocably maintained his innocence.

Hiss' conviction was seized upon by some conservatives as proof that there were Communists in the government, a Fifth Column of sorts, and the case helped pave the way for McCarthy's demagoguery (he was to constantly refer to Hiss in his first major speech on Communism in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950).

Weinstein, who successfully sued under the Freedom of Information Act to see FBI files on the case, now says his research there, and in Hiss defense files, has led him to believe that Chambers was telling the truth on the major points and that there was no frame-up of Hiss. In a book review of John Chabot Smith's Alger Hiss: The True Story (April 1, 1976 The New York Review of Books) Weinstein first advanced his findings--a switch from his earlier position expressed in the early 1970s that Hiss might be innocent. Smith's book argued the opposite, and so the debate by letter and article was on, spilling over onto the front page of the New York Times and involving the likes of I.F. Stone and Robert Sherrill.

Weinstein, a self-described "left-liberal," now waits for his own book Perjury: The Hiss Chambers Conflict, to be published by Knopf next year to answer his critics. While Weinstein claims to have a measure of objectivity--"I don't deny Whittaker Chambers told whoppers and lies, I'm simply saying on most major points at issue Alger Hiss told the greater and more significant ones"--he also says no one book can yet completely and adequately tell the full story of the Hiss case.

The following are excerpted from an interview held at Smith College in late November.

--Crimson: Why this sudden interest in the 1950s, in the McCarthy period, in the Hiss and Rosenberg cases?

Weinstein: Why now? Partly because of the shift in the climate of American opinion in the aftermath of Watergate; a perhaps more critical set of attitudes towards institutions, towards government, a belief that there were wrongs to be righted, and a search for heros in what seems to many of us a villainous time.

I think it's impossible to overestimate the importance of Watergate and the changing symbolism of the 50s and of anti-Communism in general. There have been many such upheavals but not the least important element was the downfall of Richard Nixon--the very symbol of the anti-Communism of the 50s.

Crimson: What type of history is being produced?

Weinstein: There's a great deal of useful documentary culling. There's an enormous record being built up partly through Freedom of Information Act suits such as my own and the Meeropols (the Rosenberg's sons) and Alger Hiss and others against the FBI and CIA, disgorging materials which five years ago scholars like myself could not obtain.

As for dispassionate historical works being produced in the immediate future, I remain somewhat pessimistic for several reasons. First, the symbolism of that period is quite live. I think, if nothing else, my own experiences over the past year have shown how people on both sides react in an extraordinarily emotional way to what for them remains a live and unsettled issue--not history at all. One of the problems here, and I recognize it, is the legitimacy of this direct concern for righting the wrongs of the 50s. There is a perfectly useful place for the analysis of the period through the eyes of those who were victimized at the time, or who consider themselves victimized. But these studies of victimization will not give us any overall analytic dispassionate view of the changes in American institutions and practices that took place as a result. They just will not. Which is not to say there will not be some efforts at a more dispassionate view of the period. I hope my own work will fit into that category, whatever people think of my conclusions.

Crimson: Like the Kennedy assassinations, conspiracy theories abound about the Hiss case. Have you discovered anything that would link the FBI, or anyone involved in the case, to a frame-up of Hiss, whether through forgery by typewriter or tampering with witnesses?

Weinstein: No, I have not--although I have given this question probably a more extended and more dispassionate scrutiny than anyone I can think of who has ever researched the case. I think there are conspiratorial dimensions to the case, rather surprising ones, which I'd rather not talk about now, but which will come out very soon in my book.

If you look for the roots of the various conspiracy theories you can find them back in the literature at the time of the case. There's been relatively little new since then except for extensions of some of the earlier theories. Also interesting in this connection is the fact that Mr. Hiss himself apparantly has minimized the importance of the John Dean quote (in Blind Ambition) about what he alleges that Nixon told Charles Colson--about building a typewriter in the case. Colson insists that the actual quote was something to the effect that the case was built around the typewriter, which of course is something different. Part of the explanation for Hiss' rather restrained response is that it appears from published reports that one of the theories the Hiss defense is operating under at this point is that if there was a frame-up it had much more to do with the activities of a private detective, whom the Hiss defense alleges was a FBI double agent, rather than (attacking) HUAC or Mr. Nixon or someone like that.

Crimson: Nixon is a central figure, in some ways, in this case.

Weinstein: For a historian it presents a problem I have no easy solution to--I know if I were a reader who had not done any work on the case and was told that Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover said one thing and Alger Hiss, or Defendant X, said another, I think instinctively perhaps my own attitude would be to be very skeptical about the accusations against Defendant X until I had proof to the contrary. For Mr. Nixon Alger Hiss remained a vital symbol throughout his public career. I think he probably dreamed about the Hiss case.

Crimson: In 1971, in an American Scholar article, you claimed there was reasonable doubt about Hiss' guilt. Now, more recently, you've concluded Hiss was lying--a strong charge. What evidence do you think supports this?

Weinstein: I believe Mr. Hiss was charged with perjury and I believe perjury involves lying. If I had said Mr. Hiss was rightfully convicted of perjury perhaps I suspect a good deal of the emotional force and reaction to my article would have been blunted.

Crimson: But then again the statute of limitations on espionage had run out.

Weinstein: Certainly. The perjury charge was quite clearly an appropriate legal fiction.

I think my own book outlines an enormous amount of evidence to suggest that Whittaker Chambers knew Alger Hiss closely in the 1930s, in the period Mr. Hiss denies having known Chambers, that it can be demonstrated that Mr. Hiss saw Chambers, met with him, knew him in the period after mid-1936 when he last claimed to have seen Chambers. Almost all of the personal statements Mr. Chambers made about Mr. Hiss in connection with that relationship--including some I disbelieved at the time of the American Scholar article--turned out to be quite valid. Let me give you an illustration: at that time I was very skeptical about Chambers saying Hiss was deaf in one ear, and cupped (his hand over) his ear. As it turned out, Hiss' defense files contained several letters from his lawyers saying that they had visited ear specialists Mr. Hiss had consulted and that they were not really useful because the ear specialists said Mr. Hiss had some hearing problems. All right, so that became telescoped as deaf in one ear instead of hearing problems but still, the memory is there.

There are a number of small points of detail which are minor elements in the mosa Now, getting to the more important points--the documents themselves. We have the evidence of Mr. Hiss' own document examiners that these materials were typed on the same machine that typed the Hiss' standards--the letters that were introduced into evidence typed by Priscilla Hiss during the 1930s. We have Mr. Hiss' four hand-written notes--one of which I've shown was actually quoted in full by Chambers in a 1938 article that he wrote shortly after defecting. Where did he get these handwritten memos from? And then, of course, we have the famous microfilm Pumpkin Papers.

It's very hard to outline in this kind of a conversation all of the various elements that go into proving a case. And basically, my book is much less concerned with proving a case, it's the story of these men.

Crimson: It's possible, if Hiss were guilty, that he was a "fellow traveler" and not a Communist.

Weinstein: What I have after three years of research is far more persuasive evidence to me that Hiss passed the documents, that Hiss knew Chambers extremely well, and a much more complex sense of the spectrum along which the loyalties of individuals to a radical faith might have led. I don't think it is a necessary part of the argument to require that Alger Hiss was, in that marvelous phrase of the 50s, a "card-carrying Communist." Whether or not Alger Hiss was indeed a member of the Communist Party, for all intents and purposes he behaved as either a dedicated Communist or a strong sympathizer, which is a perfectly honorable thing to do. What intellectual in the 1930s was not involved in one or another aspect of radical activity? I don't, in any sense, in my book make any effort to red-bait the beliefs of people at the time.

Crimson: What you seem to be moving towards is a more tragic interpretation of the period.

Weinstein: Exactly. It's what is in my book, basically. The lives of both of these men were ruined. Alger Hiss I think never understood that, precisely how it was ruined. I think there is in some way a lack of awareness about the cost to him, because overtly, at least, what are the costs? Twenty-five hundred dollar evening lecture appearances all over the country; a 60 Minutes television program coming out; a sort of informal retrial through his suit and all the rest. Well, that sounds quite charming, but someone should go talk to Mrs. Hiss sometime, see how she lives. She refuses to get involved in any of this. There's a great tragedy there. Someone should talk to Mrs. Chambers, who won't see anyone and lives in isolation. Someone should talk to her son, who's a journalist in Washington--and I have talked to him on several occasions--who's suspicious of the whole outside world including the FBI, Nixon, all these other people. Someone should talk to Maxim Lieber, this literary agent forced to flee the country. (Lieber was accused by Chambers of involvement in the Communist underground.)

The human costs and the social costs (of the case) to the country in connection with McCarthyism, in connection with the stimulus for this second Red Scare, were dreadful. The divisions in the intellectual community could have fought McCarthy much more cohesively if it hadn't been as divided as it was over this case, over this symbol of how far you go and whether you believe Alger Hiss or you don't believe Alger Hiss. People instead of collecting themselves to battle HUAC and McCarthy and any excesses of the executive branch were busy arguing in the prints over the guilt or innocence of this man. The one thing I will say about Alger Hiss is that if in fact he is not aware of some of the contradictions between his version of the story and the evidence, that's one thing--we're all enormously good at persuading ourselves as to what we want to believe. But if he has been aware of it--if he has been conscious of it--then I suppose at some point in the game he's got to be conscious of what the costs of his search for vindication have been.