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Whittaker Chambers had bad teeth. That is what everybody remarked about him, both when he was alive and kicking and long after his death. When his nemesis, Alger Hiss, died at 92 last November, columnists on the left and right remembered those teeth, each according to his ideological lights: on the left, as a subtle indicator of Chambers's villainy, and on the right as a further example of the left's unreasonable attacks on a decent man.
In this immediate instance, as it happens, the right is right: beauty confused with virtue, which is much the way things were during Chambers's lifetime, as Sam Tanenhaus points out in his excellent and generally sympathetic new biography, Whittaker Chambers. While Chambers was far from a pillar of virtue, if he had looked less like an unmade bed (as someone once described Heywood Broun) and more like a Hollywood actor (or, indeed, like Alger Hiss), American history in this century might have been considerably different.
The Hiss case is one of those episodes, like Sacco and Vanzetti, that are such touchstones in our history that it is hard to think that most people don't know at least something about it. But for those who don't, a superbrief summary:
During the 1920s and 1930s, Chambers was for 12 years a member of the Communist Party and an active espionage agent for the Soviet Union. In the late '30s, at real peril to his life, he broke from the party and went in the opposite direction, becoming a writer for Henry Luce's highly Republican Time magazine and eventually a senior editor. Luce knew of his Communist, but not his espionage, past.
In the late 1940s, reports of Soviet agents in American government, both current and in the past, began to come out. One of those divulging information was Chambers, and one of those he fingered as a fellow spy was Alger Hiss. Chambers had never been in government, but Hiss had -- in the State Department.
Eventually there was a trial (two, actually), with Chambers testifying, and Hiss went to prison for perjury. But, as Tanenhaus says, "Everyone understood that the technical charge of perjury masked the deeper allegation of espionage."
Chambers freely admitted his past as a spy. Hiss never did, not to his dying day. That's the point, really. The great bulk of the evidence and writings that have come out since then, including this biography, have tended to prove Chambers right and Hiss wrong, but for many true believers it is not and never will be over.
"What sets the Hiss case apart, then and now," Tanenhaus writes, "was not its mystery but the passionate belief of so many that Hiss must be innocent no matter what the evidence."
Hiss had become a symbol of the New Deal, and the pro-Hiss faction could not admit to itself what traitorous actions he and other New Deal stalwarts might have been up to, however idealistically. Philip Rahv wrote in the Partisan Review in 1952 that the faction "fought to save Hiss in order to safeguard its own illusions." Especially when its symbol was so sophisticated and the symbol of the opposition was, as one as one Hiss backer wrote, the "bland, dumpy, and devious" Chambers with those bad teeth.
It is all incredibly tangled with countless strands running in all directions: Richard Nixon's career was made, for instance, by his exposure of Hiss. But to dwell on the case exclusively would be to overlook the many other merits of this biography, the chief of which is its portrait of Chambers and his age. It was an age astir with the ferment of ideas and movements, many of which for 40 years Chambers not only argued and wrote about, but sometimes, despite considerable danger, actively took part in.
He was in many ways a sympathetic figure, devoted to his family and friends. He had a formidable intelligence that, among other things, allowed him to pick up languages almost effortlessly. In the last two years of his life he went back to college full time for the sheer joy of learning.
He was both ruthlessly and incompletely honest. He, too, lied about his past, like Hiss, though not to the same degree. And even though his political opinions continued to shift up to the time he died in 1961 at age 60 -- he came to accept the necessity of the New Deal -- he never admitted to himself that his world view helped bring into existence the scourge of McCarthyism.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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