John Ehran at the CIA web
site offers a review of G. Edward White’s Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy.
Somehow, the Hiss case never
goes away. The basic question—whether Alger Hiss was a spy for the Soviet Union
during the 1930s and 1940s—was finally settled during the 1990s, as Cold War
archives opened and documents proving his guilt became available. But other
issues remained uncertain. Unlike many other Soviet spies who confessed their
guilt, Hiss went to his grave in 1996 claiming to be innocent; he left no
record of why he had committed espionage or why he denied it publicly for
almost 50 years. Now, in Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass Wars, G. Edward White, a
law professor at the University of Virginia and son-in-law of one of Hiss’s
lawyers, provides a convincing analysis of Hiss’s reasons.
Born in 1904, Alger Hiss
graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, worked as a
secretary for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, like many educated liberals,
migrated toward the radical left during the Depression. He moved to Washington
in 1933 to work in the New Deal and, after serving in the Agricultural
Adjustment Administration and on the legal staff of the Nye Committee’s
investigation of US munitions sales during World War I, he joined the State
Department in 1936. Hiss rose high at State, eventually serving as an aide to
Secretary of State Stettinius at the Yalta conference in 1945 and then as
Secretary General of the UN organizing conference at San Francisco.
Although it is unclear when
he was recruited by the Soviets, Hiss may have been working for them as early
as 1933. While at the State Department, he routinely passed documents to
Whittaker Chambers, an American communist working for Soviet intelligence, who
photographed them and delivered the film to the Soviets. In 1938, Chambers
stopped working for Moscow and, after the announcement of the Hitler–Stalin
Pact, secured an appointment with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and
told him of the espionage ring’s activities. At the time, however, the
government was more concerned with German and Japanese threats. The FBI did not
interview Chambers until 1942, and it was not until after the war that it took
Chambers’s story seriously enough to begin an investigation. Although the
inquiry did not produce enough evidence to prove that Hiss was a spy, it raised
enough questions that Hiss was forced to leave the State Department in 1946.
The case became public in
August 1948 when Chambers, called before the House Un-American Activities
Committee, named Hiss as a communist, although he said nothing about his
espionage. Hiss denied the charge and challenged Chambers to repeat it in
public, without the immunity of testimony; Chambers did so, and Hiss filed a
slander suit. Chambers, in a deposition for the suit, revealed Hiss’s spying
and then produced papers and microfilms of documents he said Hiss had provided.
Because the statute of limitations covering espionage during the 1930s had
expired, Hiss was indicted instead for lying to a grand jury when he had denied
his activities. After two dramatic trials—the first ended in a hung jury—Hiss
was convicted and served 44 months in federal prison.
In Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass
Wars, White presents several factors that he judges gave Hiss a predisposition
for espionage. From a financially and emotionally troubled family, Hiss
practiced deception at an early age, developing impressive self-control and
discipline to create a persona that belied his origins—to Hiss’s associates, he
seemed to be from a secure upper-class background. In addition to documenting
Hiss’s various deceptions, White points out that Hiss had a controlling nature
and, even as a young man, enjoyed manipulating others and compartmentalizing
his life. At the same time, he had an altruistic nature and was frustrated by
the slow pace of social reform during the New Deal. White contends that Hiss
enjoyed the intellectual challenge not only of the “details of spying, but the
details of constructing a carapace of misinformation, half-truths, and lies to
cover one’s espionage activity.” [1] His portrait of Hiss’s personality is
consistent with the behavior often found in spies. That he may have, in
addition, seen himself as working to alleviate human suffering must have made
him an easy recruit for the Soviets.
The author’s main interest,
however, is shedding light on why Hiss denied his espionage after he was
exposed, lying continuously to his family, friends, and supporters for almost
50 years. White suggests that Hiss may initially have simply underestimated the
strength of the case against him and thought he could lie his way out of
trouble—a good bet, given that the State Department investigation had been
inconclusive. Not expecting Chambers to have hard evidence, Hiss used what
White terms a “reputational” defense—presenting himself as man of sterling
character, a pillar of the establishment, in contrast to Chambers, a confessed
former communist and spy. This strategy failed as the government chipped away
at his denials with witnesses and physical evidence, forcing him to keep adjusting
his story until he lost his credibility.
Once convicted, Hiss was
determined to be vindicated. White is at his best as he charts Hiss’s evolving
strategy. Since he had no new evidence or legal grounds on which to build a
case, he sought to shift the focus of the debate from his acts to those of
others. While in jail, Hiss took on the persona of a martyr: He appeared to
accept the injustice of his fate, was stoic and never complained, and gained
the respect of his fellow inmates as a prisoner who never sought favors or
turned informer. White details how, after his release, Hiss made these
characteristics the foundation of a new public personality and recast his story
as a human drama. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hiss presented himself
as an innocent victim of Cold War hysteria and the malevolence of Chambers,
Richard Nixon, and FBI Director Hoover. A key part of this effort, says White,
was Hiss’s decision to cooperate with a sympathetic psychiatrist, Meyer Zeligs,
who wrote a book portraying Chambers as a deeply disturbed man, driven to frame
an almost saintly Hiss by “the shiftings of his guilt-divided, tortured sense
of his own being.” [2] Hiss’s claims and Zeligs’ book were nonsense;
nonetheless, as White points out, together they gradually made Hiss a more
human and sympathetic figure.
Hiss’s effort paid large
dividends in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The Vietnam War, social upheaval,
and Watergate discredited many of the institutions of American politics and
society, and especially called into question much of what had been believed
about the Cold War. White shows how Hiss in this period shifted his narrative,
emphasizing his claim to be the victim of a government conspiracy. To many of
the disillusioned, distrustful young people in the early and mid-1970s, his
claim seemed credible. Hiss became a popular speaker on campuses. He also
managed to expand his appeal beyond students—White documents that many older,
prominent people who once had believed him guilty became unsure of their views.
Hiss’s campaign for vindication reached its peak in 1975 when Massachusetts
restored his license to practice law.
Soon after, however, Hiss’s
campaign stalled. The crucial event was the publication of historian Allen
Weinstein’s book on the case, Perjury (1978). Exhaustively researched, the book
made a damning case for Hiss’s guilt—and, in its updated edition, it remains
the standard account of the case.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
