No one who has, even once, lived close to the making of history can ever again suppose that it is made the way the history books tell it. With rare exceptions, such books are like photographs. They catch a surface image. Often as not, they distort it. The secret forces working behind and below the historical surface they seldom catch.
—Whittaker Chambers, Witness , 1952

You have not come back from hell with empty hands.
—André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers, 1952

Nearly half a century has passed since the fateful day in January 1950 when a jury in a Federal court in New York City found Alger Hiss guilty on two counts of perjury. That verdict effectively confirmed the charge brought by Whittaker Chambers that Hiss, his former comrade in a Soviet espionage apparatus in the 1930s, had betrayed his country as a Communist spy while serving as a high official in the U.S. State Department. Hiss, who had been with President Roosevelt at Yalta, had participated in the founding of the United Nations in 1945, and was president of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace when Chambers first publicly identified himself as a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee in August 1948, went to jail as a convicted felon. Yet for the remaining forty-six years of his life—he died in November 1996 at the age of ninety-two— this once highly respected member of the liberal establishment continued to insist upon his innocence. What is more remarkable, a great many intelligent people—those whom Chambers characterized in Witness as the “best people”—continued to believe him, or profess to believe him, even in the face of the mounting posttrial evidence that has reconfirmed his guilt. This is how Chambers described the situation at the end of Witness:

No feature of the Hiss Case is more obvious, or more troubling as history, than the jagged fissure, which it did not so much open as reveal, between the plain men and women of the nation, and those who affected to act, think and speak for them. It was, not invariably, but in general, the “best people” who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to go to any length to protect and defend him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis… . It was the great body of the nation, which, not invariably, but in general, kept open its mind in the Hiss Case, waiting for the returns to come in. It was they who suspected what forces disastrous to the nation were at work in the Hiss Case, and had suspected that they were at work long before there was a Hiss Case, while most of the forces of enlightenment were poohpoohing the Communist danger and calling every allusion to it a witch hunt.

It was, moreover, an inevitable corollary of this ardently held belief in Hiss’s innocence that his accuser had to be stigmatized as a disreputable liar and fraud, if not indeed a malevolent madman. In that pernicious endeavor, which has persisted in some of the “best” circles down to the present day—hence the continued neglect of Witness, an autobiography of great literary and historical distinction—Hiss’s liberal champions enjoyed an immense advantage. For upon the archetypal figure of the informer there has always been associated something odious and unclean. Americans, in their innocence, tend to be particularly unforgiving in this respect— more unforgiving, in this case, than about evidence of espionage. This, too, was a calamity that Chambers had clearly grasped when he put his life and his career at risk by informing on Alger Hiss.

That in his own self-interest Chambers need not have incurred that terrible risk is not something that is much appreciated even among people familiar with this celebrated case. It was, after all, within Chambers’s power to have sidestepped the entire catastrophe. He could have refused to testify against a former comrade, and in the “best” circles he would have been lavished with praise for defying an unloved congressional committee. It is worth recalling that in 1948, as a writer for Time and Life, Chambers was enjoying an immense success in the only decent—and decently paid—job he ever had in his life. He was a happily married man with two young children and a farm in Maryland. He certainly knew what it was likely to cost him if, in naming Hiss as a Communist, he turned informer—and not only in public opprobrium.

“Some ex-Communists are so stricken by the evil they have freed themselves from,” he afterwards wrote in Witness, “that they inform exultantly against it. No consideration, however humane, no tie however tender, checks them.” His own view of the informer’s fate was quite different. “By temperament,” he wrote, “I cannot share such exultation and stridency, though I understand both. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die in me. I inform without pleasure because it is necessary.”

Everything we know about the Hiss Case—including Chambers’s sometimes misguided attempts to shield Hiss himself from the worst charge of all: espionage--attests to the truth of this assertion. Yet the “best people” were so eager to shield themselves from the awful implications of the Hiss Case that they refused to see in Chambers anything but a caricature of irrational anti-Communist wrath. With that caricature firmly established by liberal demonization, the reality of the man himself was effectively removed from enlightened discussion. So, for that matter, was the real Alger Hiss, who, for the “best people,” remained safely concealed behind the mask of a New Deal pin-up boy, an exemplary figure of virtue and rectitude.

I always felt that Whittaker was the most misunderstood person of our time,” wrote Arthur Koestler at the time of Whittaker Chambers’s death in 1961. “When he testified he knowingly committed moral suicide for the guilt of our generation… . The witness is gone, the testimony will stand.” And so the testimony still stands a half-century later, with added corroboration turning up with greater and greater frequency from hitherto secret archives in Washington, Moscow, and Prague, with every passing year.

Yet Chambers himself has remained an elusive—indeed, an unknown—figure, and Witness an unread book. Alger Hiss had pronounced his former comrade “a psychopath,” and many of the “best people” continued to believe him—even, it must be said, as their own belief in his innocence began to suffer some damaging doubts. Whatever the nature of those doubts, however, Hiss himself continued to be treated with a level of respect that was rarely accorded to Chambers outside the conservative anti-Communist press. You could sense that aura of respect in the obituaries and death notices occasioned by Hiss’s passing in November. In keeping with its liberal orthodoxy, The New Yorker published a sentimental, down-home eulogy by Hiss’s son, and in The Nation, which for decades has made Hiss’s innocence an article of faith, Victor Navasky called him “a model citizen.” In a great many other accounts of Hiss’s death, Chambers remained the usual caricature.

This is but one of the many reasons that the publication of Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers: A Biography is a capital event.[1] For with this marvelous book a gifted writer of a generation too young to have any personal memories of the Hiss Case has undertaken to give us a life of Chambers that is not only scrupulously documented and dispassionately composed but also governed by precisely the kind of historical intelligence that has long been absent from critical accounts of its subject. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography is neither Cold War melodrama nor anti-Communist hagiography. It is the riveting story of a man of remarkable talents and remarkable suffering (remarkable flaws, too) who had the great misfortune to have “lived close to the making of history”—in his case, the history of the Communist movement in America.

It is thus, among much else, one of the best books ever written about the Communist experience in America—a narrative, as compelling as a good novel, that exhibits a profound understanding of what made a young man of Chambers’s literary and intellectual gifts a Communist in the first place, what moved him to make his shattering break with the Communist Party, and then, faced with the horrific implications of the Hitler-Stalin pact in the summer of 1939, begin his long ordeal in attempting to alert the U.S. government to the operations of the underground espionage apparatus that had already penetrated the ranks of its own bureaucracy at astonishingly high levels of responsibility.

Mr. Tanenhaus’s book is also a chronicle of three troubled families caught up in the vortex of the political traumas of their time: the dysfunctional and somewhat disreputable family into which Chambers himself was born; the family he created when he married Esther Shemitz, a painter he met at gatherings of the John Reed Club in 1929, the year of its founding; and the Hiss family—Alger, his wife Priscilla, and their children—to whom Whittaker and Esther Chambers were far more closely attached than either Alger or Priscilla Hiss could ever bring themselves to acknowledge, lest the fiction of Alger’s innocence be seen to be the spectacular act of mendacity it was.

Not the least of Mr. Tanenhaus’s many accomplishments in this biography is the mastery he brings to his vivid accounts of the very disparate social milieux that shaped Chambers’s life—and indeed, his character. To scenes as different as Columbia College in the 1920s, where Chambers formed his friendship with Meyer Schapiro, and the Communist bohemia of the late 1920s and early 1930s, where he met and married Esther Shemitz, and the atmosphere of the New Masses, the Communist journal in which Chambers made his first literary reputation; to the netherworld of the Soviet underground apparatus in Washington and the frantic regimen this imposed upon Chambers and his family, the terrors involved in his flight from Party discipline, his emergence as a writer for Time and his subsequent involvement with William Buckley’s National Review—to these and a good many other diverse subjects essential to his story Mr. Tanenhaus brings a first-rate narrative gift and an undeceived grasp of political nuance. The cast of characters he is obliged to deal with is enormous, and enormously varied. In what other biography are we likely to find figures as different as Meyer Schapiro and Richard Nixon? Yet Mr. Tanenhaus somehow manages to give us a persuasive account of all of them without allowing them to divert his narrative from its central focus on Chambers himself. At times even his footnotes contribute something essential to the narrative without interrupting it.

It is, however, in its account of the Hiss Case and its aftermath that Mr. Tanenhaus faced his greatest challenge, for the story of the two Hiss trials has been brilliantly recounted at least twice before: first in Witness and then in Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (1978). Yet on this subject, too, the challenge is triumphantly met in Mr. Tanenhaus’s narrative. For one thing, he brings to it a spare, unornamented prose that renders the complexity of the courtroom drama with a clarity and concision it has never before been given. There is nothing here of the anger and remorse and bitter disappointment that colored Chambers’s own account of the trials in Witness. At the same time, there is no need—as there was Mr. Weinstein’s Perjury—to conduct an uphill battle against liberal opinion by piling on an overabundance of incriminating detail. Mr. Tanenhaus takes nothing for granted in his account of the Hiss trials, yet at this distance in time and after his own deep immersion in the evidence that was at issue, he well understands that history has already rendered its judgment in the Hiss Case, and tells the story accordingly.

He well understands, moreover, that the judgment of history has effectively reversed the judgment of the “best people” at the time of the trials themselves. Then it was Hiss, the convicted felon still proclaiming his innocence, who was deemed to be the hero and martyr of the affair, and Chambers, who had rendered his country a great service, who was put down as a turncoat and a villain. Now, at last, it is more widely recognized with what cold contempt for his country and for the truth Hiss continued to lie—to his loyal supporters as well as to us.

Writing about the effect of the Hiss trials on Chambers, Mr. Tanenhaus recalls:

No one seemed to acknowledge that he too was a casualty of the case, with an “incurable wound.” Scarcely a word was written about Chambers’s tribulations—on the career he had lost; on the manifold indignities he had withstood, the gossip, the strenuous defamations; on the pain to his family. Instead, he remained for many the monster conjured up by Lloyd Paul Stryker, “bland, dumpy, and devious,” in one assessment.

About the refusal of the liberals to acknowledge Hiss’s guilt, Mr. Tanenhaus is also very persuasive in recalling us to the views of the anti-Communist Left at the time of the trials and its immediate aftermath:

This failure, suggested one shrewd analyst, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler, grew out of “the implicit dogma of American liberalism,” which inflexibly assumed that in any political drama “the liberal per se is the hero.” For Hiss’s supporters to admit his guilt also meant admitting “that mere liberal principle is not itself a guarantee against evil; that the wrongdoer is not always the other—“they” and not “us”; that there is no magic in the words “left” or “progressive” or “socialist” that can prevent deceit and abuse of power.”

About the trials and their aftermath, too, Mr. Tanenhaus’s summary is definitive: “Every major question was met and answered. What sets the Hiss Case apart, then and now, was not its mystery but the passionate belief of so many that Hiss must be innocent no matter what the evidence.”

Reading the account of Chambers’s last years in Mr. Tanenhaus’s book, I was reminded of the final chapter in Arthur Koestler’s autobiography, The Invisible Writing (1954). Quoting from an attack upon his work by Raymond Mortimer, the former literary editor of The New Statesman and The Nation, who had written that “if I find Mr. Koestler’s writing unlikeable, it is because he accepts as normal what I believe and hope is abnormal,” Koestler responded as follows about the experience of his own generation, which was also Whittaker Chambers’s:

It was entirely normal for a writer, an artist, politician or teacher with a minimum of integrity to have several narrow escapes from Hitler and/or Stalin, to be chased and exiled, and to get acquainted with prisons and concentration camps. It was by no means abnormal for them, in the early thirties, to regard Fascism as the main threat, and to be attracted, in varying degrees, by the great social experiment in Russia. Even today, about one quarter of the electorate in France and Spain, and a much higher percentage among the intellectuals, regard as “normal” to vote for the Communist Party. Even today the displaced persons, the scum of the earth of the post-war era, number several millions. Finally, it was quite normal for six million Europeans Jews to end their lives in a gas chamber … Yet the majority of well-meaning citizens … believe and hope that prisons and firing squads and gas chambers and Siberian slave camps just “do not happen” to ordinary people unless they are deliberately looking for trouble.

This was the kind of knowledge of history that Chambers, too, brought to his mission as an informer in the Hiss Case and, as a writer, in Witness. It is a similar command of the history of our time that makes Whittaker Chambers: A Biography essential reading for the present generation.

Notes
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1. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus; Random House, 656 pages, $35. Go back to the text.
2. This one, for example, about the fate of Lionel Trilling’s novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), in which the character of Gifford Maxim was based on Chambers, whom Trilling had met when they were undergraduates at Columbia in the 1920s: “It puzzled Trilling for many years that his publisher, Viking, did not reissue the novel in 1948–49. Since the book bore many intriguing parallels to the Hiss Case, it was likely to excite fresh interest. Unbeknownst to Trilling, Viking’s publisher, Ben Huebsch, was a Communist and had quietly offered his services to the Hiss defense. Go back to the text.