Hiss, Chambers and the Perils of Certainty

AUSTIN, Texas — The Alger Hiss case was before my time. Never had a dog in that fight. You know how we all grow up with this floating 15-year gap in our understanding of modern history? In my cohort, the history books stopped after World War II, and it was 1960 before I noticed much myself.

The gap is getting worse: In some school systems, the textbooks still haven't gotten us to the moon. Those kids are going to have a large blank to fill in.

Over the years, I kept hearing people talk about this Hiss case, so I finally went back and did a reading binge on the subject. I found it such an amazing historical monstrosity, like uncovering some horrible wound all full of pus and gangrene, still sending out mephitic vapors decades later.

Arthur Miller's celebrated analogy, "The Crucible," is probably still the best text on the topic. For me, the interesting part was not so much whether Mr. Hiss had ever been a Soviet spy — how would I know? — but how the witch hunt got so completely out of control. As Rudyard Kipling more or less said, to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs is a nifty trick.

By now, we should be able to look on this gross historical curiosity with some dispassion, but its poison spread long after the case was over, mostly because Richard Nixon remained active in our political life and political imagination for so long. And Nixon said himself that he would have been nobody without the Hiss case.

The thing about witch hunts is that first everyone has to assume there are witches. Once you've got the witch premise established, everything else is apt to follow. And that provides us with the always-timely reminder to beware of going about inventing witches.

The other curious thing about the Hiss case is the psychology of believing that Hiss was a spy, which requires abandoning much of what we know about rational thought.

According to the record, which is what journalists are taught to go by, Alger Hiss was a slightly dull Dudley Do-Right — upstanding, good credentials, successful career, etc. — whereas his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was a porky failure with bad teeth, a fellow who went about using aliases for years at a time, an ex-commie and thus somewhat given to the conversion experience. The rather more significant fact about Chambers, who kept changing his story as the case went along, was that everyone knew him to be a liar. He had lied under oath, according to his own testimony, quite extensively before he got around to charging Hiss with being a Soviet spy.

But in the stand-it-on-its-head atmosphere of the times, everything that pointed to Hiss' being an honorable fellow who followed the Boy Scout oath just made his villainy more black, while everything that pointed to Chambers' being a hysteric with deep emotional problems just made him more credible.

As I say, it was a strange case.

The unstated subtext in the case was class resentment. Hiss was a State Department pin-striper who had gone to Harvard and was from a genteel Baltimore family; Chambers was a loser, an Everyman. In those days, the press still had strong blue-collar sympathies, which was the main reason that it sided with Joe McCarthy over all those stuffed shirts at the State Department. For good or ill, I doubt that all those Establishment wannabes who infest the Washington press corps today would take a similar line.

As the years went by, the case became curiouser and curiouser. Chambers was apparently a homosexual in the '30s, or at least Hiss believed so, and assorted shrinks had a field day with that. Another odd piece of evidence that surfaced years later was that Chambers had once translated from the German a book about friendship and betrayal that had eerie similarities to the Hiss case.

However, Chambers was also a man of some parts who convinced many who knew him that he was a great intellect. He became an editor at Time magazine, a wonderful fate. William F. Buckley Jr., one of his stoutest defenders, has claimed that Chambers' book "Witness" is one of the great works of our time.

Just from a literary point of view, it is ghastly twaddle — huge stretches of overwritten, self-important, desperately self-inflating swill. He really was a most peculiar man — a psychiatric study for the ages.

Hiss, too, was put on the psychiatrist's couch. He was said to have been protecting his wife or to have been homosexual himself or simply unable to face the reality of what he had done. He did five years in the pen for perjury and spent the rest of his long life as a stationery salesman, always attempting to prove his innocence.

After the Berlin Wall came down, Soviet authorities said they had checked the archives and found no record that Hiss had ever been a spy. But of course, that made no difference to the Chambersites. Evidence always did have a nasty way of making no difference at all to those with passionate beliefs on the case. The Chambers camp later claimed to have found a reference to Hiss in the Hungarian secret service files.

Aside from its charm as a mystery, the Hiss case stands as a monument to our ability to invest absolute certainty in some very cloudy causes. Certainly the authorities and the press could have profited by more skepticism at the time. Contemporary historians seem to have come down on the side of "With all this horse poop around, there's bound to be a pony here somewhere." Maybe. Beware certainty.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.