Perjury – Allen Weinstein, 1978 ★★★★

Probing the Fundamental Why of Alger Hiss

Once upon a time, people wondered whether U. S. State Department official Alger Hiss transferred stolen government documents to Soviet intelligence. Then the question became more a matter of why.

Like why did Hiss steal the documents, and why did he keep lying about it after he served his time, right up until he died?

“The fundamental why” is the way Joseph Conrad put it in his epic novel about the nature of guilt, Lord Jim, contrasting it with “the superficial how.” Allan Weinstein quotes that passage in his famous takedown of Hiss, Perjury, which pretty much laid out the how part to most people’s satisfaction more than 30 years ago. Since then, he has never as satisfactorily addressed the why.

A definitive account of the case which rocked America in 1948 and remains an undercurrent of politics to this day, Perjury lays out the reasons for finding Hiss guilty of perjury when he claimed he was not a Soviet spy. [Hiss could not be convicted of espionage directly under the statute of limitations; only for lying about it when he denied the charge.] Back in 1978, when the first edition was published, the evidence Weinstein presented included the public record of a Congressional investigation and two trials, as well as information from Hiss's own lawyers that present Hiss in a wretched light.

Since then, Weinstein has published two more editions that record how the weight of evidence amassed against Hiss has only grown. The Venona Papers, intercepted messages from Soviet intelligence that were declassified in 1995, not only identify Hiss as an asset but indicate he remained an active agent for Josef Stalin long after the Georgian despot signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler, a final breaking point with Communism for many of the American left.

Weinstein’s latest edition of Perjury, published in 2013, brings in still more information in the form of document research conducted by Weinstein and a colleague in Eastern Europe. Still, the substance of the book remains unchanged from 1978. Having read both that and the 2013 edition, I can say you really don’t get a stronger case with the latter book as much as a more repetitive one.

"You will always come back to the documents in applying reason to this case," said prosecutor Thomas Murphy in his summation at the trial which led to Hiss's conviction. Indeed, that is what Weinstein does here, continually returning to documents stolen from the State Department. The man who testified against Hiss, former spy Whittaker Chambers, claimed they were given to him for transfer to the Soviet Union.

Hiss’s defense, recounted by Weinstein at great length, was to say the least unsatisfying. First he claimed not to know Chambers at all, changing his story only after seeing Chambers’ teeth. Then he claimed he only knew Chambers by a pseudonym, and not very well at that. Yet Chambers and his family had lived for a time in the Hiss house, and Hiss had even given Chambers the use of his car.

The counterargument for Hiss’s defense ran in all sorts of directions. This makes for some of the most fascinating parts of Weinstein’s book. Early on, when it was clear the purloined papers provided by Chambers had Hiss’s handwriting, it was said that maybe Chambers had snuck into Hiss’s State Department office and stolen the papers when no one was looking. Then, when other papers turned out to have been typed out on a Woodstock typewriter traced to the Hiss family, it was suggested that Chambers had somehow managed to get hold of the machine. Later on, a popular theory among some Hiss defenders was that the government, led by J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had constructed an exact replica of the Woodstock.

Whatever the theory, the underlying notion remained the same: that Hiss, as a mid-level member of the liberal establishment, was an ideal target for reactionary forces within the United States operating through their puppet, Whittaker Chambers.

Weinstein goes into gory detail on how the defense team pursued various theories and kept hitting brick walls. He quotes from files Hiss himself made available to the researcher, unwisely as it turned out.

“They seemed half convinced that Hiss might be covering up for his wife,” Weinstein writes of the lawyers.

Alger’s wife, Priscilla Hiss, is one way Weinstein tries to get at the why of the case, though without much success. She was by all accounts a strong-willed woman who effectively ran the marriage. When he got a job offer from a prestigious Boston law firm, she made him move to New York City anyway so she could pursue a career of her own. She never did much in that department, but she was apparently the social conscience of the house. She registered as a Socialist at a time when Socialist presidential candidates were distant third-party figures, and while her husband played the role of loyal Democrat.

When Chambers said he tried to convince his old friend Alger to break ties with the Soviet Union, Priscilla was the one who told Chambers off, in terms so scorching he would recount in a letter to a friend “the rank obscenity of cultured women!”

But when Alger’s lawyers suggested using Priscilla as a means of casting doubt on his guilt, he would have no part of it.

Even in prison clothes, Hiss cut a dashing figure that proved a jarring contrast to the notion he could have been a spy in the service of one of the most murderous regimes in history. Image from Wikipedia.org.

Instead, the focus of the defense went entirely into the character of the accuser. Chambers perjured himself before the trial even began, by first saying Hiss was merely quietly aligning himself with the Soviets and denying either Hiss or himself passed secrets. Chambers confessed he had been concerned about his own vulnerability to prosecution, and also was “shielding” Hiss as an old friend.

Chambers was certainly a character. For years he lived under a variety of pseudonyms in pursuit of his goal of Communist world domination. Then in the late 1930s he did an about-face, and became an anti-communist gatekeeper of public opinion at his new job as an editor at Time magazine. Throughout much of this period, Chambers was a depressive head-case who led a double life cruising for male sex partners. He even managed to get run out of Columbia University as an undergraduate by writing a play in which Jesus Christ is depicted deciding He is better off dead.

Hiss’s head lawyer at the first of two government prosecution trials against Hiss trumpeted Chambers’ character for all he could:

“In the warm southern countries, you know, where they have leprosy, sometimes you will hear on the streets perhaps among the lepers a man crying down the street, ‘Unclean, unclean,’ at the approach of a leper,” attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker said in his opening argument for Hiss’s defense. “I say the same to you at the approach of this moral leper.”

Weinstein spends much time on the background on Chambers: his early life; his youthful allegiance to communism in the shadow of his brother’s suicide; and his eventual disillusionment with the U. S. S. R. in the late 1930s. He had attempted earlier in the 1940s to more quietly finger his old friend Alger as a security risk, but the high-ranking State Department official he spoke to mysteriously did nothing with the information. People just seemed to see a portly, slovenly-dressed man bad-mouthing someone who looked like he had walked out of an Arrow Shirt advertisement.

“Poor Chambers,” sighed a later Chambers interrogator, a young Californian congressman named Richard Nixon. “Nobody ever believes him at first.”

The Hiss case would make Nixon, but Weinstein’s book often shows the future president in a bad light. Nixon’s instincts for distrusting Hiss were correct, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Hiss represented the sort of Eastern prep-school elite Nixon spent his whole life resenting. Later, when the case against Hiss suffered what appeared to be a major setback, Nixon went all to pieces, only recovering when the episode proved a false alarm.

Weinstein catches Nixon playing fast-and-loose with the details of the case in his later memoir, Six Crises. At times, Weinstein comes off rather hard on Nixon. Perhaps this is because Perjury was first published in the shadows of Watergate. Hiss enjoyed a period of friendly rediscovery in the mid-1970s as one of “Tricky Dick’s” first victims; when he cooperated with Weinstein, a liberal historian, Hiss no doubt expected more of the same. Weinstein had to push against the current when he published his book; divorcing Hiss’s guilt from Nixon’s sullied reputation was a necessary priority.

At times, Weinstein’s account gets deep in the weeds, no doubt anticipating objections that followed the initial publication of his book. I found it quite tedious reading through details about a typewriter’s provenance. You understand why Weinstein errs on the side of thoroughness; you just wish he didn’t. It’s more how at the expense of why.

Perjury also presents the soap-opera aspects of the story in great depth. Like how did Chambers’ homosexual history become a major focus of investigation, and why didn’t Hiss’s defense go as hard on that as they did Chambers’ past expressions of atheism, both being sure-fire ways of garnering jury antipathy back then?

Or how did a vital piece of evidence, that old Woodstock, remain unavailable to both defense and prosecution for such a long time (to the point of driving Hoover to fits of apoplexy captured in the marginalia of FBI documents Weinstein accessed)?

Why did so many people defend Hiss well past the point of reason? One is said to have told Sidney Hook, a liberal believer in Hiss’s guilt: “Even if Hiss himself were to confess his guilt, I wouldn’t believe it.”

Analyzing the Hiss defense, Weinstein notes that tendency was common among liberals who had less problem with the how of the matter than the why. “Hiss is just a fall guy for much bigger game,” was the way the communist Daily Worker put it. Over the years this notion of an anti-liberal conspiracy has taken on a life of its own, proudly independent of the evidence as captured here.

Weinstein has a clear point-of-view, and doesn’t hide it. Still, he takes into account weaknesses in the case against Hiss, or more accurately, for Chambers. The latter was a fascinating man, but prone to misrepresenting himself, sometimes understandably, sometimes bewilderingly. You get the feeling by book’s end that Chambers’ action was, at least in part, public-suicide-as-performance-art.

Also dealt with in Perjury is the way the United States changed as a result of the case (or as Weinstein refers to it throughout the book, “the Case.”) Hiss proved grist for the Red Scare, not to mention a deeper level of mistrust across the nation’s ideological divide that remains today. However the politics and passions behind the case muddy the waters still, Weinstein’s book makes clear that, from a purely objective view, Hiss was guilty as charged.