Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy

No new material; just a good summary of the history of the Alger Hiss case. Author G. Edward White became interested when he found out his father-in-law was one of Hiss’s defense attorneys


White is firmly on the Hiss-was-guilty side, as is (now) known to everybody in the US except the editors of The Nation and a handful of college professors. What puzzles White is why Hiss never confessed – he lied to his supporters, his wife, his son, and possibly to himself. Unfortunately, White doesn’t present the obvious answer to his own question – because it was working. The physical evidence against Hiss was overwhelming, so his entire defense was based on character – and everybody who met Hiss, without noticeable exception, found him charming and sincere and couldn’t understand how he could possibly be guilty. If I had met him, I probably would have felt the same way. In fact, except for the minor detail of treason, Hiss does seem to have been a pretty decent guy. He married his first wife to save her reputation after another man got her pregnant and dumped her. He got in trouble with Whittaker Chambers by loaning him money (and Chambers himself praised Hiss’s charity). He spent his time in prison teaching illiterate inmates to read, and his letters home (assuming they’re not lies, too) show he got considerable personal satisfaction out of this and managed to adapt to prison life despite being of a rather different background than the other inmates.


I don’t think Hiss actually planned his deny-everything strategy really far in advance – although if he really was a Marxist ideologue he would have felt that the ultimate triumph of the proletariat would have vindicated him – but his life couldn’t have worked out better if he had. Although he had some rough times after prison, working a series of low-paying jobs, things gradually began to improve. He was invited to give lectures, his government pension was restored, he was readmitted to the bar, and remarried a sort of leftist groupie. Before the Venona decrypts finally nailed him, he was much more widely respected than his old adversaries, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon.


Not a bad book if you want a good background on the Hiss case, and want to read about an interesting but flawed man.
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This highly speculative and ultimately annoying psycho-history depicts Hiss as the consummate confidence man, as demonstrated by the vigor and sustained effort he devoted to expunging the record; of course, this is what an innocent man with a highly developed sense of honor would do too. Take this particular statement: "For Hiss, convincing the public that he had been an innocent victim of a malevolent political culture, not a Soviet agent, was intimately connected to the overriding goal of helping the ideals of Soviet Communism spread throughout the world." No evidence is offered for this being the case and at that point I wanted to throw the book against the wall. I contented myself with a quick skim as the author had lost me.

This is keeping in mind that I do believe that Hiss was holding back something when he perjured himself, but whether that was actual spying, a history as a member of the Communist party, protecting other people, or simply distancing himself from Whittaker Chambers we might never know for sure. Certainly the conspiracy theories that Hiss came up with to protect himself look absurd in retrospect. Manipulated typewriters; give me a break!

White seems to have entered into this project convinced that Hiss had to be a spy and doesn't seem to realize that the existing evidence isn't that convincing; at least I'm not that convinced. Too much of the case against Hiss still depends on taking Chambers seriously, and he's as dubious a figure as the author accuses Hiss of being; that White seems to realize this is one of the few things that makes this book tolerable. However, it's also not like I'm expecting the sort of air-tight evidence that can only come from Russian military intelligence to emerge anytime soon. The speculation about Hiss will thus continue. ( )