[In the following review, Galbraith provides his perspective on the Hiss-Chambers case and emphasizes the insight and value of the letters in Odyssey of a Friend.]

One evening in January, 1950, I was stopped on Fifth Avenue by an acquaintance who served as the intellectual MVB for the House of Morgan. He told me, without visible regret, that the jury in the second Hiss trial had just returned a verdict of guilty on two counts of perjury. My pain was greater than his. Clearly the enemies of the New Deal, all who hated FDR, his works and legions, would now have a field day. My sense of abstract moral concern is always usefully enhanced by being personally involved. I had been politically and emotionally a part of the Administration and though a later arrival than Alger Hiss—whom I knew but casually—had held a rather more important post. I had another thought. Were Hiss in fact innocent no one was exempt from a monstrous frameup. Were he guilty no one would be exempt from suspicion. I continued on my way in a thoughtful mood.

In time, like most liberals, I came to accept the guilt of Hiss. The importance of the information that he passed to the Soviets from his State Department job having to do with trade agreements was probably slight. It could have been negative. Considering the number of spies they seem to have had it quite possibly added to a confusing excess. We ourselves now know what that means. And by the time of the second trial Hiss was subject to the most serious flaw in our jurisprudence which is its terrible vulnerability to the hanging public mood. But to believe he was telling the truth required more effort and imagination than I could muster. Since then various of those who were named as his associates in the Party have conceded that, indeed, they were his associates.

Alger Hiss, one must conclude, was shot down as he had all but completed one of the most audacious political traverses of all time—from the Communist apparatus of the thirties to the Cold War Establishment of the late forties. Already he had sold himself to John Foster Dulles. So aided he had reached the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organization deeply committed to the more scholarly aspects of the strictly predictable view. He was helping to organize enlightened citizens on behalf of the Marshall Plan—and one recalls what threat that was designed to meet. Eventually he would have been a man on whom Dean Rusk could have relied. When the time came for a diplomatically experienced man in Saigon or Paris, someone who would never be associated with a useful and hence disturbing initiative, he would have done instead of Henry Cabot Lodge.

While I came to accept Hiss's guilt, and in degree to blame him for Joe McCarthy, I never got around to forgiving Whittaker Chambers. He had spied on a far more formidable scale than Hiss, though admittedly without the same official connections. But having repented, informed, and somewhat belatedly (after first denying it) confessed to espionage, he had been washed clean. Hiss hadn't made it to the Establishment but Chambers was all the way in as a patriot.

In the late fifties I was visiting John Strachey near London one weekend and was astonished and a little shocked to hear him say he thought Whittaker Chambers was one of the most important and interesting literary figures of our generation. He took a copy of Witness down from his shelf and urged that I reread it. I somehow doubt that I had really read it before. Strachey was a man of great intelligence and liberality of mind and excellent literary judgment. I reread the book and concluded that, as usual, his judgment was sound. The book is morbidly concerned with the Communist threat in the United States; it exaggerates the rôle of the Party and the associated conspiracy. This warps the author's judgment on many matters. One is put off by the righteous denunciation of men who are acting on beliefs that were his own a few years before. But the book is extremely learned, frequently perceptive, and a superb piece of writing. I concluded that I had rejected it because I did not care for the author or his political associations. This is not the best foundation for literary or artistic criticism and one that provokes a certain measure of objection when employed by pre-Cambrian congressmen against Communist painters.

Now a large number of Chambers' letters have been published [Odyssey of a Friend]. They are fascinating. Every person who wants to understand this period of history and its participants needs to read them. They add little on the Hiss case. But being informal and undesigned they tell much about Chambers. Much of it is very surprising.

It is not news that Chambers destroyed Hiss. But these letters show that Hiss also destroyed Chambers. After the trials he was a wounded man, fearful of the press, passionately anxious to regain his privacy, afraid lest public opinion would vindicate Hiss and indict him, resentful and angry at the way the Establishment, as he regarded it, seemed determined that this should happen. No longer a senior editor of Time, he was short of money. His health was broken and he lived in the shadow of sudden death. He is still bugged about Communism but it is no longer a dominating theme. Often he is kindly and mellow.

Most of these letters are addressed to William F. Buckley, Jr. It is clear from between the lines that Buckley admired Chambers and sensed both the quality of his writing and the depth of his erudition. He was more than kind to Chambers and the latter responded. He speaks of his “sense of gratitude, highly personal” when “my grateful colleagues of the American press [among whom I was not, surely, the least practitioner] slammed the door tight in my face.”

But Buckley also needed Chambers. He was faced with the most formidable of publishing problems, that of finding literacy combined with thought on the right. Professor Thomas Nixon Carver of Harvard, a conservative monument of a half century ago, once promulgated what came in highly limited circles to be known as Carver's Law. It held that the trouble with radicals is that they read only radical literature and the trouble with conservatives is that they don't read anything. Reading and writing have a well-established association. So having largely exhausted the supply of home-grown reactionaries whose turgidity of style was within allowable limits of tolerance when he hired himself, Buckley had to rely on the reformed radicals—the more than adequately eloquent graduates of the Communist Party or the less drastically regenerated followers of Leon Trotsky. In erudition, editorial skill, imagination and as a writer none rivalled Whittaker Chambers. Chambers himself saw the problem. In a letter to Buckley in 1957 he notes that “Curiously (perhaps you will suppose perversely) your belief that NR (National Review) is full of readable copy troubles me most.” Close students of National Review will wonder if Buckley read this letter with the attention that it deserved.

Though Chambers was needed, these letters show that he posed some interesting problems. As a writer he was a perfectionist; he seems regularly to have torn up letters because they were not up to standard. There are many references to hopelessly delayed copy. He greatly admired Buckley and respected James Burnham—to whom, incidentally, along with Adolf Berle we owe no slight debt for our understanding of the modern large corporation. But he had a highly limited view of his other National Review colleagues. Sharing with Buckley in the launching of the journal was one Willi Schlamm, like Chambers an old Time, Inc. hand. Unlike Chambers he had been expelled from the Communist Party. Reflecting on this, Chambers shows detectable Communist sympathies. (Later, after an eruption among the editors that would have been somewhat notable in SDS, Schlamm departed forever for Germany.)

Chambers had contempt for Joe McCarthy—“a man of bilious ineptitude,” and “a heavy-handed slugger who telegraphs his fouls in advance.” He thought Dulles, whom Hiss had adopted, a sanctimonious fraud. He was more reticent on Nixon but confesses in one letter that he is a man to whom he could find nothing whatever to say.

His political views are even more surprising. He was deeply and perceptively concerned about the arms race and strongly opposed to the tendency of his colleagues to hint at war without facing its consequences. He associated Khrushchev with a major change in Soviet policy toward the West—the rankest of heresy in his circles—and in these letters strongly supported the idea of meeting him half way by offering a general pullback in Europe. “This is not 1932. … The greatest drama of the great century is in play.” He thought the Republicans were without future unless they captured, i.e. outbid the Democrats for, the support of the masses of the people. He was sternly against censors and censorship, even of such (for the time) hideously pornographic works as Lady Chatterley's Lover, equally against wiretapping, and he was for the integrity of the courts and for passports for everyone including, in particular, Alger Hiss. He thought old-fashioned free enterprise was dead and had an enchanting quarrel with his colleagues over the treatment accorded a book by Ludwig von Mises, a major apostle of the choleric right. Reacting a trifle untactfully to what could only be his view of the average National Review reader, he warned that the book would not “harm anyone above the mental age of twelve. But its power to harm minds under that age is great indeed.” In May of 1957 he guessed that there might be trouble from Republican economic management by the end of the decade. He predicted that it would elect John F. Kennedy. Eventually he resigned from National Review. Alas that he did not remain and live. Nothing is so needed as conservatives of such views.

But to emphasize the political interest of these letters is, in a way, to mislead. They are more important for the depth of personal feeling they convey and as an exercise in profound self-revelation. And there is also once again—but quite unostentatiously—their depth of learning. Chambers must have been one of the most avidly intellectual men of the century. The letters affirm the latter point with a detail of Chambers' personal history of which few can be aware. In 1959, at the age of 58 with by his own knowledge and calculation only a few months or years to live, he went back to university as a full-time student. His courses included elementary economics, Greek and French composition. He took classroom discussions very seriously and must have been a terrible trial for his infinitely less informed teachers. He was very pleased by his grades. There aren't so many such writers that one can be ignored.