he named Hiss and others as officials who were passing sensitive secret government information to the Soviets, Chambers was largely ignored as the country mobilized for World War II. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for example, was more concerned with Nazi infiltrators than with Communists, especially after the United States and the Soviet Union became allies.

After the war, the political climate began to change. The Republican Party gained seats in Congress, and much of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program became suspect. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigated Communist influence in Hollywood, the labor unions, and government. Yet such congressional investigations were often done sloppily and for obvious political gain. HUAC abused its witnesses and destroyed the careers of people who were labeled Communists or fellow travelers (those aiding the Communist cause).

Tanenhaus follows Richard Nixon’s biographers and other historians who credit Nixon with reviving and legitimizing the anti-Communist crusade. Nixon and HUAC investigator Robert Stripling were alone in believing Chambers’s charges that Hiss had been and perhaps still was a Communist. Hiss had had a brilliant career in government, culminating in his work at Yalta alongside Roosevelt. As president of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, Hiss was one of the most important postwar opinion makers. It was dreadful to think that he had advised the ailing Roosevelt at Yalta, where to many anti-Communists it seemed Roosevelt had capitulated to Soviet designs in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Tanenhaus is adept at showing how the odds were against Chambers and Nixon. Hiss had impeccable references. He dressed well, moved elegantly, and was unflappable in his assertion of innocence. Chambers was fat, disheveled-looking in his rumpled suits, and an admitted Communist who had lied and deceived others for nearly a decade and had perjured himself in testimony before government committees. Nearly all the important columnists wrote sympathetic profiles of Hiss. Only the daily newspapers, Tanenhaus reports, tried to report evenhandedly on the case.

Hiss could not be charged with espionage, because the statute of limitations had run out. Based on Chambers’s testimony and Hiss’s denials, however, Hiss was tried for perjury. On the one hand, the government had a strong case. Chambers testified in detail about Hiss’s habits and intimate life. Chambers possessed government documents in Hiss’s handwriting. Chambers’s wife Esther corroborated his story and testified to her friendship with Hiss’s wife, Priscilla. The government was able to show that Priscilla had typed documents on her typewriter that matched those in Chambers’s possession. On the other hand, Hiss alleged that Chambers could have stolen the documents from Hiss’s office because of lax government security. Hiss intimated that Chambers was a delusional writer who had concocted a fanciful story, and Priscilla Hiss corroborated her husband’s staunch denials of any involvement with Communists or espionage. Most of all, Hiss stood on his impeccable public record.

The first perjury trial ended in a hung jury—precisely the outcome that Hiss’s attorney, Lloyd Paul Stryker, had sought. Stryker did not believe that he had the evidence to exonerate his client, but he had thought that by dwelling on Chambers’s unsavory background he could create enough doubt in the jury to ensure that it could not reach a unanimous verdict. After all, the government could not show how Chambers had acquired Hiss’s documents, and Hiss did not deny knowing Chambers (under the pseudonym George Crosley). It was just possible, in other words, that the parts of the Hiss and Chambers versions that overlapped accounted for the fact that both men admitted knowing each other and yet fashioned such different interpretations of what their friendship had meant.

Even so, the first trial ended with eight of twelve jurors ready to convict Hiss. Tanenhaus treats Hiss as an arrogant liar who thought that he could bluff his way out of a jam. The wise course would have been to continue Stryker’s tactics in a second trial. Instead, Hiss hired a lawyer who went all out for his exoneration. Thus Hiss’s lawyer had to resort to theories about how a typewriter could be constructed to mimic Priscilla Hiss’s machine. Such a machine was produced, but it took more than a year to manufacture, and it still had flaws that allowed experts to tell the difference between it and Priscilla’s typewriter. Even more important, according to Tanenhaus, was the change in political climate. Before the Hiss trial, less than half of the American public believed that there had been a Communist conspiracy inside the U.S. government. After the first Hiss trial, a majority of the American people were prepared to believe not only in Hiss’s guilt but also in a widespread Communist espionage ring.

Although Chambers and Nixon triumphed, they were vilified for years in the liberal press. Tanenhaus shows that Nixon certainly played the Hiss case to his political advantage and that Chambers became a political partisan close to Nixon and other Republicans. Yet the idea that Chambers made up his evidence, or that exposure of Hiss and other spies was simply a political attack on the New Deal, is untenable. Nixon was a first-rate investigator, and much of his work was corroborated by Bert Andrews, a Herald Tribune journalist initially skeptical of Chambers’s charges. The evidence against Hiss has only strengthened in recent years.

Although Chambers became a patron saint of the Right in the last ten years of his life, he developed a more nuanced politics than most of the ideologues who supported him. He was initially sympathetic to Joseph McCarthy, but Chambers realized that McCarthy’s thuggish tactics seriously damaged the anti- Communist cause. Yet he did not publicly repudiate McCarthy or the excesses of anti-Communism. In private, he expressed his reservations to conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr., whose National Review grew in part out of Chambers’s apocalyptic view of a world in struggle against a Communist conspiracy.

Except during the trials, Esther Chambers receives little attention in this book. How she interacted with her husband, and why she believed strongly in him, is never explained. Besides sifting the evidence at the end of the biography, Tanenhaus might have teased out the implications of the Hiss-Chambers case. It did considerable damage to the American Left that is still not well understood because of the focus on the evils of McCarthyism. Certainly the witch-hunting associated with the reckless McCarthy constitutes a deplorable episode in American history. Yet so is the blindness of many liberals who insisted on Hiss’s innocence even in the face of mounting, irrefutable evidence. As reporter Rebecca West put it, the Hiss-Chambers case was like the Dreyfus trial in reverse. Whereas Alfred Dreyfus was pronounced guilty before he was tried, largely because he was Jewish, Hiss was pronounced innocent before the evidence against him was carefully assessed because he was a New Deal liberal. The Hiss-Chambers case can seem a relic of the past in the post-Cold War world, yet it demeaned political dialogue in ways that still deform America’s civic life.

Sources for Further Study

America. CLXXVII, July 19, 1997, p. 25.

Chicago Tribune. March 16, 1997, p. 3.

Commentary. CIII, February, 1997, p. 61.

The Economist. CCCXLIII, June 21, 1997, p. 6.

Houston Chronicle. March 2, 1997, p. 27.

Los Angeles Times. March 2, 1997, p. 4.

The Nation. CCLXIV, February 17, 1997, p. 27.

The New Republic. CCXVI, April 14, 1997, p. 38.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, March 9, 1997, p. 5.

The New Yorker. March 17, 1997, pp. 112- 17.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, December 16, 1996, p. 48.

Time. CXLIX, March 10, 1997, p. 88.

The Times Literary Supplement. June 6, 1997, p. 9.

USA Today. March 27, 1997, p. D6.

The Wall Street Journal. February 20, 1997, p. A18.

The Washington Post Book Review. March 9, 1997, p. 1.