On the Right

New York, July 14—Although Allen Weinstein’s best-seller, Prejury: The Hiss- Chambers Case, has convinced everyone who is not a member of the Flat Earth Society that Alger Hiss was guilty as charged in what has been called the most important political trial of the century, an interesting pattern emerges in the reviewers’ fascinated attention. Most pronouncedly it shines through the review by Richard Rovere, The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent for lo these many years. It is a view of Chambers that divulges the depths of the philistinism of the cultural Left in America. Whittaker Chambers, writes Rovere, was “a confessed spy and perjurer, a thief in his youth, a tormented homosexual, frowsy in appearance and all but friendless, as obsessed by his anti-Communism as he had been as an evangel of revolution . . . a certifiable neurotic.”

Let us pause for a little historical rectification. The perjury of Whittaker Chambers consisted of the simple act of having denied that he knew of Hiss’s involvement in espionage, a falsehood as easily explained as Chambers’ entirely plausible subsequent contention that he did not seek to incriminate his old colleague-in-espionage, merely to immobilize him and to alert the Republic to the activities of American friends of tyranny. His “thievery” in his youth consisted in husbanding, against the rules, a few books from the library of Columbia University. If that made him a thief, so is one-half the population of Yale University.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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New York, July 14—Although Allen Weinstein’s best-seller, Prejury: The Hiss- Chambers Case, has convinced everyone who is not a member of the Flat Earth Society that Alger Hiss was guilty as charged in what has been called the most important political trial of the century, an interesting pattern emerges in the reviewers’ fascinated attention. Most pronouncedly it shines through the review by Richard Rovere, The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent for lo these many years. It is a view of Chambers that divulges the depths of the philistinism of the cultural Left in America. Whittaker Chambers, writes Rovere, was “a confessed spy and perjurer, a thief in his youth, a tormented homosexual, frowsy in appearance and all but friendless, as obsessed by his anti-Communism as he had been as an evangel of revolution . . . a certifiable neurotic.”

Let us pause for a little historical rectification. The perjury of Whittaker Chambers consisted of the simple act of having denied that he knew of Hiss’s involvement in espionage, a falsehood as easily explained as Chambers’ entirely plausible subsequent contention that he did not seek to incriminate his old colleague-in-espionage, merely to immobilize him and to alert the Republic to the activities of American friends of tyranny. His “thievery” in his youth consisted in husbanding, against the rules, a few books from the library of Columbia University. If that made him a thief, so is one-half the population of Yale University.