Inner Chambers

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House, 610 pp., $35)

LEAFING through the introduction to the newly collected Holmes-Frankfurter correspondence, I found a passing reference to “the alleged Communist spy Alger Hiss.” Time was when such lawyerly weaseling left me speechless with anger. Now I just shrug. As Dostoyevsky, Whittaker Chambers’s favorite author, once put it, “Man gets used to everything, the beast!” Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in a court of law, and everyone who knows anything about the Hiss case knows perfectly well that he did what Chambers said he did. Allen Weinstein put the next-to-last nail in the coffin in 1978 with the publication of Perjury, and the coup de grâce came with the release last year by the National Security Agency of intercepted Soviet cable traffic from the Forties, which revealed that Hiss flew straight from Yalta to Moscow, where Andrei Vyshinsky personally thanked him for his long years of service to the Soviet Union. But when Hiss died in November, virtually no obituary writer was willing to say flat out that He Did It, and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw both went so far as to suggest that he was framed. Such is the nature of Alger Hiss’s posthumous victory: by lying steadfastly for half a century, he succeeded in hiding the truth behind the shadow of a doubt.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

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Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House, 610 pp., $35)

LEAFING through the introduction to the newly collected Holmes-Frankfurter correspondence, I found a passing reference to “the alleged Communist spy Alger Hiss.” Time was when such lawyerly weaseling left me speechless with anger. Now I just shrug. As Dostoyevsky, Whittaker Chambers’s favorite author, once put it, “Man gets used to everything, the beast!” Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in a court of law, and everyone who knows anything about the Hiss case knows perfectly well that he did what Chambers said he did. Allen Weinstein put the next-to-last nail in the coffin in 1978 with the publication of Perjury, and the coup de grâce came with the release last year by the National Security Agency of intercepted Soviet cable traffic from the Forties, which revealed that Hiss flew straight from Yalta to Moscow, where Andrei Vyshinsky personally thanked him for his long years of service to the Soviet Union. But when Hiss died in November, virtually no obituary writer was willing to say flat out that He Did It, and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw both went so far as to suggest that he was framed. Such is the nature of Alger Hiss’s posthumous victory: by lying steadfastly for half a century, he succeeded in hiding the truth behind the shadow of a doubt.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.