Witness for the Truth

NOW THAT General Dmitri A. Volkogonov has retracted his rash statement exonerating Alger Hiss, and Mr. Hiss himself has receded from the public spotlight, it seems fair to say a word about the man who was truly vindicated by the whole sorry episode. I mean Mr. Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers. For the first fundamental fact of the Hiss case—and the wellspring of its great drama—is that it featured two major actors. We’ve heard a great deal about one of them, Alger Hiss, and about his public life. How he was one of the so-called New Deal lawyers, a junior member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s brain trust, who later became a ranking member of the State Department, in attendance at the Yalta Conference of 1945 and at the founding conference of the United Nations, being named its temporary Secretary General. You may know too that Mr. Hiss left the government in 1947 to assume the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and that he still held that position the following year when he was identified as a onetime Communist by Whittaker Chambers in hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

But who was Whittaker Chambers? Who was this man who said he had known Alger Hiss intimately, had stayed for weeks in his house, and had been given the use of Mr. Hiss’s car? This man who, even as he professed his affection for Mr. Hiss, claimed that Mr. Hiss had been, along with Chambers himself, a Communist in the 1930s, a loyal servant of the Soviet Union? And who, when challenged by Alger Hiss to repeat his accusations outside the protective immunity of a congressional committee, promptly did repeat them and found himself the chief witness in the perjury trials of Alger Hiss, the second of them ending in Mr. Hiss’s conviction and sentencing to a jail term?

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Sam Tanenhaus

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NOW THAT General Dmitri A. Volkogonov has retracted his rash statement exonerating Alger Hiss, and Mr. Hiss himself has receded from the public spotlight, it seems fair to say a word about the man who was truly vindicated by the whole sorry episode. I mean Mr. Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers. For the first fundamental fact of the Hiss case—and the wellspring of its great drama—is that it featured two major actors. We’ve heard a great deal about one of them, Alger Hiss, and about his public life. How he was one of the so-called New Deal lawyers, a junior member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s brain trust, who later became a ranking member of the State Department, in attendance at the Yalta Conference of 1945 and at the founding conference of the United Nations, being named its temporary Secretary General. You may know too that Mr. Hiss left the government in 1947 to assume the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and that he still held that position the following year when he was identified as a onetime Communist by Whittaker Chambers in hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

But who was Whittaker Chambers? Who was this man who said he had known Alger Hiss intimately, had stayed for weeks in his house, and had been given the use of Mr. Hiss’s car? This man who, even as he professed his affection for Mr. Hiss, claimed that Mr. Hiss had been, along with Chambers himself, a Communist in the 1930s, a loyal servant of the Soviet Union? And who, when challenged by Alger Hiss to repeat his accusations outside the protective immunity of a congressional committee, promptly did repeat them and found himself the chief witness in the perjury trials of Alger Hiss, the second of them ending in Mr. Hiss’s conviction and sentencing to a jail term?