The Week

Conceivably it could be a coincidence, but at the very moment we were celebrating NATIONAL review’s 35th anniversary (and quite a party it was), the Federal Government went out of business.

Waaaaaaaaaaaay down at the bottom of a long story whose headline is “Roosevelt Aide Called Unwitting Spy,” New York Times writer Craig Whitney tells us of another disclosure by KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky: that at KGB headquarters in Moscow, one Iskhak A. Akhmerov was the guy who served as KGB controller for—Alger Hiss! The lead in Mr. Whitney’s story is that Gordievsky’s new book says the KGB considered Harry Hopkins, FDR’s eminence grise, their most important asset in America. But Hopkins, the book says, was not a willing servant of the Soviet Union—he was just a reliable dupe. KGB: The Inside Story contains (we have established) the sentence, “By early 1937 [Hiss] was delivering packets of documents to Chambers at intervals of about a week or ten days.” The throat you just heard slit is The Nation’s. (Human blood allegedly issued.) Alger Hiss was unavailable for comment.

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National Review

William F. Buckley Jr.

Conceivably it could be a coincidence, but at the very moment we were celebrating NATIONAL review’s 35th anniversary (and quite a party it was), the Federal Government went out of business.

Waaaaaaaaaaaay down at the bottom of a long story whose headline is “Roosevelt Aide Called Unwitting Spy,” New York Times writer Craig Whitney tells us of another disclosure by KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky: that at KGB headquarters in Moscow, one Iskhak A. Akhmerov was the guy who served as KGB controller for—Alger Hiss! The lead in Mr. Whitney’s story is that Gordievsky’s new book says the KGB considered Harry Hopkins, FDR’s eminence grise, their most important asset in America. But Hopkins, the book says, was not a willing servant of the Soviet Union—he was just a reliable dupe. KGB: The Inside Story contains (we have established) the sentence, “By early 1937 [Hiss] was delivering packets of documents to Chambers at intervals of about a week or ten days.” The throat you just heard slit is The Nation’s. (Human blood allegedly issued.) Alger Hiss was unavailable for comment.