Alger, Ales And Joe

In 1937, as Stalin’s Moscow trials entered their second year and the more alert American comrades began to notice that something was wrong in paradise, Rodgers and Hart opened Babes in Arms on Broadway. One song in the show, I Wish I Were in Love Again, had a friskily sardonic line about “the self-deception that believes the lie.” A lyric for the era.

Return to the dialectics of the time: Lie No. 1, communism itself, eventually introduced America to Lie No. 2: “I am not a communist.” Which set the stage for Lie No. 3: “I have here in my hand a list of 205…” And so on.

It was the cold war’s three-card monte. Americans would be at one another’s throat for a half-century, sorting out which of the lies was the evil one and which was the harmless. Consider Whittaker Chambers, the aggressive apostate from Lie No. 1: Was he a malignant fabricator? Or was the real deceiver Alger Hiss, who went to his death in 1996 still proclaiming No. 2? Or was it the father of McCarthyism–drunken, reckless Tailgunner Joe, No. 3’s bully and birdseed artist, who was the true Antichrist?

All that was long ago and far away, in a country different from our own. But there is a convergence of new books on the period, with fresh deceptions and clarifying truths. Tony Hiss’s The View from Alger’s Window: A Son’s Memoir is a tender hagiography that makes a claim for his father’s innocence–a case so heartbreakingly sweet that one struggles (though unsuccessfully) to join in the son’s self-deception. William F. Buckley Jr., who as a young conservative in the 1950s was a friend to both Chambers and McCarthy, gives his version of McCarthy in a documentary novel, The Redhunter. And in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr analyze the deciphered ’40s cable traffic, recently released, between Soviet agents working in America and their masters in Moscow–files that show there was far more spying, and far more complicity by American party members, than was previously thought.

Next March, moreover, Basic Books will bring out The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein, former minority chief investigator of the House Internal Security Committee (which used to be HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee), and the late Eric Breindel. The book will make sensational charges, among them Romerstein’s claim that the radical journalist I.F. Stone was a paid Soviet agent.

Tony Hiss, 58, still occupies the Greenwich Village apartment where he lived as a child with Alger and Priscilla Hiss. He calls it a “time funnel,” a point of metaphysical access connecting present and past. Tony worked for years writing unsigned Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker. He tells Alger’s story as a kind of cold war fairy tale, colored by the moods of our age of therapy: Once upon a time, a boy’s idealistic young father was set upon by an ogre who hid under the bridge, Whittaker Chambers (fat, neurotic, with bad teeth and a sick man’s mysterious need to destroy), a former communist agent who told congressional investigators that Hiss transmitted government documents to him between 1934 and 1938.

“But in any real world,” writes Hiss, “there is no way to squeeze together in one person the translucent father I got to know and the monstrous Alger that Chambers talked and wrote about.” Hiss makes his case by quoting at length the lovely letters Alger wrote to him and Priscilla from the Lewisburg federal penitentiary, where he served three years and eight months in the early ’50s. In effect, says Tony, the letters–gentle, loving, teasing, serene, filled with the observations of a bird watcher and stargazer–exonerate Alger. Bad things happen to good people. Alger’s creed was not Marxism but…neighborliness!

Whittaker Chambers, Tony’s ogre, kept up a correspondence in the ’50s with the young William F. Buckley Jr. Chambers was emphatic in his contempt for Joe McCarthy: “For the Right to tie itself in any way to Senator McCarthy is suicide…[H]e can’t lead anybody because he can’t think. He is a rabble-rouser and a slugger.”

Buckley’s judgment is more complex in The Redhunter, an ingeniously symmetrical drama of the origins and psychology of communism and anticommunism. He has invented a young alter ego, Harry Bontecou, who goes to work for Joe McCarthy (an only lightly novelized version of the real Senator) and turns out to have been fathered by a secret onetime English communist. Buckley offers not so much an ideological evaluation of McCarthy as a portrait of a live character and force of nature–country-boy chicken farmer, charmer, weasel, patriot, bully, loose cannon and for all that, the spokesman for a valid American intuition (fear, if you like). In an atmosphere compounded of the Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe, the Hiss conviction, the detonation of the first Soviet nuclear bomb, the communist takeover of China and the invasion of South Korea, something was wrong in the world. The opening of Soviet archives after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., together with the Venona decryptions, which the National Security Agency began releasing in 1995, has made it clear that the fear of Soviet espionage was neither neurotic nor hallucinatory.

The Venona traffic validates the “even paranoids have enemies” school. Although Venona might have saved America a lot of internal strife had it been released years ago, it demonstrates beyond argument that the Soviet penetration into American life, government, science and industry during the ’30s and ’40s was deep, thorough and hostile. Venona shows that the American Communist Party was elaborately involved in the spying (though of course only a small minority of party members were actual spies). To fake the Venona traffic would have required a conspiracy involving thousands, working together over many years. Furthermore, the decrypted messages are often verified by other sources. The Soviets and their agents in America thought their coded messages were secure, so they communicated fairly freely–about their penetration of the wartime Manhattan Project, for example. Some leftists still protest the innocence of Julius Rosenberg, but there he is in Venona, as an agent code-named “Liberal.” Names long disputed emerge with unambiguous clarity. Harry Dexter White, supposed martyr to HUAC in 1948, is identified as an agent. So is Roosevelt White House aide Lauchlin Currie.

And so, in Venona No. 1822, dated March 5, 1945, we find an agent code-named “Ales.” The message says Ales had worked for Soviet intelligence since 1935, being the leader of a small group of agents consisting mostly of family relations. Ales, according to the message, was one of four members of the U.S. delegation to Yalta who returned to the U.S. via Moscow.

Hiss was one of those four Yalta delegates. No evidence or allegation has ever suggested that any of the other three could have been communists. Chambers says Hiss joined the party in late 1934, and Hiss’s brother Donald and wife Priscilla were also said to be agents. Added to the earlier accumulation of evidence, the Venona message seems to remove reasonable doubt about Alger Hiss’s guilt.

More, perhaps, will be learned from the thousands of pages of grand jury testimony in the Hiss investigation that a federal judge in Manhattan has ordered the government to unseal. Tony Hiss’s book, itself a kind of Utopian exercise, has the sweetness of wishes. As Jake Barnes says to Lady Brett Ashley at the end of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (back in the days when Alger was bright and young and clerking for Oliver Wendell Holmes), “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”