An Un-American Life | Sam Tanenhaus | Review by The Spectator

This is a really astonishing story, lasting many decades. One of the most egregious of Hiss partisans was Lord Jowitt, Lord Chancellor in the Attlee government, whose The Strange Case of Alger Hiss published in 1953 must be the silliest and trashiest book ever written by a former head of the English judiciary. Then in 1964, Chambers’s posthumous collection Cold Friday was reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Conor Cruise O’Brien under the sarcastic headline ‘The Perjured Saint’, taking the standard line that Chambers was an evil, psychopathic liar. Cruise O’Brien is an admirable man and writer who has since changed his mind on a number of subjects; I wonder if this is one of them.

‘So many’ and ‘standard line’ need to be qualified. We speak here of the received wisdom of the chattering classes, the lumpenintelligenstia, the liberal elite. Chambers himself dryly contrasted the mass of ordinary Americans who always recognised the plain truth from the start, with

the ‘best people’ who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to go to any length to protect and defend him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis.

This psychosis could be comical: Sidney Hook described a New York liberal who told him he wouldn’t believe that Hiss was guilty if Hiss himself came up and confessed. Another American liberal (with perhaps more sense of irony) once said that if Hiss were ever proved guilty it would be the end of Daycare, and that gives a clue: Hiss had become a symbol, and to admit his guilt would be to betray the New Deal and the whole progressive cause, or so some persuaded themselves.