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Title: Whitaker Chambers by Sam Tanenhaus ISBN: 0-609-00047-0 Publisher: Random House Value Pub Pub. Date: 31 August, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Don't Let This One Fall Into a Crack
Comment: Among those who were my college classmates in the 1950s, I wonder how many thought they would live long enough to think that Sam Sheppard was probably innocent, and that Alger Hiss was almost certainly guilty? Not me, I can assure you. As it happens, I lived in Cleveland for a few months in 1954, while the Sheppard fandango was in full flourish. I think I had the uneasy sense then that there was something unseemly about the media (more precisely - Louis Seltzer's Cleveland Press) and its bacchanal. I never doubted - until years later - that the underlying verdict was really wrong.

The Hiss-Chambers conflict is perhaps more complicated. Chambers' charge that Hiss was a Communist agent stood or fell on Chambers' say-so alone. It's true that Chambers, as an influential senior editor at Time Magazine, was in some sense the creature of the publisher Henry Luce, and in any event had plenty of loud advocates from the start. But Luce himself never seems to have known quite what to make of Chambers, and Luce was far from eager to embrace Chambers after Chambers swept himself into the center of the maelstrom. Meanwhile Hiss, with his cool, civilized, aristocratic (except he wasn't, really) demeanor just couldn't be guilty - except, it turns out, seem even on the left (Jerome Frank is a remarkable example) felt uncomfortable with him from the start.

Tanenhaus' biography is a model of detached sympathy. He pretty clearly got himself inside Chambers' skin, but he leaves not the slightest doubt that Chambers was one extremely weird guy, not in any sense the man you would choose to stand as the defender of Western Civilization. Likewise he is at pains to show how Chambers, a conservative ideologue by any measure, remained his own conservative ideologue, never the catspaw of so many who were eager to use him (example: Chambers never had any truck with Joe McCarthy). That may offer a certain solace for all those of my generation who couldn't bear to believe that Hiss was guilty, but have to accept now that Chambers was probably right. My only regret is that this fine biography is out of stock: it's an important story and it would be a shame to see it fall into a crack.