To the Editor:

It is typical of Sam Tanenhaus’s carelessness with facts that he begins his recital of the Hiss case [“Hiss: Guilty as Charged,” April] by misidentifying Alger Hiss as a former Assistant Secretary of State. Hiss was never that, although he did work in the office of Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Sayre. Mr. Tanenhaus continues with over a dozen more serious mistakes, even managing to cram three errors into the one misstatement that Hiss “abandoned the pretense that he had not known his accuser.” What Hiss had actually said, carefully and accurately, was that he had

never heard of Whittaker Chambers. . . . The name means absolutely nothing to me. . . . I would not want to take an oath that I have never seen that man. I would like to see him and then I think I would be better able to tell whether I had ever seen him.

No pretense; nothing to abandon; and even Chambers testified that Hiss had not known him under the name Whittaker Chambers but only under a pseudonym.

Mr. Tanenhaus is meretricious in rehashing the story that Noel Field named Alger Hiss as a fellow spy to Hungarian secret police during Field’s “rehabilitation” 40 years ago. Field, who had had contacts with the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and with European Communists, was held incommunicado for five-and-a-half years (1949-54) and tortured and interrogated by the Hungarian secret police. After his release, he wrote to Hiss that not the least part of the tragedy that had befallen him was that his imprisonment had prevented him “from nailing this outrageous lie” of false testimony by a perjured witness in Hiss’s second trial [Hede Massing, testifying that she and Hiss had competed to recruit Field as a Soviet agent]:

My definite and absolute personal knowledge of the complete untruth of this particular bit of evidence is the clearest proof to me—aside from my experience of your personality and outlook—of the falsehood of the rest of the “evidence” on which you were convicted.

Mr. Tanenhaus leads the reader to believe that the Hungarian interrogation dossier is a sensational new find, but then he tells us the documents are not scheduled for publication. Can that be because they were already misrepresented fifteen years ago by Allen Weinstein in Perjury? Weinstein’s source, Karel Kaplan, repudiated Weinstein’s misrepresentation. Mr. Tanenhaus proclaims that “selected documents . . . seal the case against Alger Hiss.” Likewise did the prosecutor, 44 years ago, announce that the second jury’s verdict against Hiss “permanently sealed the issues that were created by this case.”

On issues where the documents have been published, Mr. Tanenhaus is demonstrably in error. For openers, he misrepresents the follow-up comments by General Dmitri A. Volkogonov, chairman of the Russian Federation’s parliamentary commission on Soviet intelligence archives, concerning Volkogonov’s October 1992 report that he and the Foreign Intelligence Service had “analyzed a huge amount of documents and determined as a result that Alger Hiss . . . was never a spy for the Soviet Union.” Volkogonov later said that he was taken aback by the commotion his report caused, and he repeated his caution that there can be no guarantee that some files were not destroyed and said that there may be files in archives not yet examined. These comments were neither “sheepish” nor “retracting” (Mr. Tanenhaus’s words), nor did they include his wishful invention that Volkogonov “admitted” he had seen only a “few documents” or that his efforts “consisted mainly of discussions with KGB employees.” In reality, according to the New York Times reporter who interviewed him, Volkogonov was “elaborating” on his initial report but “made no retractions.” Moreover, in another interview following up on his initial report, Volkogonov said that he knew from numerous documents he had seen on many spies that, “Positively, if he [Hiss] was a spy, then I believe positively I would have found a reflection in various files.”

Your readers may be interested to learn that not only General Volkogonov but also archive officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Security, the Central Party and Comintern archives, and the Committee on Archive Matters to the Government of the Russian Federation have written since September 1992 that they found no documents incriminating Hiss.

Mr. Tanenhaus’s style of argumentation is puzzling. Sample: “As for Hiss’s link with the Communist party, followers of national politics knew of his inclusion in a circle of young officials of the Roosevelt administration who drew fire for subverting the policies of the New Deal.” Mr. Tanenhaus does not say which “policies,” or how “subverting” them related to the Communist party. Perhaps he employs the word “subverting” to suggest “subversion,” as in the popular cold-war phrase “Communist subversion.”

In his next sentence, Mr. Tanenhaus asserts—erroneously—that “Hiss nearly lost his job because of a legal opinion he had written” at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Mr. Tanenhaus says nothing about the nature of the legal opinion or its relevance to the Communist party. He may have had in mind a much-publicized political flap in 1935 involving a legal opinion—written not by Hiss but by David Krieger, revised by Telford Taylor, and approved by Hiss—interpreting a cotton-crop contract to protect sharecroppers. The interpretation displeased cotton growers whose political clout resulted in a shake-up of the AAA, although not at the expense of Hiss, Taylor, or Krieger.

Mr. Tanenhaus then purveys a falsehood by omission: he writes that Hiss’s AAA colleague Lee Pressman, whom Chambers had named as a member of the same Communist party group with Hiss in 1934-35, “eventually admitted he was a Communist.” What Mr. Tanenhaus omits, however, is the important part of Pressman’s testimony: that while he, Pressman, was a member of the group, Hiss was not.

A final sample of Mr. Tanenhaus’s argumentation: “Hiss’s dogged avowal of innocence carefully followed the line of defense prescribed by the Communist party [that] ‘persons detected in espionage [must] deny everything.’”

Mr. Tanenhaus might well have derived that anti-syllogism from Representative Karl Mundt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), who told Hiss in 1948:

This committee never had any illusions that we would be able to prove definitely whether or not you are a Communist because, in dealing with people charged with being Communists, over a period of years we have found that those who are guilty refused to admit it and dodged the question, or deliberately lied.

A complete list of Mr. Tanenhaus’s errors, omissions, and distortions would be as long as his article itself. It is not worth the effort.

John Lowenthal
New York City

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To the Editor:

Sam Tanenhaus’s article is a textbook example of disinformation, a compendium of distortion, error, and downright falsehood. First off, much of his argument relies on material beyond documentation or verification: unpublished and unsourced material from Soviet, Russian, and Hungarian archives, as well as archives belonging to Allen Weinstein (the latter being explicitly withheld from public inspection despite repeated promises over the years that they would be deposited at the Truman Library).

Then there is the matter of Mr. Tanenhaus’s claimed ability to read Whittaker Chambers’s mind. . . . He speculates as to the reasons Chambers testified falsely under oath and mentions two instances of Chambers’s falsehoods; but more than 60 other examples are omitted from his account.

Another problem is that of strategic vagueness. By referring interchangeably to positions taken by Alger Hiss, by his “defense,” his “partisans,” his “surrogates,” “defenders,” “champions,” and “supporters,” Mr. Tanenhaus obscures his meaning and is thereby enabled to play fast and loose with the facts as he totally neglects the legal evidence adduced in the Hiss case.

I have tallied 68 lies, distortions, and falsifications in Mr. Tanenhaus’s article. I obviously cannot hope to be granted space, in a letter to the editor, to list them all. However, these examples will, I trust, demonstrate how thoroughly unreliable is Mr. Tanenhaus’s reporting:

• Mr. Tanenhaus claims that “several acquaintances of Chambers” knew that the documents he said he had hidden in a dumbwaiter shaft for ten years were what he said they were and not, as “Hiss’s defenders maintain,” fakes manufactured as part of a frame-up. Nathan Levine—the only acquaintance mentioned—“knew of the documents long before he [Chambers] produced them in 1948.” But it is a matter of record that Levine testified—before HUAC in December 1948 and at both Hiss trials as a witness for the prosecution—that he never knew what was inside an envelope he said he received from Chambers in 1938, either when he received it, during the decade he said it was in his possession, or when Chambers retrieved it in 1948.
• Hiss’s testimony before HUAC, according to Mr. Tanenhaus, was “ingeniously constructed” with respect to his identifying Chambers as someone he had once known as “George Crosley.” But omitted from Mr. Tanenhaus’s account is Chambers’s admission, under cross-examination at Hiss’s trial(s), that “George Crosley” was a name he used in the mid-1930’s and that Hiss well “may have” known him under that name. Another significant omission in this regard—in the context of Mr. Tanenhaus’s insinuation that Hiss had played fast and loose with the truth—is Chambers’s denial, in his testimony before HUAC in August 1948, when the issue of the name “George Crosley” was central to the Hiss-Chambers controversy, that he had ever used this name.
• In an effort at disproving Hiss’s testimony that he had never known “George Crosley” to be a Communist, Mr. Tanenhaus cites Josephine Herbst (without source reference) as an acquaintance of Chambers who “knew this essential fact about him”; and as a woman “whose husband John Herrmann reportedly was present on the occasion when Chambers and Hiss first met.” John Herrmann, then divorced and living in Mexico, in 1949 and again in 1953 told the FBI that he had never met Alger Hiss—and in none of Chambers’s testimony or statements to the authorities did he ever say that Herrmann was present when he first met Hiss.
• I exchanged letters with Josephine Herbst shortly before she died in January 1969. She wrote that she met Chambers two or three times in the summer of 1934 and that she “never inquired who he really was. . . . I had the impression that he was, or might be, at least European, perhaps Austrian. . . . It was a curious time and in this country one did not make inquiries.” About Chambers, on November 6, 1968, Miss Herbst wrote me: “I did not know anything about him”; and, “Neither my husband nor Chambers ever disclosed to me the nature of their connection.” These letters are on deposit at the University of Michigan, along with my other papers on the Hiss case, and Mr. Tanenhaus has told me and others that he has made copies of them.
• In the summer of 1948, in his testimony before HUAC and, again, at Hiss’s trial(s), Whittaker Chambers testified that Alger Hiss was his “closest friend in the Communist party.” Mr. Tanenhaus echoes Chambers’s testimony in reporting that Hiss “was nothing less than Chambers’s best friend in thirteen years as a Communist.” But Chambers’s testimony (and Mr. Tanenhaus’s repeating it as a fact) is put in serious question by documents released in 1976 under the Freedom of Information Act, indicating that such a claim was one of the scores of Chambers’s perjuries. On March 18, 1946—in a statement withheld from Hiss at trial—Chambers told the FBI that he had “absolutely no information” that Alger Hiss was a member of the Communist party.

If COMMENTARY would be willing to grant me space, I should be very pleased to provide your readers with an additional 63 examples of Mr. Tanenhaus’s grab-bag of trickery, the sort of falsification, error, and misrepresentation that enables him to contend that it is Alger Hiss’s supporters who are “forever incapable of owning up to the truth”

William A. Reuben
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . I have practiced trial law for over 55 years and was fully aware of the Hiss case from its inception. From the very outset I believed there was reasonable doubt of Hiss’s guilt because of the character of the renegade Communists who were witnesses against him. But then, after a thorough investigation of everything written on the subject, pro and con, I came to the firm conclusion that Hiss was innocent beyond any doubt.

Mr. Tanenhaus enshrines the testimony of all those Communists of the 30’s and 40’s who became heroes to HUAC by providing whatever statements were required to gain some modicum of respectability. HUAC itself was not worthy of belief and, of course, to the everlasting shame of the country, the case enhanced the career of the villain Richard Nixon who disgraced the office of the presidency.

I find it revealing that Mr. Tanenhaus leaves out of his COMMENTARY article a statement he made in an article he wrote last January in the Wall Street Journal. In that earlier article he stated that “. . . Mr. Hiss repeatedly beseeched General Volkogonov to rummage through Soviet Intelligence archives in order to establish that Mr. Hiss had not committed espionage.” As a trial lawyer, it has been my experience that only an innocent person would persist in such a request. Evidently, Mr. Tanenhaus realized that it was his personal bias that was revealed by this statement, so he omitted it in the COMMENTARY article. . . .

Wilbur Duberstein
San Ramon, California

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To the Editor:

Sam Tanenhaus’s article presents a strong case that Alger Hiss was indeed a Communist spy, but I remain unconvinced, even though Mr. Tanenhaus’s explanations of why people continue to believe in Hiss’s innocence do not apply to me. I have been a conservative Republican for the past twenty years; I believe that lots of Communist spies did infiltrate the U.S. government; and I am neutral about McCarthyism. I do not claim to be an expert on this case, but I have read a few things on the subject and feel open-minded about it. Let me present my thinking so you can better understand why so many people do remain unconvinced. . . .

• Aside from the case itself, Hiss achieved much more credibility during his lifetime than Whittaker Chambers did. He earned a superb personal and professional reputation, and many people who knew him well defended him strongly to the end. By contrast, Chambers was a Communist spy who led a life of deceit. . . .
• I do not believe that yarn about Chambers hiding the film in a pumpkin patch. I suspect he planted the evidence. . . . There were five rolls of film, and three were withheld from examination by the defense and the jury, supposedly for super-secret “national-security” reasons. Not until two decades later was it revealed that one of these three rolls was completely blank, and the other two contained instructions on how to use fire extinguishers, life rafts, and chest parachutes. How do conservatives justify the withholding of this evidence for so long? . . .
• The person who organized the case against Hiss was Congressman Richard Nixon, a known fabricator of evidence. Under his direction, Howard Hunt falsified State Department cables to implicate President John F. Kennedy falsely in the assassination of Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. . . .
• There are a few former Communist spies scattered around the world who allege that Hiss was also a spy. They have an axe to grind; maybe they are telling the truth, and maybe not. As I understand this part of the evidence, Allen Weinstein interviewed these witnesses for his book, Perjury, but has refused for many years to let anyone else listen to the tapes. Under such circumstances, I consider these allegations to be merely a curiosity. Just as there were indeed Communist spies in the U.S. government, so have there also been fabricators. . . .

Mike Sylwester
Fredericksburg, Virginia

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To the Editor:

. . . Sam Tanenhaus deals with the crucial issue of the timing of Whittaker Chambers’s defection from Communism in rather disingenuous fashion. He notes that “On many different occasions Chambers said he had broken [with the Communist party] in late 1937.” In fact, from September 1939 . . . until August 1948, Chambers gave only that date, repeating it six times to the FBI on March 26, 1946 and, under oath, to HUAC before changing it to April 15, 1938 to cover himself when government records and other items he alleged he had obtained from Alger Hiss (the so-called Pumpkin Papers and Baltimore Documents) proved unexpectedly to be dated as late as April 1 of that year.

Mr. Tanenhaus claims that Chambers’s memory was “sound,” except that “he had a terrible head for numbers. Dates, in particular, gave him trouble.” Persons with sound memories do not have the problem of recall for critical moments of their lives that Chambers demonstrated over and over again. Such an argument fails to consider seriously the possibility that Chambers was a consummate liar in this instance as well as in many other important aspects of his life. . . .

Mr. Tanenhaus then goes on to suggest that Chambers confused the times of his break because “his defection happened gradually and was preceded by an escalation of disenchantment from which it was impossible to isolate a single, decisive incident.” . . . Chambers said that when he made his final break he was living in a house near Pikesville, Maryland, to which he had moved from an apartment on Mount Royal Terrace in Baltimore. If Chambers had wanted to pin down the exact time of his break, he could have done so without too much difficulty using the ad he placed to sublet his apartment. He could also have checked his correspondence with Oxford University Press about some translation work, which he insisted took place after the break. However, the problem with that approach is that the ad in the Baltimore Sun ran on February 27, 1938 and the apartment was rented by mid-March, while his negotiations with Oxford were settled by March 1, 1938. In a letter of May 3, 1938 to his editor at Oxford, Chambers wrote that he had not been living at Mount Royal Terrace “for more than a month.”

Furthermore, Chambers acknowledged that after his defection he was absolutely terrified of reprisals from the Russians and thus made several changes of residence, fleeing to Florida at one point, keeping a gun with him constantly, and often sitting up all night on guard no matter where he was staying. Given such overwhelming concerns for his own welfare and that of his family, one would think he would remember precisely when this highly stressful period began.

James W. Hamilton
Albuquerque, New Mexico

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To the Editor:

Congratulations are in order for Sam Tanenhaus’s “Hiss: Guilty as Charged.” I would like to add two points.

Mr. Tanenhaus quotes from the testimony of Whittaker Chambers before HUAC. He correctly describes the testimony as ambiguous on the subject of espionage—perhaps also a veiled warning to Alger Hiss. However, when Whittaker Chambers testified before the grand jury for the Southern District of New York (1948), there was no ambiguity. He was asked whether espionage had been committed, and he denied it—a clear case of perjury. Chambers had not been in contact with Hiss for ten years. He liked and admired Hiss and hoped that during this decade Hiss had at least begun to question his allegiance to the Communist party. The Truman administration moved to indict Chambers for perjury. President Harry S. Truman did not doubt Hiss’s guilt nor did he believe that Chambers’s one act of perjury, however motivated, was worse than the continuing treason of Alger Hiss. His decision was purely pragmatic. Any revelations of Communist activity in government would reflect poorly on the Democratic party. With Chambers an indicted (perhaps convicted) perjurer, the main witness against Hiss would be neutralized. Then Congressman Richard M. Nixon became the prime mover in saving Chambers from an indictment.

Second, it should come as no surprise if a detailed search of KGB files turns up nothing more than a record of Chambers’s membership in the American Communist party. When Chambers went into the Communist underground he never worked for the KGB (or, more accurately, its predecessor, the NKVD). He worked for military intelligence (now GRU) and for the Communist International. The latter was allegedly dissolved in 1943 as a gesture of wartime solidarity by Joseph Stalin. In reality its functions were transferred to the international department of the Communist party.

Gloria M. Stewart
Thousand Oaks, California

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Sam Tanenhaus writes:

First, a word about the new sources introduced in my article. The KGB file on the Robinson-Reubens case has been authenticated by Robert Conquest and now reposes at the Hoover Institution where it is available for inspection. The Hungarian documents examined by Maria Schmidt are being vetted for release by officials in Budapest. Mrs. Schmidt’s article is in the hands of government censors, who must clear it before it can be published.

Now, the letters. John Lowenthal deems it “not worth the effort” to review all my errors. Alas, he could not even muster the energy to argue plausibly the points he did raise.

To say Hiss made no pretense of not knowing Whittaker Chambers is simply wrong. In his opening statement, Hiss declared, “I have never laid eyes on him” and then repeated, “I have never seen him.” He was careful to preface both denials with a hedge—“so far as I know,” in the first instance; “as far as I know,” in the second. This was a protection against a future charge of perjury in the event HUAC should uncover the truth, as of course it did. Robert Stripling, HUAC’s chief investigator, caught on to Hiss’s tactics and so asked him point-blank if he had ever seen Chambers. Hiss replied with the remark quoted by Mr. Lowenthal: “The name means nothing to me.” This evasion contradicted Hiss’s previous admission that the name Chambers did mean something to him, for (said Hiss) Chambers’s name had come up in 1947 when Hiss was interviewed by the FBI about his Communist ties.

On the AAA, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal: the “opinion [was] written by Alger Hiss and approved by [Jerome] Frank.” Frank, who later declined to act as a character witness for Hiss, consistently identified him as the author of the opinion. Historians are at a loss to explain why Hiss was not fired when others at AAA were let go. Schlesinger: “Alger Hiss was oddly not on [Chester] Davis’s purge list, though Davis had complained particularly of him to [Henry A.] Wallace.” According to a memo prepared by an AAA staffer, “Alger Hiss was not asked for his resignation because he was the cleverest of the aides to Mr. Frank and did not work in the ‘open.’ ” Which leads to the question of subversion. Mr. Lowenthal should consult the letters exchanged in 1948 by Hiss and Robert Cruise McManus, who had been at AAA with Hiss and later confronted him with his belief that Hiss had been a Communist. (Here I should amend a point made in my article: I said that John Abt, Hiss’s colleague in the AAA and the Ware group, had “deep associations with the [Communist] party.” In fact, not long before his death in 1991, Abt publicly acknowledged his longstanding party membership. See the New York Times obituary. In addition, Harvey Klehr has called my attention to the obituary of Abt published in the People’s Weekly World, the organ of the Communist party, which includes a tribute by Gus Hall, the party’s national chairman, to Abt, a “60-year member of the Communist party.”)

As for Lee Pressman, in 1948 he dismissed Chambers’s charges as “the stale and lurid mouthings of a Republican exhibitionist,” but when summoned by HUAC, Pressman hid behind the Fifth Amendment. In August 1950, after Hiss’s conviction for perjury, Pressman made a return appearance and recanted his earlier denials. He now admitted his own membership in the Ware group, along with that of three others named by Chambers. Pressman also said, “I can state as a matter of knowledge, that for the period of my participation in that group, which is the only basis on which I can say I have knowledge, Alger Hiss was not a member of the group.” This is the “important” testimony Mr. Lowenthal has in mind. But when questioned two days later by the FBI, Pressman allowed “it was quite possible that Alger Hiss might have been a member of this group.” In sum, Pressman confirmed Chambers’s allegation on every crucial point save one, Hiss’s membership in the secret unit. But Nathaniel Weyl remembered seeing Hiss and Pressman together at cell meetings. There is another point. Those Pressman named in 1950 were, like himself, well-known Communists. Identifying them as such harmed them little even as it enabled Pressman to establish himself as a useful ally in Hiss’s subsequent legal efforts. Pressman had already come to Hiss’s aid during the perjury trials: Hiss’s defense files record Pressman’s efforts to obtain damaging information on Chambers and Hede Massing—information that came directly from the Communist party.

The Hungarian documents: Mr. Lowenthal scorns them. His colleague Victor Navasky, editor of the Nation, knows better. In fact, after my article appeared, Navasky directed a researcher in Budapest to look for the Noel Field file, presumably in the hope of discrediting it. Mr. Lowenthal contends Field’s remarks were made under extreme duress. Once more he is confused. True, Field was brutalized by Hungarian secret police upon his arrest in 1949. However, the confessions forced out of him at that time had nothing to do with Alger Hiss. They had instead to do with allegations of an entirely different (and opposed) character—cooked-up charges that Field had betrayed his Soviet bosses by working secretly as an agent of the United States. The statements about Hiss came in 1954, when Field was released from prison. There is no reason to believe he was tortured at that time, only that he was interrogated about his personal history.

I can assure Mr. Lowenthal that there is no danger of my having “misrepresented” the papers Maria Schmidt saw: I faxed her a copy of my article before it was published and she confirmed the accuracy of what I wrote.

Mr. Lowenthal’s remarks on Field himself betray a disquieting ignorance. He grudgingly concedes Field “had contacts . . . even with European Communists.” This is a curious way to describe a man who boasted of having helped Stalin’s assassins murder the Soviet defector Ignatz Reiss. No wonder Hiss made no use of the letter quoted by Mr. Lowenthal. Four years after writing to Hiss, Field publicly declared himself an unrepentant Communist. (See Flora Lewis, Red Pawn.)

I have saved for last General Volkogonov and his spurious vindication of Alger Hiss. Mr. Lowenthal is much concerned about that sorry affair since it was he who stage-managed it. Here he deserves credit. Little as he knows about the Hiss case, Mr. Lowenthal knows everything about public relations, as a recent issue of the Nation Associate makes clear. This newsletter explains—extols, rather—the process by which Mr. Lowenthal and his colleagues at the Nation contrived to elevate the general’s sentimental letter to Hiss into an event of historic magnitude, a campaign premeditated even down to the manufacture of “some interesting soundbites for television.” Here is the real John Lowenthal—not a scholar, not a historian, but an impresario. And he is still at it, passing off the letter from Volkogonov as a published document.

It was Volkogonov himself who owned up to the true character of his “research.” He did so first in the Russian publication cited in my article. Mr. Lowenthal evidently has not read it. He relies solely on the article published in the New York Times—and gets it wrong. He says the report does not represent Volkogonov’s follow-up remarks as a retraction. In fact, the article was headlined “Russian General Retreats on Hiss.”

There appeared below that article a second in which we were told Mr. Lowenthal “indicated surprise at the general’s remarks.” As well he should have, since the remarks thoroughly undermined Volkogonov’s initial statement. We now know, from Volkogonov’s own mouth, that he spent only two days looking in the archives; that the documents he reviewed came only from the KGB—Chambers and Hiss worked for the GRU (department of military intelligence); and that he set out to determine only whether Hiss had been a “paid, contracted spy”—Chambers specifically said Hiss had volunteered his services. And we know it was Mr. Lowenthal himself, with his reckless disregard for the methods of historical inquiry, who “pushed” Volkogonov “hard to say things of which I was not fully convinced.”

Now that Volkogonov’s vindication has been exposed, Mr. Lowenthal seeks to bedazzle readers with other letters from various “archive officials.” These too are worthless. If letters alone sufficed, there would not be today a small army of scholars working to secure the release of documents still tightly guarded in Moscow.

Mr. Lowenthal is correct on one point. Alger Hiss was never Assistant Secretary of State. The highest position he achieved was that of director of Special Political Affairs. We should all be grateful he rose no further.

I come now to William A. Reuben, author of The Dream of Whittaker Chambers. That manuscript is as yet unpublished, so his letter must serve as an introduction to his own peculiar dream world. Mr. Reuben makes much of the “legal evidence adduced in the Hiss case.” Has he forgotten it was that evidence which sent Hiss to prison?

On the question of Chambers’s withholding of information on espionage, I claimed no “ability to read” Chambers’s mind. But I have read the HUAC transcript. I suggest Mr. Reuben do the same. He will find that in December 1948, after he had produced the documents incriminating Hiss, Chambers was asked why he had previously withheld them. He replied that his intent had been “to do no more injury than necessary to the human elements involved . . . to give [Hiss and the others] an opportunity to make their own break, damaged as little as possible by me.” This confirms Herbert Solow’s memorandum of 1938 quoted in my article.

Nor can there be any question of mind-reading in my discussion of Chambers’s break with the Communist party and the date when it occurred. My article explicitly cites the sources I used.

Mr. Reuben says he has “tallied 68 lies, distortions, and falsifications” in my article. If the five examples he elaborates are representative of the remaining 63, he would be well advised to keep those others to himself.

• In his appearance before HUAC (December 10, 1948), Nathan Levine recounted the part he played in concealing the envelope in 1938 and retrieving it ten years later. Once the package was recovered, said Levine, he briefly left Chambers alone with it. But on “one occasion I came into the kitchen and he [Chambers] was standing . . . with some papers in his hands, and he uttered . . . ‘holy cow’ or some exclamation, ‘I didn’t think that this still existed,’ or ‘was still in existence.’ ”

Only someone with Mr. Reuben’s powers of self-deception can fail to grasp why Chambers was excited: he had discovered documents he knew would incriminate Hiss and discredit the charges of slander. Others who knew of the papers were the journalist Isaac Don Levine, who testified about them to HUAC on December 8, 1948, and Ludwig Lore, an ex-Communist who in 1941 alerted the FBI to Chambers and his great knowledge of the Communist underground.

• What Chambers actually said was that in his years in the underground he had used so many aliases that he could not rule out the possibility that George Crosley was one of them. But he was fairly certain Hiss had known him as “Carl,” as had others in Washington. Julian Wadleigh and Josephine Herbst both identified him by that name. Hiss, for his part, failed to produce anyone who knew Chambers as Crosley, save one witness so unreliable that Hiss dared not let him testify, so doubtful was his credibility. In any case, the name Crosley was not at all “central to the . . . controversy” once Hiss admitted having known Chambers.
• I have indeed examined copies of Mr. Reuben’s letters from Josephine Herbst. But he evidently has not seen documents of much greater significance: the correspondence between Herbst and her former husband John Herrmann (at Yale); and Herbst’s interviews with Hiss’s attorneys (at Harvard). Herbst sympathized with Hiss, and in January 1949 met with his lawyers. They were dismayed when she gave an account of the Ware group identical to Chambers’s own. She identified John Herrmann as an operative in the group and identified Chambers as Carl, an agent with important contacts both in the U.S. government and in the Soviet-controlled underground. When FBI interviewers called on Herbst in 1950, she admitted knowing Carl in 1934 as a Communist who was gathering materials for the New York office, but she covered up Herrmann’s role as best she could. She immediately contacted Herrmann in Mexico and gave him “all the information he needed to make their stories coincide.” So reports Herbst’s biographer, Elinor Langer. Herbst’s letter of warning to Herrmann is at Yale. Langer also reports Herrmann’s presence at the lunch where Chambers and Hiss first met. Chambers himself was not quite sure who attended the lunch.
• The file Mr. Reuben cites has no bearing on my remark about the relationship of Chambers and Hiss. That issue boiled down to two questions: (1) were Hiss and Chambers close friends; (2) were they Communists? The answer to the first is beyond dispute. Hiss himself said he had invited Chambers to stay in his home and had given Chambers his car. Did the two men know each other as Communists? Chambers’s role in the party is well-documented. That leaves Hiss: was he a Communist? Among those who have studied the evidence, only a handful think he was not, and their reasoning is typified by the deluded formulations of Messrs. Lowenthal and Reuben.

Wilbur Duberstein is right to say there were ex-Communists who made reckless and self-serving charges. But Chambers was not one of them. He testifed with reluctance and at great personal cost. (See my article, “Witness for the Truth,” National Review, February 15, 1993.) Why, asks Mr. Duberstein, would a guilty Hiss have requested a search of Soviet intelligence archives? For the simple reason that he had nothing to lose. As I said in my article, had officials found incriminating material on Hiss, they would not have publicized it. And if we may believe Volkogonov, the search he authorized was guaranteed to turn up nothing.

Regarding the several points raised by Mike Sylwester:

• Alger Hiss’s reputation was not spotless. As early as 1940, French intelligence sources had doubts about Hiss’s loyalty, and in 1945 the Russian defector Igor Gouzenko made charges about leaks that pointed to Hiss. Chambers, for his part, came before HUAC not only as a self-confessed ex-Communist but also as a distinguished journalist, a senior editor of Time magazine.
• The microfilm also included technical information of no small interest to the Soviet Union. The other rolls contained classified State Department documents.
• Richard Nixon has uttered more than one mystifying remark about the Hiss case. But no existing evidence points to a fake typewriter or forged documents.
• I am not aware of any witnesses interviewed by Allen Weinstein who fall into the category described by Mr. Sylwester.

James A. Hamilton rehashes evidence adduced by the Hiss defense in 1952 in its attempt to secure a new trial. But other facts uncovered at the same time established that the key incident in Chambers’s break with the Communist underground—his escape by car from Baltimore to Daytona Beach, Florida—occurred at the end of April 1938, well after the dates recorded on the final batch of documents Chambers received from Hiss.

There is much in my article not remarked on in these letters: the memos and statements by Herbert Solow; the testimony of Nathaniel Weyl, Felix Inslerman, William Edward Crane, and Julian Wadleigh; the Fifth Amentment pleas entered by Hiss’s friends and colleagues; the memoir by Nadezhda Ulanovskaya—all of it supportive of Chambers’s testimony. Readers can judge for themselves what the collective silence on these points of evidence implies about the innocence or guilt of Alger Hiss.

Finally, my thanks to Gloria M. Stewart. Both her points are correct. On the first: I emphasized the HUAC testimony because it was the first public testimony Chambers gave. On the second: see my article, “Still Guilty After All These Years,” Wall Street Journal (January 8, 1993).