BOOK REVIEW: Equally erring about Hiss

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By David Chambers

ALGER HISS AND THE BATTLE FOR HISTORY

By Susan Jacoby

Yale University Press, $24, 272 pages

Reviewed by David Chambers

Susan Jacoby is a gifted writer. She is deft and light. As a grandchild of Whittaker Chambers (who was another gifted writer, if rarely so light), I looked forward to "Alger Hiss and the Battle for History." How would she weigh in on the Hiss case?

Her latest book begins with a clever foil. She has her own mother ask of this book about the Hiss case, "Who cares about that anymore?" We should, Ms. Jacoby holds. People today need to avoid the "swift eclipses of historical memory" too common in American culture. They need to care about the Hiss case. Much of today's fissured politics formed back then.

Ms. Jacoby writes in a conversational, even chatty tone that makes reading this slim volume a pleasure. She probably had in mind a book along the lines of the late Richard Rorty's "Achieving Our Country" (1998). However, at critical moments, she appears not to have thought through or stuck to her mission. The results are disastrous.

The main goal Ms. Jacoby sets for herself is noble. "The contradictory historical scripts about the Hiss case reveal much more about conflicting visions of what America ought to be." These scripts are less about "what American communism actually was - or about who Alger Hiss was." However, she rambles rather than guides or glides readers through the six decades since the Hiss case.

The drama features the usual suspects: Mr. Chambers, Richard Nixon, conservatives as demons: Mr. Hiss, Franklin D. Roosevelt and liberals as angels. Ms. Jacoby makes little if any attempt to reconcile contradictions either she or her subjects raise. She quotes Mr. Hiss when he calls Mr. Chambers a "latter-day Jack London," but she herself can only call Mr. Chambers a liar and bumbling crackpot. Such smears come from the days of the case itself. Ms. Jacoby offers no insight into the case or its meaning.

She claims, "It is not my intention to re-examine or re-evaluate actual evidence in the Hiss case." Instead, her book serves to expose her own prejudices more than explain the relevance of the Hiss case to this generation. She does not recommend other works on the case. (Perhaps she did not read enough to make such recommendations?)