After 40 years, Alger Hiss is still hard at it. Recollections of a Life, his second book, combines a pale, noncommittal account of Hiss’s pre-1948 career as itinerant paperpusher (Justice Holmes, the New Deal, Yalta, the Carnegie Endowment) with yet another rehashing of the old, old story. Whittaker Chambers was crazy. I’m an honest man. I will be vindicated. The touchy spots are evasively skirted, the familiar refrains resung. Who cares? The friends of Alger Hiss will buy it out of yawning habit. Others will stay far away.

The main difference between the reception of Recollections of a Life and In the Court of Public Opinion, Hiss’s previous book, is that the climate of opinion regarding the Hiss-Chambers case has shifted profoundly in the ensuing years. In intellectually respectable circles it used to be easy enough to avow a belief in Hiss’s innocence without being hooted out of the room. The publication of Allen Weinstein’s Perjury changed all that. Perjury was an extraordinarily detailed factual examination of the Hiss-Chambers case written by a liberal historian who started out believing that Alger Hiss was innocent and ended up convinced of his guilt. It knocked the stuffing out of Hiss, to say nothing of his dwindling band of Stalinoid loyalists. (The fact that in Recollections Hiss has next to nothing to say about Weinstein is more revealing than anything else about the book.)

The other thing that has changed, of course, is the reputation of Whittaker Chambers. Forty years ago, he was a morose, rumpled senior editor of Time, a magazine which could scarcely have been in worse odor among the respectable liberals of the day. Thirty years ago, he was a morose, rumpled senior editor of National Review, a magazine widely thought to be published by right-wing fanatics for right-wing fanatics. Eight years ago, the right-wing fanatics took over the White House and promptly became trendy. Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Medal of Freedom. Pipe Creek Farm, site of the sacred pumpkin patch, was declared a national landmark a few months ago. John Judis’s new biography of William F. Buckley Jr. makes a highly persuasive case for Chambers having exerted a moderating influence on Buckley and, by implication, the entire conservative movement. You can’t get much further in than that.

To be sure, the battle is not yet won. Concealed Enemies, the hideous PBS “docudrama” about the Hiss-Chambers case, confused a lot of ignorant television viewers a few years back. Even today. Recollections of a Life managed to snag a reputable publisher and rack up a few favorable reviews, one of them in The New York Times. But Alger Hiss is no longer stylish, and for that reason alone it is increasingly possible to be interested in Whittaker Chambers without being labeled a fanatic. Indeed, it is quite possible to be interested in Chambers without being particularly interested in the Hiss-Chambers case. The Pumpkin Papers Irregulars continue to meet every Halloween to hash over the succulent ins and outs of prothonotary warblers and Woodstock typewriters, but younger conservatives are more likely to think of Whittaker Chambers as a writer of considerable power and a key figure in the development of modern American conservatism, than as the ex-spy who nailed Alger Hiss.

By contrast, now that the court of public opinion has rendered its verdict on the Hiss-Chambers case and Alger Hiss has finally (finally!) run out his legal string. Hiss himself has become less and less intriguing, both as an abstract cause and as a flesh-and-blood person. As a result. Recollections of a Life, despite its egregiously offensive blasts at Whittaker Chambers’s sanity, comes across rather feebly. Though the old reflexes twitch a bit when Hiss coolly labels Chambers “a psychopath,” the impulse to reply quickly resolves itself in mild irritation. It is hard to get too terribly upset over a book filled with lies so few people believe any more. If Alger Hiss dies unhappy, that will surely be the reason why.

Teachout_Review

[Recollections of a Life, by Alger Hiss; New York: Henry Holt]