An Un-American Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers [Paperback]

If you've ever wondered why American 'liberals' nurture such a visceral hatred of Richard Nixon, this book will enlighten you. Growing up in a family where Eleanor Roosevelt was worshipped, I automatically assumed that Nixon was a vicious reactionary, little better than Joseph McCarthy. As for Whittaker Chambers--well, it was something of a shock to find out that he was a senior editor for Time when the Alger Hiss case broke. I had always assumed that he was a seedy conspirator, an American commie-turned-fascist.

Tanenhaus is a brilliant writer. He has no illusions about Nixon or Chambers; they are presented warts and all (and there are plenty--it's an amazingly lively book). He has even fewer illusions about Alger Hiss; by now his guilt is so well established that I was quite frankly amazed to find that Wikipedia still regards this as controversial. The arguments Wikipedia rehearses for Hiss's innocence are so comprehensively demolished by Tanenhaus that one can only wonder why this belief persists.

But as Tanenhaus argues, for many American liberals, it is essential to believe in the purity of the New Deal and the Virgin Eleanor. And of course, Eleanor did everything she could to protect Hiss and to demean Chambers. Certainly, my late (and sainted) mother had a blind spot. Her attitude was that even if Hiss did pass on a few secrets to the Russians, they were our allies. Of course, this is nonsense: Hiss was passing secrets to them before and after the Ribbentrop pact. The Russians were never our allies until they were forced into our arms by the Wehrmacht.

But back to Nixon--I admit that I revelled in his disgrace. Watergate, Waterloo. But later, as I became more interested in his presidency, I discovered that he was far from being a reactionary. He retained Patrick Moynihan, whose socially-liberal policies changed American forever. For all the leftist agitprop about Nixon's 'racist' Southern Strategy, it was he who desegregated America's schools, and expanded Johnson's embryonic welfare state. Previously, the only credible explanation I had read for Nixonophobia was that he was too 'common': but then so was Truman. This book demonstrates that Hiss almost certainly would have escaped justice but for Nixon's astuteness.

Another illusion that this book shattered was my impression that Hiss was a patrician. In fact, his social origins were no more distinguished than Chamber's or Nixon's. But his zealous pursuit of New Deal policies marked him as a coming man, and genuine patricians like Dean Acheson took to him like a long-lost son.

Altogether, a superb book. Not the least of its merits is that it reveals that Chambers had a brilliant, if somewhat wayward, intellect. It's worth reading for account of his tortuous spiritual road through life, which even included a long stint as a Quaker. Indeed, he's far more interesting than Hiss, who was as much a social climber as a commie.