Researcher says Hiss did lie

By Max Lerner

Two men Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers who knew each other as friends and comrades in the New Deal '30s, whose espionage and perjury "case" exploded in the '40s and stayed in the headlines ever since. Two men locked in a lethal embrace, each seeing the other as satanic, each having to destroy the other in order to guard his place in history,

It became a Janus legend and a Janus mystery.

But now the mystery has been dissipated by Allen Weinstein's Himalayan research achievement "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case" (Knopf).

Thirty years after the case broke, a young historian who started by believing in Hiss, who fought the FBI to get masses of documents, who interviewed 80 people (including former Soviet spies) has been compelled to conclude that Chambers told the truth and Hiss perjured himself.

With the mystery gone, will the legend also go? It will be weakened but will linger. Both men, by the

events of their early lives and the climate of their time, were turned into single-purposed monoliths.

Chambers became a Soviet underground agent, then broke with the party and apparatus and turned into a fierce anti-Communist. Hiss moving high into the New Deal, joining a Communist cell, delivering secret documents to Chambers just as fiercely guarded his image as a bright, respectable "progressive," a pillar of the liberal establishment.

Hiss couldn't admit in the 1940s that he had lied, without bringing down this whole house of trust. Nor can he admit it now, even with the facts riveted down by devastating documentation. Too many years have passed, too many people have hardened their positions, too many images would shiver into fragments.

As one of the Chambers-Hiss generation I had to choose between them.

Whose story was truthful, whose contrived about Hiss' rent-free apartment which he gave to Chambers, about the Ford "thrown in,' about the rug given by the spymasters to their spy, about the "pumpkin papers," about who typed the secret State Department cables on Hiss' Woodstock typewriter and how?

At first, like many others, I was inclined to side with Hiss, especially given the climate within which Richard Nixon and his subcommittee had acted...

But his first trial made me waver. As I sat through his disastrous second trial, with the ghastly blunder of his attorneys in basing their defense on the testimony of two psychiatrists that Chambers was a psychopath, I was unsurprised by the jury's "guilty" verdict.

When Chambers published his autobiography, "Witness," I was almost ready to believe he told the truth.

After Hiss jail term I rode on the train with him from Baltimore to New York and told him he had to write a parallel memoir to that of Chambers and recount his whole life. Instead he wrote a book which was a rehashed legal brief..

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Of the two it was Chambers who prevailed in the trial, yet his life remained full of despair. He had given the FBI a self-lacerating ac count of his homosexual adventures. He was tortured by a sense of his inability to awaken the world to the realities of communism, and died convinced that the West would fall,

Hiss lost his case, but he took the prison experience in stride, kept the allegiance of his son and the belief of his supporters, and still exude confidence, still seeks to use Nixon's fall at Watergate as further proof of the conspiracy against him a' effort that Weinstein effectively. debunks.

The new proof will not shake the.. already convinced. But it will sway the marginal and the moderates, and create a climate in which we may at last free ourselves from the inci bus, of the legend of Hiss as victim and Chambers as fiend.

TRA

Lerner is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.