It's sort of cute to see the battered and ragged defenders of Alger Hiss contort themselves in unseemly ways to prove the Soviet spy was just a crusading New Dealer whose typewriter happened to produce State Department documents that wound up in a confessed Soviet spy's hollowed-out pumpkin. Ron Rosenbaum, an attentive student of cold war historiography and the Le Carresque intrigues of 50-year-old questions, has a must-read piece in Slate about the resurgence of the Innocent Hiss plaint, this time cobbled together in the American Scholar by the otherwise distinguished scholar Kai Bird and his Russian dragoman (Note: In Polish — czerwony — as it'd be Russified. Krasnyi is Russian for "red." Should have been clearer about this in my original post. Sorry for the confusion.)
There's a lot of arcane details to weed through, but this paragraph by Ron captures the heart of the matter:
In the end, they have the worst of both worlds. Without exonerating Hiss (since there's a great deal of evidence beyond the "Ales" identification against Hiss, more than "association"), they've raised the possibility that there were two spies rather than none. They've made Joe McCarthy look good, or anyway, better. Perhaps new evidence will finally turn up from Soviet archives to vindicate one side or another in this endless embittered battle. One can't rule out the possibility that Bird and Chervonnaya are right, but they haven't proven it here.
The second "spy" here is Wilder Foote, another progressive Truman administration official whom Bird and Chervonnaya have fingered as the notorious "Ales" in the VENONA decrypts, or F.B.I. documents captured from the Soviets decades ago, but only declassified and pored over by Iron Curtain peepers (like yours truly) since the Berlin Wall came a-tumbling down. (I sent Rosenbaum's piece to Ron Radosh, who knows more about this subject than any practicing journalist. The second Ron's write-up is available at TNR's academic blog Open University.)
What you need to know is this. The bien-pensant left has, in its agonizingly prolonged quest to show that the self-evident is merely a sham, now resorted to hauling in an unusual suspect into the Stalinist lineup, and it has done so in a manner that McCarthy himself might have envied. A real Marxist wouldn't fail to recognize this as the cunning of history — even if it comes at the expense of fellow travelers, or modern symps of them.
Actually, if we're to be historically precise, McCarthy had nothing at all to do with the Hiss-Chambers case, or, for that matter, with the HUAC investigations. The "H" stood for House after all, and McCarthy was a conspicuous senator (also a recipient of Commie aid in his first Wisconsin campaign), however much the bland eminence over the disastrous mini-epoch of Red baiting that did more damage to serious cold war concerns about Soviet infiltration of U.S. government than it ever did to martyred men and women of cinema. Or maybe not so martyred.
My buddy, comrade and all-around Jewcy baba Stephen Schwartz has a good anecdote about the lines of demarcation that were drawn in Hollywood over l'affaire Kazan. (Unlike most neocon intellectuals and erstwhile Red diaper babies, Stephen comes from the West Coast and grew up entrenched in the myth, lore and occasional reality of the On the Waterfront generation.) Apparently, it was the only the screenwriters who ever had beef with the filmmaker who named names, whereas the directors — and today we can enlist Scorsese and Coppola, for whom Stephen once worked, on Kazan's side — never condemned him. This was often because the ones credited with keeping their heads held high realized that that was about the most talented thing they could ever contrive to do.
I'll pay a shiny nickel to anyone who can name three of the Hollywood Ten without resorting to Wikipedia. Unlike Tailgunner Joe, you're on your honor.
P.S. Socialists and liberals who emerge the cleanest from the dearly departed century all suspected Hiss was guilty as sin: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Murray Kempton and I.F. Stone, whose own encounters with beetle-browed Tass correspondents are also the source of much revisionist agita. Sitting on my hard drive is an interview I hope to one day make use of, conducted with Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB agent who claims Stone was an "agent of influence" for Moscow Central. Stone's most recent biographer Myra MacPherson says the charge is bogus, or at the very most, misleading due to chronology. Yes, Stone appears as "Blin" (the Russian word for "pancake") in a few VENONA docs, but he was either approached and uncooperative, or mildly cooperative but only during the Russian-U.S. period of comity during and slightly after World War II, a time when more establishment journos like Walter Lippman were dishing good Beltway gossip to Stalinist goons, too. See Paul Berman's mash-up with Eric Alterman and MacPherson on this here, here, and here. Also Radosh's New Criterion review of All Governments Lie!: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone.
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