HELLO, BABY . . . Scene: River Forest Library reading room, in dead of afternoon, soaking up silence in leather-covered easy chair, soon to doze off, reading about 8/25/48 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing. Reporters had copy boys at the ready, to rush out with scribbled takes (pages of copy), for calling into rewrite. This in the days of several afternoon editions of major dailies.
CATHOLIC CONNECTION . . . Fr. John Cronin of National Catholic Welfare Conference (later renamed U.S. Catholic Conference), the bishops' agency based in Washington, was in the middle of the Alger Hiss case, filling then-Congressman Nixon in on details. His contact at FBI called Nixon daily to tell what had turned up.
Nixon made several trips to Chambers's farm, became convinced WC was telling the truth, brought the NY Herald-Trib man out to visit WC. He too became convinced that WC had known Hiss and that Hiss was lying.
RUNNER'S FATHER . . . Calvin Fixx, WC's coworker and friend at Time, who stayed by him throughout the Hiss case and died of a heart attack in March, 1950, at 43, was the father of Jim Fixx, the runner and best-selling author of The Complete Book of Running, who also died of a heart attack (while running), at 52. Chambers sorely missed Calvin Fixx.
CLAY FEET . . . Book to check out is Raymond Sokolow's (Sokolov's?) Wayward Reporter (1980), a life of AJ Leibling, the New Yorker writer who wrote a regular column on "the wayward press," citing (conservative) bias and conflict of interest. In the 1980 book is an account of Leibling's work to help defend Hiss while covering the trial for the New Yorker.
So what? I.F. (St. Izzy) Stone was on the take from the Russkies, we read in the Venona cables.
POLITICALLY INCORRECT . . . Lionel Trilling's 1947 novel, The Middle of the Journey, has a character, Gifford Maxim, based on Whittaker Chambers, whom Trilling knew from Columbia U. Trilling thought Viking would re-issue it in 1948 and 1949, when the Hiss trial was very big news; but the Viking editor, Ben Huebsch, a Communist, held back, even though sales would have been brisk, Sam Tanenhaus reports in his excellent 1997 biography, Whittaker Chambers.
COWLEY NOT COOL . . . The eminent litterateur Malcolm Cowley took the stand for Hiss, said Chambers had called asst. Sec. of State Francis Sayre a Communist. But C. had told FBI, when asked if Sayre was a communist, "Quite the contrary." Cowley's testimony was "patently absurd," Chambers told reporters. Chambers had trashed Cowley's work in a Time article.
CERF COOL . . . Second trial over, Hiss convicted, Chambers needed work. His old boss would have rehired him at Time, but the troops resisted, and publisher Henry Luce backed off. Chambers started a book, got an agent, was invited by Random House editor David McDowell to the office. Bennett Cerf, R. House head man and pro-Hiss, said, "Get him out of here." To which McDowell: What kind of liberal are you? You won't consider a guy because you don't like him? Cerf, shamed, said send him in. Then Chambers and Cerf, Columbia alums, chatted each other up, finding many mutual friends.
QUAKERS NOT COOL . . . Cerf stayed close to Chambers, visited him in his illness in 1952. With his wife Phyllis he attended Chambers's daughter's wedding, the two Cerfs staying over at the Chambers farm. The wedding was at the local (Westminster, Maryland) Episcopal Church, partly because Chambers, a devout Quaker, had become alienated from the Quakers, who had sided with Hiss and it seemed, had blackballed his daughter at Swarthmore College, the Quaker Harvard. The daughter went instead to Smith.
SECULAR LIBERALS . . . You had to be a theist to fight Communism according to Chambers in his memoirs, Witness, said anti-Communist philosopher Sidney Hook, who wasn't one. Chambers's blaming the Renaissance and Enlightenment for man's making himself the new master of universe replacing God, and thus logically devising Communism, is a rightist view of intellectual life comparable to Solzhenitsyn (years later "eerily" echoing Chambers) and yet later, Vaclav Havel, of Czech "velvet revolution" fame.
Havel in 1992 in NY Times called Communism the last gasp of the "modern age" and the belief that the world is "wholly knowable" and governed by a certain number of laws fully graspable and usable toward man's benefit.
That's as good a statement of liberalism as I have found. It's liberal optimism, proven finally by Communism, in which it reached its apogee, to be an illusion. So a college teacher can be unembarrassed to announce in conversation that he wishes he had absolute power, or at least enough to remake things as he saw fit, so as to right wrongs as he saw them afflicting mankind. This is secular messianism, slipping soundlessly into quixotism with strong elements of nowhere-ism, commonly known as utopianism. It's blasphemy in Chambers's view, and I agree.
COOL BOOK . . . See Koestler novel, Darkness at Noon, embraced by Chambers as capturing the essence of Communism.
MARY TO HANNAH: TRASH HIM . . . Hannah Arendt trashed Witness in Commonweal as the work of a police-state informer. She had been advised by Mary McCarthy as to the importance of repressing the rise to publishing respectability of the new conservatism which Witness represented. McCarthy knew Arendt agreed about repressing "this new Right" which was seeking acceptance as "normal" (italics hers), that it had to be "scotched." She just wasn't sure if Arendt agreed on how to do it, she wrote.
Ah, those lefties did plot, did they not?
FRIEND FELIX . . . Felix Frankfurther, "Rasputin" of the New Deal, was a supporter of Alger Hiss whom Hiss did not at first name in his defense. It had to be pulled out of him at a HUAC hearing, apparently because F. was so transparently leftist as not to work well enough in Hiss's behalf.
FRIEND WHITTAKER . . . Chambers did not appreciate Joe McCarthy, whom he liked personally, but held back from publicly criticizing him, unwilling to give comfort to his enemies.
posted by Jim Bowman @ 10/18/2003 02:37:00 PM
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