Volume 25, Number 6 · April 20, 1978
The Honor of Alger Hiss
By Garry Wills
Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case
by Allen Weinstein
Knopf, 674 pp., $15.00
Suspecting Alger Hiss was somehow, on the face of it, indecent. He was almost drearily correct. He specialized in innocence. He was innocent of failure—so he could not understand his father. He was innocent of doubt—so he could not understand his brother Bosley. He was so innocent of psychic turmoil that his sister was in and out of mental institutions for several years without his being aware of her disturbance. He passed through the Thirties so innocent of ideology that he could later swear he met no communists at all, or—if he did meet any—he could not recognize them. He was innocent of friendships except with the well placed, with patrons. He seemed to spring fully armed from the head of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He became the perfect civil servant, a political Jeeves who knew his place and filled it perfectly. If anything, he was so correct as to rule out originality. Justice Frankfurter, another of his early patrons, was puzzled in 1946 to reflect that Hiss had not quite lived up to the promise of his youth which boded something beyond mere rectitude.[1]
Review, 2795 words
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