Does anyone under the age of seventy really care any more about Alger Hiss? Even Susan Jacoby's mother asked, "Who the hell cares about that anymore?" Jacoby's goal was to show how the arguments and debates over Hiss's guilt continue to play out in our politics in different forms. What we see today is simply a continuation of the besmirchment of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt by the Right and an attempt to defend them by the Left. That was precisely the symbolism behind the Alger Hiss case. The Left was attempting to defend the New Deal and obfuscate its flirtation with Communism in the thirties, while the Right was attacking the New Deal and hiding its own flirtation with Naziism and isolationism of the twenties and thirties by labeling FDR's attempt to save capitalism as communistic.

She decided to write the book after watching a pathetic spectacle. At a conference on Hiss in 2007, she watched his stepson, who was in his nineties, valiantly trying to deny that his step-father had ever met Chambers because he, a little boy at the time, never saw him in the house. The idea that an eight-year-old could remember who was in the house at a particular time was emblematic of the irrationality of the Left; but the Right had its own irrationality.

Jacoby, herself is absolutely convinced Hiss lied -- she cites Weinstein's Perjury as providing conclusive proof, but she's only 98% convinced Hiss was a spy. If he was for certain, his spy skills were childish. And there were really competent spies like George Koval who had been trained by the GRU and even worked on the Manhattan Project. But Hiss and his eastern establishment elitism had become symbolic of the New Deal which was under attack by the Right. Richard Nixon had hated Hiss and his background from the first day they met. Hiss had remarked how he had gone to Harvard and Nixon had gone to what was it? Whittier College? So even though Chambers was clearly a disreputable liar and Hiss a charming aristocrat, -- or perhaps because of that -- Nixon and HUAC had it in for him.

But her book is not really about the case but about the media and how it wrote about the case over the years.

In another of those wonderful ironies, after Hiss got out of prison, he got a job selling stationery. Salesmanship is sort of the iconic American profession where those who are the most successful are those who are best at telling people what they want to hear.

I listened also to an interview Jacoby had with Brian Lamb. He asked her about her time in Moscow where she had been a correspondent for the Washington Post while protests were going on in the United States about the Vietnam War.

But where I really became opposed to the Vietnam War was in Moscow. l lived in Moscow from 1969 to the end of 1971. I wrote my first two books on Russia when I came home from the material I gathered there. And I was there on the day that the shootings at Kent State University, which you know the famous iconic picture of the young girl over the fallen student there shot by the National Guard. It was of course on the front page of Izvestia ire Pravda that day.

And l had many Russian dissident friends who had an almost highly idealized view of the United States because the Soviet Union was so bad; the United States must be good. And the time l had, the question they asked was how you know when the thing we looked to for your country is that you allowed dissent. You don't kill dissenters. You don't put them in concentration camps. How do you reconcile that, my Russian dissident friends said, with this picture from Kent State?

First of all, they said - because they're so used to, they were so used to doctored pictures - is this real? And I said, yes, It real you know I've seen it on the wire. But at this point I began to think what kind of a damage to our reputation, our best ideals, the best things that people around the world think America stands for, this is yet another thing. And I think that's when I decisively turned against the Vietnam War, when I found it impossible to explain to Russians who had idealized America, how can we be shooting people for demonstrating against the Vietnam War?

How sad.

As to the lessons from Alger Hiss and Vietnam:

But l think that what happened in the .60s, even more than the Vietnam War obviously. Obviously you know two things happened in oOs of surpassing importance, the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protest, followed quite swiftly by the Women's Movement. All of these things had to do with saying, well just because you're the government or just because you're the authorities, you don't know best.

And I think that -1 think unfortunately the Vietnam War has not had nearly as much of an impact as l would have thought it would have had because of the kind of historical amnesia that has characterized our country over the last four decades. And that begins a little bit in the 60's where the culture of celebrity begins to come in and people are getting all of their news from visual images which in one way is what turned people against the war. But I think of the late 60s as a time when begin the process of losing our attention span.

So I think in one way, I don't think if the lessons of the Vietnam War were learned, 1 don't think that Bush would have had so much overwhelming support early on for the Iraq War. So I'm not sure what a long-term effect the Vietnam War had on this country.
( )

Not really about Alger Hiss at all, but is a couple hundred pages of: Well, OK, Alger Hiss was guilty BUT NIXON WAS A LIAR. Well, OK, Alger Hiss was guilty BUT BUSH INVADED IRAQ. Well, OK Alger Hiss was guilty BUT REAGAN DIDN’T REALLY WIN THE COLD WAR. Well, OK, Alger Hiss was guilty but LIBERALS KNEW IT ALL ALONG AND IT DIDN’T REALLY MATTER ANYWAY AND LIBERALS ARE RIGHT ABOUT HISTORY AND WE WON THE BATTLE SO THERE. And so forth. Adds nothing to Hiss lore. (Well, almost nothing; I discovered that Whittaker Chambers was the original English translator of Bambi, for Simon & Schuster. I always thought the part where Bambi discovers the plans to introduce socialism to The Forest hidden in a pumpkin was a little suspicious). ( )

Okay, to be fully honest, I picked up this book not for its subject but for its author. I have been somewhat familiar with the Alger Hiss controversy, but have never been able to work up that much interest. It seemed likely he was guilty, and still seemed likely that McCarthyism was a violation of any sane democratic system. Still, I have loved the other books the author wrote, so I picked this one up, and discovered that, while I was still not that much more interested in Hiss, the story of the roiling, frothing division between his defenders and his detractors is indeed a very interesting story, and has quite a bit to say about our current political situation and how we got where we are today. In the hands of a skillful writer, the various strands of the case twine together nicely, though the book is a bit brief (which is apparently unusual in books about Hiss). A decent tracking of latter 20th century and early 21st century political history in America, this book has a lot to offer, but will probably manage to offend true believers on both sides (that is not meant as a criticism, by the way. Sometimes true believers need to be offended). ( )

Why Hiss Still Matters

I wasn't a big fan of Susan Jacoby's previous book "Age of Unreason," but I think her new book "Alger Hiss and the Battle of History" is much better. Though other reviewers have attacked the book on the Jacoby's admitted ideological stance on the liberal left, the book itself is a balanced view of how the Alger Hiss case has continued to demarcate the battle lines between the Right and the Left.

The book is not meant to revisit the evidence, or to convince the reader on Hiss's guilt one way or another (Jacoby admits that based on the evidence, she is convinced of his guilt), but rather she uses the Hiss case to show how politically divided the country was, and continues to be. How the political memory of Hiss serves as a symbol by both sides of the debate -- used by the Right as emblematic of the unpatriotism of the Left (ie. Obama as a Socialist = un-American) -- used by the Left as a continuation of political hysteria gone too far (ie. Salem Witch trials, Arthur Miller's "The Crucible").

Overall, this is a very readable book about the debates between the Left and the Right through the lens of the Hiss case. Definitely recommended for anyone wanted to learn more about Cold War domestic politics in the United States. ( )

Heard a brief review of this on Slate. Jacoby defines the development of the Cold War through the battle between Hiss and Chambers