Boo, Hiss, how wrong can you be?

An UnAmerican Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers by Sam Tanenhaus

Old Street, £25

What's Left: How Liberals Lost their Way by Nick Cohen

Fourth Estate, £12.99

AS A RED-DIAPER BABY, born in the mid1950s, the great causes in the foreground of my early life were noble – Vietnam, civil rights and antiapartheid. But the bookshelves and yellowing pamphlets in our house were populated by the ghosts of a terrible immediate past – wraiths with strange names, such as the Rosenbergs, Arthur Koestler and Alger Hiss.

Hiss was a handsome, cultured American New Dealer, a former senior figure in the State Department where he helped to set up the UN, who found himself accused in 1948 of having been a prewar Communist agent. His accuser, before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), was an unlovely man – like Koestler, a “renegade” Communist – called Whittaker Chambers. In early 1950 Chambers’s account of working with Hiss in the Communist underground was accepted by a jury in a perjury trial and Hiss was jailed. Richard Nixon made his name and Senator Joe McCarthy was unleashed upon the nation.

Chambers’s notoriety lived on among Left liberals. When Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York TimesBook Review, began to research the life of Whittaker Chambers, he discovered that the embers were easily aroused to flame. “It is almost impossible,” he writes in his biography, “to convey the robustness of Chambers hatred when I began writing this book . . . 40 years after the Hiss verdict.”

After its US publication An UnAmerican Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers took another decade to reach Britain. In that ten years the twin towers fell, the world changed and Tanenhaus decided that the book contained important warnings. After 1945, he writes, both Stalin and the leaders of the US, dangerously “espousing a purifying doctrine”, created the Cold War. Today the neocons are doing the same thing unilaterally.

But is this what the Chambers case teaches us? The book is (the introduction apart) simply the best-written volume of history or biography I’ve read for several years. Chambers emerges as a sensitive and hugely intelligent man, who joined the American Communist Party in 1925 and quickly became one of the American Left’s best writers. Then, in the early Thirties, he became an agent, passing on to the Russians copies of government materials obtained by sympathis-ers. One of these helpers, beyond doubt, was Alger Hiss.

So, when Chambers made his claims, he was telling the truth – and when Hiss denied even meeting Chambers, or suggested that he was mad, or a jealous homosexual, this hero of the Left was lying. But Tanenhaus goes further. Not only was Chambers the honest one, he was also right. When he left the party in 1938, Chambers could see what many of them denied, that Stalin was the monstrous inheritor of an unstable enterprise.

So it is odd to read Tanenhaus’s suggestion that the moral of the book is to warn against the creation by new McCarthyites of a shadow opponent, a “fiction [which] persuades them to inaugurate a new cold war, even though no suitable adversary and no empire at all, exists . . .”

If this were true, the story of this book – like many others – should be that antiCommunism was terrible. But the tale of Chambers is a warning about liberal myopia. “What sets the Hiss case apart, then and now,” Tanenhaus writes, “is not its mystery but the passionate belief of many that Hiss must be innocent no matter what the evidence.”

There were exceptions, such as Lionel Trilling and Sidney Hook, but during the Hiss case the four most influential liberal columnists were all pro-Hiss, and even after the trial, liberal publishers didn’t want Chambers’s book I, Witness because, he “was on the wrong side.” It was disgraceful that when, in 1951, Chambers – a Quaker – attempted to enlist his daughter Ellen in the elite Quaker Swarthmore College, she was blackballed. There was something else too. “Hiss’s sympathis-ers,” Tanenhaus says, “failed to grasp what had been occurring before their eyes.” Because they didn’t want to grasp it. Many of Hiss’s defenders were more sympathetic to Russia than to their own system.

If this has a modern parallel it is surely the one in What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way, a new polemic by the Observer writer Nick Cohen.

The book is Cohen’s attempt to understand why, gradually, after 9/11 he found himself estranged from many of those whom he might previously have called “comrade”. The Iraq War was the occasion for this rupture.

Cohen, a longtime friend of exiled Iraqi and Kurdish democrats, regarded Saddam Hussein’s regime as one of the worst on the planet, and looked forward to its overthrow. When this was about to be accomplished by the invasion in 2003, Cohen understood that there would be opposition, but not that some on the Left would, in effect, decide to support the Saddamite remnants and market-bomb-ers of the Iraqi “resistance”.

This experience has led him into an angry and splendid exploration of a perverse phenomenon, starting in the days of the prewar Peace Pledge Union, in which pacifism turned into a tolerance of Na-zism, from the former Labour leader George Lansbury’s fatuous visit to see Hitler to Christopher Isherwood’s infamous sentiment “What do I care for the Czechs?”

Cohen exposes the true history of Noam Chomsky’s slippery tolerance of exotic despots who, like him, opposed America and reminds readers of how that national treasure, Harold Pinter, served on the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.

Above all, Cohen wonders how it is that people whose every instinct should have cried out against violent Islamism and jihadism see their own democratic governments as somehow worse. Naturally, Cohen’s critics argue that he mistakes the excesses of the far Left for the attitudes of the mainstream, but if only that were true. Learned progressive journals will lend their letters sections to debate just how bad a liar Tony Blair actually is, while running articles seeking to absolve the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, from entirely justified accusations of antiSemitism.

And it has become a fairly widespread notion on the Left that what counts is “antiimperialism”, that America is the greatest threat to world peace and the real terrorist state, whereas Islamism is an understandable, if occasionally regret-table reaction to Western provocation – a reactive movement of the downtrodden.

Accordingly we are invited to disarm. In Tanenhaus’s new introduction he observes that, “substitute ‘Islamo-fascist’ for ‘Communist’ and it is distressingly clear how little has changed”. Cohen shows that Tanenhaus is right, but only in the most ironic sense.

Comments

[Frank Schnittger]

There is a very deep human instinct, most manifest in free societies, to resist the temptation to view the sentiment "my country right or wrong" as the guiding light for all patriotic, honourable action.

Unfortunately this often spills into a sort of over-compensation, to view the actions off others in an almost totally uncritical light. Just because there is an awful lot wrong with modern western democracies does not mean that they are not light years better than the alternatives offered by religious ideologues, African despots, or neo communist populists.

You yourself, David, have often offered the contrarian view to the popular misperception that everything in Britain is going to the dogs – or worse – as dogs in Britain are generally regarded as an entirely laudable alternative to children.

But people tend to take what they have for granted, and yearn for the apparently greener and more romantic hills far away. There is also a deep suspicion of those who would demonise the foreign in pursuit of their own domestic agenda.

But many of the icons of the left have let them down – Castro, Mugabe, Arafat –and those that haven’t – Brandt, Gorbachev, and Mandela made their peace with Capitalism, albeit heavily modified and controlled to allay its inherently polarising characteristics.

But all of this doesn’t mean that the Iraq war wasn’t a terrible mistake, and that the greater atrocities haven’t generally been committed by the Right. A despot is a despot whether of the Right or Left, and knowing how to get rid of them without creating an even worse mess is something neither the Left nor Right have mastered.