The Redhunter and The View From Alger's Window

Dear Ron,

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This Slate "Book Club" is better than therapy. I should really pay its (beautiful and talented) editors to let me do one every week. What with all the Moscow gold still lying around The Nation offices, it should be easy ...

Anyway, back to Red-hunting and Hiss-baiting. My friend Paul Berman once pointed out that the problem with the Hiss/Chambers case is that everyone who knows the details is crazy. (I except Tony Hiss from the category, since after all, it's his dad we're talking about. And I also except Victor Navasky, since, well, he's my boss.) But I felt a little of this creeping craziness last night, while watching an absolutely wonderful 40^th-annniversary performance of "Kind of Blue" at Symphony Space. My mind drifted to pumpkin patches and Woodstock typewriters. Out, out, damned spot!

I would like to respond to all that nasty stuff you said in your last post, but it would be bad for my emotional health. Anyway, stealthy leftist that I am, I have another agenda. After sending off yesterday's message, I went downstairs to my building's basement, where a member of the co-op has contributed a community Stairmaster, bringing with me the new New Republic that had arrived while I was at lunch.

I was minding my own business, working on my now considerable gut, when what should I find but yet another New Republic screed about Hiss/Chambers, this one by Sam Tanenhaus, author of an admiring biography of Chambers, as well as an admiring profile of TNR literary editor Leon Wieseltier.

I should have mentioned yesterday that not only is TNR obsessed with the case, it is also obsessed with The Nation's refusal to endorse the TNR view of it. Here's Tanenhaus:

The Nation, for example, which should comport itself humbly in the matter of Hiss and company, recently sought to discredit the work of [historian John Earl] Haynes and [Harvey] Klehr because 'the project has received extensive funding from such hard-line conservative sources as the Bradley, Olin and Smith Richardson foundations'

Well, I wrote the article in question and am happy--here's where the therapy comes in--to report that judging by Tanenhaus' reporting, Stephen Glass must be back at work as a TNR fact-checker.

You would never guess that the article in question had nothing whatever to do with Hiss or Chambers. It was about a misguided and ultimately unconvincing attack on Yale University Press' "Annals of Communism" series by TNR editor Jacob Heilbrunn, who has graciously declined to defend himself on this point. (The director of the series says Marty Peretz apologized to him and admitted the article should never have run; Peretz denies this.) Anyway, Tanenhaus' attack is dishonest in more ways than I can count.

The sentence in my column regarding conservative foundation funding referred not to the historians in question but to the entire series--which, you may recall, I was defending, not attacking. Haynes and Klehr attacked the TNR story in a letter to the editor, as well.

To the degree that I was mildly critical of Haynes and Klehr's work in the article at all, I let Arthur Schlesinger--with his unimpeachable bona fides as an anti-Communist historian--do the heavy lifting. How convenient, therefore, that Schlesinger had reviewed their book in--of all places--The New Republic: a review, in fact, that Tanenhaus quotes himself. Here is the venerable Professor Schlesinger's words as published in TNR regarding Haynes and Klehr:

One might wish that the tone of the editorial commentary in The Secret World of American Communism had been more neutral and objective. The documents themselves carry the indictment and sarcastic annotations diminish their force. And the editors are rather uncritical about American ex-Communists.

Schlesinger also had a problem with their eagerness to "blacken the names of innocent people." In other words, TNR did just what Tanenhaus, in TNR, dishonestly accuses The Nation of doing. Is there a Freudian in the house?

Why I am mentioning all this? Well, partially because Buckley's book leaves me so cold I have nothing to say about it. And partially, because, what the hell, I have the floor. But here's my question, Ron:

What is it with you people? Why do you care so much about what the editors of one little political magazine think that it makes you all behave so foolishly? You've attacked The Nation in every one of your posts. You've called its much-beloved and enormously intelligent editor, Victor Navasky, "obtuse." You've cited Tanenhaus who, I think, has embarrassed himself on the subject. And the same damn thing happens every time. You guys go bonkers whenever anyone brings up Hiss or Chambers--or even when you bring it up yourselves. I can feel the blood pressure rising in your e-mail. Why not give it a rest? Who cares? So he was guilty, so he was innocent. So what? The Cold War is over.

Why can't we all just get along?

Your pal,
Eric

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Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and the author of Who Speaks for America? (click here to buy the book). Ronald Radosh is senior research associate at the Center for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University and co-author, with Harvey Klehr, of The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (click here to buy the book). This week they discuss The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy, by William F. Buckley Jr. (click here to buy the book), and The View From Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir, by Tony Hiss (click here to buy the book). Addendum: William Buckley Quotes Himself in Self-Defense

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