To the Editor:

I suppose Leslie Fiedler took his academic life in his hands by stating in cold print that Alger Hiss is guilty of treason. His fellow professors will undoubtedly burn him at the stake for witch-hunting. Nevertheless, I hold no brief for Mr. Fiedler’s courage. His article—“Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence,” in the August 1951 issue of COMMENTARY—carries its own insurance. For though he states a few obvious facts about Hiss, he makes sure to turn away the wrath of the Hissites by denigrating Whittaker Chambers and perpetuating the shameful myth that a shrewd defense lawyer and two captive psychiatrists created. This is the way of the politician; it is hardly what one would expect from a literary critic and a professor of the humanities.

Perhaps my criticism should be aimed at Fiedler’s method. Had he bothered to speak to Chambers, to his associates, to those who have known him long or fleetingly, the article might have turned out differently. Instead, Fiedler read two books, a scattering of transcript, and a few newspaper clippings. Literary critics, I know, look down on “journalists.” But any newspaperman who applied Fiedler’s method to a workaday assignment, who sucked “facts” out of his thumb so blatantly, would in short order find himself on the street or teaching college journalism.

“Any good bourgeois bristles when confronted with Whittaker Chambers,” Fiedler writes with aplomb. . . . It is not the good bourgeois who bristles when he meets Chambers. It is not the farmer whose hackles rise. Chambers’ neighbors in Westminster—and there is not a professor among them—stuck staunchly by him through the worst of the Hissite smear campaign; they responded to him as a man and they respected his courage. Only the urban liberal intellectuals succumbed to the Hiss propaganda; the last bastion of Hissism today is manned not by the bourgeoisie but by Harvard and Columbia professors. . . .

Fiedler makes two more statements about Chambers which cannot bear even the most casual examination: (1) “They [Hiss and Chambers] are men who could never have met outside the Communist movement,” and (2) “. . . he [Chambers] is the sort of person of whom one believes immediately quite unfounded stories of insanity and depravity” because of his “unprepossessing air.” Both statements are nonsensical to the point of idiocy. . . . How never meet? Because of birth and antecedents? A check of the Hiss and Chambers family records will show that Chambers comes from an immeasurably “better” family than Hiss. Because of money? Even without an apparatus pushing him up, Chambers made considerably more than Hiss when once he set himself to his chosen work of writing. Ability? Chambers is accepted as by far the best writer and editor in the news-magazine field; Hiss has a quick mind and the instincts of a slick salesman. . . .

The sort of person who believes that Chambers is the “sort of person” about whom anything can be believed . . . did not see Chambers at the second trial when, unplagued by a hostile and arrogant judge, he quickly won over jury and spectators by his manner, his directness, his quality of personal communication. . . .

Ralph De Toledano
Associate Editor
Newsweek
New York City

_____________

To the Editor:

I am writing because I believe that you and your readers have a right to know that almost all of the facts purporting to come from the “record” in Mr. Fiedler’s article on “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence” are either misquotations or deliberate distortions of the testimony. . . . There are few facts from the record in this article—probably not more than a dozen or two, and of these apparent “facts” (some of them based solely on Chambers’ testimony) I find ten distortions or misquotations.

I won’t bore you with all of them but I cite as a sample the sentence . . . on page 112 where Mr. Fiedler writes, “As a matter of fact, he had even once, for certain obscure reasons, let the deadbeat move into his apartment for a couple of days, or was it weeks.” The record shows that not only did Alger Hiss’s testimony on this subject never vary (note the implication in “a couple of days, or was it weeks”) from the fact that he rented his apartment for several months to a man who did not, at that time, appear to be a deadbeat, but that Whittaker Chambers also testified to occupying the apartment for six to eight weeks at least. Their testimony as to the reasons differed, but the reasons appear obscure only in Mr. Fiedler’s article. . . .

Helen L. Buttenwieser
New York City.

_____________

To the Editor:

I am inclined to think that Leslie A. Fiedler’s article, “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence,” in your issue of August 1951, was the best single article I have read on that grimly fascinating subject. I should like to make explicit something which is certainly implicit in Mr. Fiedler’s discussion of the attitude both of Alger Hiss and Julian Wadleigh. That something is the compulsion that we all ought to be under to observe ordinary rules of good faith, standards of conduct and mutual relationship worked out through long centuries of experience. Both Hiss and Wadleigh probably felt warranted in transcending those rules out of some higher law of duty to “humanity” as they understood that duty. This anarchic concept of duty in defiance of good faith is, as the Hiss case illustrates, extraordinarily dangerous. That is true in other relationships than those of a government agency to one of its trusted employees. . . .

To this I would like to add a second observation: it has rarely been given to any man to do so much harm to civil liberties and tolerance and free discussion as was done by Alger Hiss. Repeatedly even in our own minds we who want to protest the baleful McCarthy influence on free speech have been checked by the question, “Yes, but what about Alger Hiss?” . . .

Norman Thomas
New York City

_____________