by Tony Judt
Decades later, the pro-Hiss psychosis can still be seen at work. Laboring under the curious illusion that the moral and historical credibility of American progressivism depends upon the exculpation of Alger Hiss (and by extension of philo-Communism in general), two generations of liberal intellectuals have striven to clear his name at Whittaker Chambers’s expense. In 1978, the Nation sent a reporter to Budapest to meet the eighty-year-old Josef Peters, Chambers’s controller back in the 1930s, then living in retirement in Hungary. Under investigation by HUAC in 1948, Peters had taken the Fifth; but when the reporter asked him about the Hiss affair, Peters laughingly confirmed to him that the very notion of any “secret” Communist “underground” was nonsense, and that he had never been involved in anything of the sort. It is not difficult to imagine Peters’s thoughts as the man from the Nation, duly reassured, walked away from his door: Lenin’s derogatory reference to “useful idiots” has cognates in most European languages. As Raymond Aron ruefully noted back in 1950, “progressivism consists in presenting Communist arguments as though they emanated spontaneously from independent speculation.”
Even today, nearly four decades after his death and with the truth of his testimony firmly established, Whittaker Chambers remains a marked man. Consider the review of Tanenhaus’s book in the New Yorker. So far as Hiss’s Communist activities are concerned, Sidney Blumenthal writes, “the room for reasonable doubt continues to shrink.” Indeed. But that is apparently not the end of the matter. Blumenthal opportunistically resurrects the same charge that Alger Hiss’s lawyers initially intended to pursue (and then abandoned, lest it rebound on their client): that the affair was about unrequited homosexual attraction.
As it happens, Tanenhaus deals very well with this issue. Chambers, like his father, was probably bisexual (he certainly admitted to numerous homosexual activities), and some of his youthful poetry reveals markedly homoerotic preoccupations. In the 1950s, of course, these were highly charged matters, and hints of homosexual involvement or motivation could destroy a man. Today things are different. Blumenthal reminds his readers that in the 1950s “conservatism was the ultimate closet,” shielding Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover, and the rest from exposure and scrutiny. Chambers, it is thereby suggested, is guilty by association with such men, who overcompensated for their hidden sexual preferences by persecuting others. Why else would he attack a man like Hiss? Thus, as so often in the past, we are led away from the evidence and the great political issues of the day toward an alleged private imperative of a disreputable kind.
Why did Chambers do it? According to Blumenthal, “his motives remain murky.” But not the consequences of his actions: “Since the end of the Cold War, this conservative anti-Communism has become an anachronism. What endures is the fear of the enemy within: the homosexual menace.” And there is more. In case the homosexual issue lacks a bien-pensant resonance, Blumenthal reminds us that one result of Whittaker Chambers’s “outing” of State Department China experts such as O. Edmund Clubb was the latter’s replacement by “the dogmatic, abstract Dean Rusk, who eventually became Secretary of State. Vietnam lay in the future, but a seed of tragedy had been planted.” Thus Chambers also bears an indirect responsibility for the Vietnam War.
This is a smear, 1990s style. Blumenthal’s insinuations are a reminder that there is nearly always something provincial and self-serving about the response of American intellectuals to Whittaker Chambers. Many of them simply cannot, or will not, understand Chambers and his actions in a broader international context. For the Hiss case did not happen in a vacuum. It is exactly contemporaneous, for example, with the trial in Budapest in 1949 of László Rajk, the first of the great postwar show trials that served as cover for a purge of prewar underground Communists. Hence the interrogation of Noel Field and the references to Hiss in Eastern European archives.
The Hiss affair was also a remarkable echo of the Kravchenko and Rousset affairs in France. In 1946, Viktor Kravchenko, a midlevel Soviet bureaucrat who had defected to the United States, published I Chose Freedom, his account of the real workings of the Stalinist autocracy. A French Communist periodical, Les Lettres Françaises, published an article in November 1947 claiming that the book was an American fabrication, and that the details it gave of life in Stalin’s Russia were a lie. Kravchenko sued for libel and produced a string of witnesses to confirm his story. He won his case and symbolic damages, but for the vast majority of French intellectuals he remained for many years guilty of the more serious crime of slandering the Soviet Union and its French supporters.
In November 1949, in the same week that the second Hiss trial began, David Rousset, a survivor of the German camps, wrote an article in Le Figaro Littéraire describing the concentration camp system in the Soviet Union. The same Communist periodical accused him of inventing the whole thing, and he, too, sued for libel. Among the witnesses he produced was the remarkable Margarete Buber-Neumann, a former German Communist who had spent three years in the Soviet forced labor camp at Karaganda before being handed to the Germans in 1940 and spending the war years in Ravensbrück. Buoyed by her testimony, Rousset won his case as well, but with no discernible impact upon the philo-Soviet sensibilities of a significant sector of the French intelligentsia.
Nobody, to my knowledge, has suggested that Margarete Buber-Neumann, David Rousset, Viktor Kravchenko, or the many other European ex-Communists who spoke out about Stalinism in the 1930s and 1940s—men and women such as Victor Serge in Russia, Ruth Fischer in Germany, and Ignazio Silone in Italy, not to mention Arthur Koestler—were driven by some peculiar combination of ressentiment and repressed sexuality to betray former colleagues, embarrass friends, or avenge themselves upon an inhospitable world. Like Chambers, however, they sacrificed something for speaking out, and they were execrated by their erstwhile comrades on the intellectual Left. Nor have European progressives been as keen as their American counterparts to repress the thought that there might really have existed a secret Communist underground. As Koestler noted, the fact that such claims were sometimes made by people who are distasteful doesn’t make them untrue. Even in Britain, where Communism was never more than a minority predilection, it has not occurred to many people to imagine that the now-notorious spy network recruited among Cambridge undergraduates in the 1930s was an invention of the political Right.
Whittaker Chambers himself felt some affinity for his European counterparts, who had a better understanding of his background and his dilemma. In 1959, he returned from one of his rare trips abroad exhilarated from a meeting in Austria with Koestler and Buber-Neumann. “We,” he wrote to William E Buckley Jr., “are almost the only survivors—the old activists who were articulate, consequent revolutionists and not merely agents.” Like Ignazio Silone, he was convinced that only Communists and ex-Communists could truly understand each other, as one another’s only true and worthy opponents. Certainly, Chambers was giving himself airs here—or, rather, clinging desperately in his last years to the idea that he belonged to a select group of historically important individuals and was not just the renegade informer that American intellectuals took him for. Still, he had a point. Even so subtle a critic as Irving Howe, when reviewing Chambers’s autobiography in 1952, could not help faulting him for tarring Lenin with the Stalinist brush. Stalin was not Lenin’s ideological heir, wrote Howe, but the maker of a “new bureaucratic ruling-class.” Chambers did not have to encounter that sort of face-saving ideological maneuver among his European peers, who had seen Leninism close-up and suffered no such “revisionist” illusions.
Chambers’s admiration for the Europeans was in some measure reciprocated. Koestler described Witness in 1953 as “a great book, in the old, simple sense of greatness”; and even before its appearance Richard Crossman had invited its author to contribute to The God That Failed. (Chambers declined the invitation.) What these men and others found in Chambers was an unusual degree of moral courage—Trilling described him as “a man of honor”—and occasional bursts of almost Orwell
-like insight, as when he writes of progressive intellectuals that “fundamentally benevolent and humane, they loved their fellow-countrymen in distress far more than they could ever love them in prosperity.”
And yet, whatever the degree of mutual respect and sympathy that bound him to his European peers, he was not “one of them.” As his biographer shows with care and understanding, Whittaker Chambers was utterly American. It is not for nothing that he called his autobiography Witness. He had a tragic worldview, morbid even, framed by a bitter and unhappy childhood and a lifelong search for an all-embracing, all-sustaining creed. All mortal questions for Chambers depended upon finding the answer to one transcendental and ultimate question. In Communism, he found a version of that answer, the key to the human condition, and, in contrast to most ex-Marxists, he never really abandoned it. His descriptions of politics as a battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil; his eschatological evocations of the coming struggle between freedom and enslavement; his account of human history since the Renaissance as a hubristic assertion of the centrality of man for which a price must now be paid: All this is a one-dimensional version of the Manichaean creed of Leninism held up to the mirror of a renascent religious fervor.
When he wrote that the Hiss case had “religious, moral, human and historical meaning” Chambers was not grandstanding. He really meant it. And he thought that it was true for Alger Hiss too, which is why he raised his opponent, in his own imagining, to a plateau far higher than Hiss deserved. Chambers’s insistence on describing Hiss’s dishonesty as self-sacrifice is the best clue to his own fundamental inability to grasp the truth about the Communist ideal to which he had once devoted himself: that it meant more to him than it did for many of the others. It was this quasi-theological transubstantiation of Communism that made Whittaker Chambers so much an American figure. The educated, secular, cosmopolitan, disabused skepticism of his European friends would have kept them from coming to such pleasingly redemptive conclusions.
Sam Tanenhaus is to be congratulated on having captured so sympathetically the complexities of this troubled man. His book reads at times like a thriller, and he tells the story of the hearings and the trials with great verve and skill. He is fairer to all parties concerned than anyone else whom I have read on these matters. All this would be for naught, of course, if Tanenhaus had somehow missed the man himself. He hasn’t. You cannot read this book without feeling for this solitary, unhappy character, an insecure autodidact with the sensibility of a mystic, who “hung always upon the curse of himself,” as he wrote to his children in the preface of his book.
Chambers’s tragedy was that his years in the entrails of the Communist movement were the high point of his life. He remained obsessed with the 1930s, he saw his own and humanity’s history through the prism of the choices and the commitments of that decade, and he was crucified for that obsession by generations to come. He really did feel a duty to bear witness, but he suffered deeply for the pain and the publicity that he brought upon himself, his family, and his former friends. Tanenhaus shows just how greatly Chambers agonized over whether to tell what he knew, and it is hard to resist the thought that there is an element of Shakespearean tragedy in this otherwise unremarkable man trapped in an unforgiving era. He, too, must more than once have rued his self-assigned condition: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right.”
This review of Sam Tanenhaus’s admirable biography of Whittaker Chambers first appeared in the New Republic in 1997. Even at that late date it provoked anguished exchanges from readers and colleagues convinced that the case against Alger Hiss remained unproven and that the reputation of Chambers could not—and should not—be redeemed.
CHAPTER XIX
The Crisis: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Cuba
The story of the Cuban missiles begins in April 1962, when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to increase very substantially the limited military support hitherto provided by the USSR to the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. At his urging, the Soviet Presidium duly assented to a military buildup on the island, which, in its final form, was to include some fifty thousand Soviet military personnel, organized in five nuclear missile regiments, four motorized regiments, two tank battalions, one MIG-21 fighter wing, forty-two IL-28 light bombers, two cruise missile regiments, twelve SA-2 antiaircraft units with 144 launchers, and a squadron of eleven submarines, seven of them equipped with nuclear missiles.
President John F. Kennedy and U.S. intelligence analysts were aware of the growing Soviet military presence in Cuba. But it was only after August 29, 1962, when a U-2 reconnaissance plane spotted the SA-2 missile sites, that Kennedy went public, on September 4, with a warning that whereas such land-to-air defensive missiles were acceptable, the installation of offensive missiles in Cuba would not be. On September 13, during a press conference, he repeated the warning: “If at any time . . . Cuba were to . . . become an offensive military base of significant capacityfor the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.”1
What Kennedy did not then know was that by September the Soviet buildup also included thirty-six SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) and twenty-four SS-5 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), together with their nuclear warheads. (The first nuclear warheads arrived in Mariel aboard a Soviet freighter on October 4; by October 28, when the crisis ended, all the warheads for both sorts of missiles and all the SS-4 missiles themselves were actually in Cuba—only the SS-5s remained to be delivered.) Indeed, the Kennedy administration had been assured, by Khrushchev and by Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., that no such missiles were or would be placed in Cuba. When Dobrynin in early September asked how he might reply to a private question from Robert Kennedy about the Cuban situation, he was instructed by Moscow that “in talking to the Americans you should confirm that there are only defensive Soviet weapons in Cuba.”
Dobrynin reassured Robert Kennedy accordingly, with all the more conviction in that he, too, knew nothing about the ballistic missile emplacements. The U.S. authorities accepted these reassurances, particularly since, as George Ball notes in his memoirs, the Soviet Union had never hitherto placed offensive missile bases outside its own territory, not even in the neighboring countries of the Warsaw Pact.2
The significance of the MRBMs and IRBMs lay in their reach. They were designed not to hit incoming aircraft but to land on targets deep inside the U.S.; the range of an SS-4 was about 1,100 nautical miles, that of an SS-5 nearly twice that. A Soviet MRBM of that era, launched from Cuba, could hit Washington, D.C.; an IRBM could hit almost any target in the continental U.S., sparing only the far Pacific Northwest. They were useless as defensive weapons; their only possible value was offensive—or as a deterrent to the offensives of others. Thus, when a U-2 flying over San Cristobal, in western Cuba, on October 14 spotted three missile sites under construction, and when these sites were identified in Washington as identical to known MRBM launch sites in the Soviet Union, President Kennedy and his advisers drew the obvious conclusion. They had been lied to, and their warnings had been ignored. The Soviet Union was placing offensive missiles in Cuba, missiles that could only be deployed against targets in the U.S. The Cuban missile crisis had begun.
The first, confidential phase of the crisis, from early morning on October 16, when McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, woke him up with the bad news, until 7:00 p.m. on the evening of October 22, when President Kennedy announced a naval quarantine around Cuba, was confined to a handful of men in Washington, D.C.: the “Executive Committee” (ExComm) that Kennedy gathered around him to decide what to do. The deliberations of this group, secretly taped by Kennedy himself, have now been painstakingly transcribed and impeccably edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow.16
Curiously, and like Khrushchev, who had made no contingency plans for the eventuality of his missile buildup being discovered befo
re completion, Kennedy and his advisers had given no thought to what they should do if just such a crisis should occur: “No one, as far as I can remember,” Bundy later wrote, “thought it necessary in September to consider what we would do if our warnings were disregarded . . . . This was a failure of foresight, and one of the reasons for respecting the quality of the basic decision President Kennedy reached on October 20 is that he had to begin on the sixteenth almost from a standing start.”3 That decision, of course, was to announce a partial quarantine of Cuba, under which ships suspected of carrying military supplies would be stopped from entering Cuban waters. But among the other strategies considered—and according to Kennedy it was not until October 21 that he made his final decision—were a more comprehensive blockade than the selective one eventually imposed, an air strike on the missile sites in Cuba, a blanket air strike on the island’s military bases, and a full-scale military invasion.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff favored the most extreme response, but they had little civilian backing on ExComm. The option of ignoring the buildup and continuing as before had no takers. For five days ExComm debated three unknowns: How many missiles were in place, and were they operational? How would the NATO allies react to either an insufficient U.S. response or an excessive one, the dilemma of “credibility” that obsessed Kennedy and his close advisers? And what would Khrushchev do in response to various possible American moves?
An air strike risked missing some of the missile sites—their exact number was unknown—and thus inviting a response from those still in place, or in some part of the world where the balance of forces favored the Soviet Union, notably Berlin. Conversely, if the nuclear warheads were not yet in Cuba—and no one at this stage knew the answer to that—an air strike was excessive; a blockade on all incoming offensive weaponry would suffice. And since an invasion took some advance planning, it could be kept in reserve as an option if all else failed. Meanwhile, a naval blockade or quarantine would buy both sides time to reconsider. Following the advice of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Under Secretary of State George Ball, and his Soviet experts (former ambassadors Charles Bohlen and Llewellyn Thompson), this was the option that Kennedy chose.
