The Strange Case

On its spring books list, Doubleday announced that it would publish The Strange Case of Alger Hiss by the Earl Jowitt, Lord Chancellor of Great Britain in Clement Attlee's Labor government. The book was eagerly awaited by U.S. partisans of Hiss, who understood (correctly) that Jowitt had reviewed the evidence and found the case against Hiss not sufficient to warrant a conviction by the standards of British justice. Last fortnight Doubleday announced that the book was being withdrawn; review copies were recalled, and 5,000 copies already in bookstores were collected.

"Suppression!" cried the Daily Worker in a front-page article designed to give the impression that enemies of Hiss had forced the withdrawal of Jowitt's book. Out of the pureness of its devotion, the Daily Worker misspoke. Doubleday President Douglas M. Black explained that "a serious, inadvertent factual error" had been discovered in the book. Most serious, Black admitted, was Barrister Jowitt's "misunderstanding the complicated time sequence in Whittaker Chambers' book, Witness, [and] a misinterpretation of the Hiss trial testimony." After the facts had been set straight, Black promised, the book would be published.

In Britain, where the Jowitt book was published last month, a few reviewers were quick to spot the factual errors and other defects. Rebecca West in the London Sunday Times wrote: "Inevitably the case has become a bat-haunted labyrinth. But Lord Jowitt makes it more difficult to understand than it really is. Consider, for example, his treatment of the attempt at suicide made by Whittaker Chambers . . . Chambers gives a detailed account [in Witness] of how, after he had discovered the documents which were ultimately to satisfy the courts that Hiss and not he was lying, he decided to let those documents prove his innocence and the guilt of the Communist Party, and he took steps to take refuge in death from the persecution to which he was being subjected . . . [Lord Jowitt] alleges that

Chambers attempted to commit suicide before he produced [the documents] and draws sinister conclusions from this. 'Any prudent man would have hesitated before lie brought before a jury such fraudulent documents,' says Lord Jowitt grimly . . .

And he goes very far in suggesting that the jury might have brought in a different verdict had they known what, in fact, never happened." Denis W. Brogan, reviewing the book for the Spectator, attacked it on grounds more serious than a mixed-up time se quence. "The most alarming thing about Lord Jowitt's book is the innocence of the modern world that it displays." For illustration. Brogan cited a passage from Jowitt: "It is shocking to think that whilst holding and accepting a position of confidence under the Government of his own country. [Hiss] should abuse that confidence by making available secret documents to outsiders. There is no philosophy of which I have ever heard, or indeed which I can imagine, which can excuse such conduct ... It may well be, I do not pretend to know, that Communists desire the success of Russia and its satellites above that of their own land."

Here, concludes Brogan, "is the basic reason why the book is bad, why [Jowitt] is continually being amazed or shocked at things that, however deplorable, are not, in this age, in the least shocking, and about which, in the age of Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, the Canadian spy ring and the rest, there is no point in being shocked."

The naivete of the ex-Chancellor is less amazing when his career is considered. He was a lawyer with a respectable practice, with no experience in criminal cases and no knowledge of U.S. law. He was a Liberal member of Parliament until the Liberals began to collapse and he lost his seat. He joined the Labor Party, got back in the House of Commons, where he served with fidelity to his party but without any great distinction, except that he had one of the most mellifluous speaking voices in British public life. Attorney General under Labor's Ramsay MacDonald, Solicitor General in Churchill's wartime coalition government, he was finally named Lord Chancellor when Labor came to power in 1945, as a reward for party service.

Onetime Lords Chancellor are forbidden to return to the practice of law. Lord Jowitt, with time on his hands, turned to the study of the Hiss case. With the affinity of many non-Communist leftists for the Hiss defense, and with the British tendency to consider the U.S. "hysterical" about Communists, it surprised no one that Jowitt found for Alger Hiss. It may be a shock to some readers, however, that a onetime Lord Chancellor does "not pretend to know" about Communist morality and that he cannot get facts as an ordinary American jury got them.

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