A Bizarre Political Mystery

By Richard Zoglin

Concealed Enemies, PBS, May 7, 8,9

On a chill December night in 1948, Whittaker Chambers led two investigators from the House Committee on Un-American Activities into a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm. From inside a hollowed-out pumpkin he produced several rolls of microfilm: copies of secret Government documents that, he claimed, had been passed to him in the 1930s by a State Department official named Alger Hiss, when both men were members of a Soviet espionage ring.

A few days later, HUAC members, spurred on by first-term California Congressman Richard Nixon, called Eastman Kodak to check on the film's emulsion numbers. They got bad news: the film could not have been manufactured before 1945, which meant that Chambers must be lying. Furious, Nixon phoned Chambers to demand an explanation. But minutes later, Kodak called back to apologize for its mistake: the film could indeed have been made in 1938. "Poor Chambers," said a relieved Nixon. "Nobody ever believes him at first."

Such were the bizarre twists and turns of the notorious Hiss-Chambers case. In the decades since the case dominated the headlines, the facts have all but disappeared under the symbolic baggage piled on them. For liberals, the dapper, Harvard-educated Hiss--who left the State Department in 1947 and became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace--epitomized the best and brightest of Roosevelt's New Dealers. The accusations against him seemed an indictment of a whole political era, as well as a harbinger of McCarthyite anti-Red hysteria. For conservatives (among them President Reagan, who awarded Chambers a posthumous Medal of Freedom earlier this year), the case had a different meaning. Along with Chambers' harrowing tales of life in the Red underground and his considerable eloquence, the affair dramatized the evils of Communism and the peril its infiltration posed for the U.S.

To its great credit, Concealed Enemies, a four-hour, three-part docudrama in PBS'S American Playhouse series, clears away much of that baggage and concentrates instead on one of the most fascinating political mystery stories of the century. The drama, with script by British Playwright Hugh Whitemore, begins on Aug. 3, 1948, the day that Chambers electrified a HUAC hearing by naming Hiss as a Communist. Chambers by then had been out of the Communist Party for ten years, and was working as a senior editor for TIME. The climax is set in a courtroom almost 18 months later, when Hiss--who denied all charges and has continued to do so to this day--was convicted at a second trial for perjury. (His first trial ended in a hung jury.) The intervening events make compelling drama: the discovery of the "pumpkin papers"; the search for the Hisses' old Woodstock typewriter, allegedly used to retype the secret documents; the investigation into a homosexual phase in Chambers' past; the charges and denials, the courtroom theatrics and, as ever, the uncertainties.

As Hiss, Edward Herrmann (who played F.D.R. in Eleanor and Franklin) is the quintessence of Ivy League aplomb, but with a hint of arrogance and evasiveness. John Harkins, a close physical match for Chambers, is eerily effective as the tormented ex-Communist turned passionate antiCommunist. As Nixon, who built his political career on his role in the Hiss case, Peter Riegert (who starred in the film Local Hero) maintains a steady scowl but avoids facile parody.

The show's most serious flaw is the congenital problem of many docudramas dealing with controversial events: a dogged inscrutability. Remaining neutral on the issue of Hiss's guilt, the show presents a mass of incidents--some important, some irrelevant, some canceling others out--that are engrossing from moment to moment. But the end result is a sort of dramatic entropy that can be frustrating.

At the outset of Perjury, his exhaustive 1978 study of the Hiss-Chambers case (which concluded that Hiss was guilty), Historian Allen Weinstein cautions that the story's fantastic elements "might be better served by the attentions of a perceptive novelist." By the end of Concealed Enemies, the TV viewer may agree. --By Richard Zoglin