FRED ASTAIRE MEETS THE SAD-SACK DOSTOYEVSKIAN PUDGE

By LANCE MORROW

Washington, 1948: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and Joe McCarthy and all the others were back from their war. It had shown them the world, and an apocalypse or two, and the possibilities of the new global power that would become the stuff of their careers, their medium. The new cold war was the generation's moment, its opportunity. The veterans worked the capital--a southern town enlarged to world power and wired with new political electricity--and searched for their way up.

We know the outcome of their stories now. One, Joe McCarthy of Appleton, Wisconsin, would turn into a household ism and be dead within a decade of a boozehound's liver; three would make it to the White House, grasping all of Washington's power for a moment. One President would be assassinated in Texas. Two (Johnson and Nixon) would be driven from office in disgrace, which was also, by the way, the fate of world communism.

One story of the time--a strange, defining piece of cold war Kabuki--has remained a mystery intact. The matter of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, and which of them was telling the truth, became a litmus test for several generations, a marker not only of political sympathies but also of intellectual class and sensibility. Hiss and Chambers were the cold war's Mozart and Salieri, and their mysteries were multilayered. If you went below the murk of espionage and infiltration and double lives--a subject fascinating in itself--you penetrated to the deeper strangeness of the two men's psychologies and, yet deeper, to the disconcerting affinities.

In physical type, and in superficialities of temperament, Hiss and Chambers could not have been more different. Hiss on first inspection looked like the Fred Astaire of the mandarin left, lithe and well bred, the Establishment's own darling prothonotary warbler. Chambers, sad-sack Dostoyevskian pudge, more Slavic than American in mind, with terrible teeth and an air of doom, seemed to inhabit a flinching shadow world. He dodged through the '30s packing a revolver and hugging the walls of dark corridors. A paranoid smudge, the mandarins thought, whose amorphous bulk concealed a damaged child given to imagining grandiose conspiracies, and messiah roles for himself. Poor Chambers was brutally and dismissively psychoanalyzed, more so than Hiss.

Of course Chambers invited such attention. His 1952 book Witness, a now forgotten 800-page confession and jeremiad, was overly melodramatic and Doom-of-the-Westy in tone. Yet his 100-page chapter, "The Story of a Middle-Class Family," is among the finest and most frightening of American autobiographies--Sophocles visiting Theodore Dreiser, with gothic touches, told in Chambers' incomparable prose style. "Dysfunctional" does not quite describe the Chambers family of Lynbrook, Long Island--the weird, derisive, mostly vanishing father, who was bisexual; the mad grandmother wandering the house at night with a knife; the mother who slept with an ax under the bed; the alcoholism; the beloved brother Richard who put his head in an oven.

A sadly interesting motif of parallel dysfunctions ran through the Hiss family as well. Alger Hiss's father committed suicide rather savagely, slashing his throat with his own razor. Alger's sister Mary Ann also killed herself, by swallowing a bottle of caustic household cleanser.

Alger Hiss made almost a fetish of his unflappable objectivity. Presumptuously, no doubt, one imagines that there were shadows in his mind so disturbing (his father's betrayal-suicide, a black hole of grief and abandonment and shame) that cauterized objectivity became the only salvation. I have always believed the Chambers rather than the Hiss version of events, just as I think Chambers was the more gifted and interesting of the two men; there seemed less to Hiss than first appeared and more to Chambers. But I wonder if their lives did not intersect at some subterranean level, some hidden confluence of global history and personal trauma.

Here is a triangulation, a sort of syllogism, that seemed to be at work: Except for evil itself (if you believe in evil, as Chambers did), what mystery is deeper than that of betrayal? What betrayal is deeper, and more decisive, than suicide? What deeper political or social suicide can a man commit than to betray his country?