Impartial Report on Hiss

The first thing to say about Alistair Cooke's treatment of Alger Hiss is that it is honest and carefully, almost painfully, impartial. These days that is saying a good deal. A previously published book on the Hiss trial ("Seeds of Treason" by Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky) paints so black a picture of the defendant that probably even Thomas F. Murphy, the erstwhile prosecutor, would raise an occasional eyebrow over it. Mr. Cooke, then, is accurate. Whether he is more than that is another question.

To spell out this drama Mr. Cooke begins with a background scene--a description of the atmosphere of the thirties. He wants to remind readers that millions of Americans turned to Communism and other radicalism, of the right as well as the left, in a period when old values were toppling, depression gripped the country, and the Western Powers were allowing Fascist Germany to grow. In this part of his book Mr. Cooke discusses a range of subjects from the N.R.A. to the Anschluss. He makes his point.

The main body of the book is a minute, detailed description of the Hiss case as it developed before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and as it was argued before two juries. In an abstracted style Mr. Cooke notes the attitudes of the House Committee members, Mr. Murphy's failure to smile, the postures of Lloyd Paul Stryker, defense attorney in the first trial. He spends pages, with liberal quotations from the record, giving the arguments on both sides of the most minute points. And he estimates the reaction of spectators to each argument.

What Mr. Cooke was apparently trying to do was to match the standard of his countrywoman, Rebecca West, in her description of the trial of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw. The difficulty is that the Joyce and Hiss trials are not comparable. By a detailing of the first you learn something about the defendant, but by a detailing of the Hiss trials you learn nothing about Mr. Hiss.

Thus the fatal, if inevitable, defect of "A Generation on Trial" is that it says nothing, absolutely nothing, new. The background and the trial details are valuable and perhaps interesting for many persons, particularly those who are students of the Hiss case. But the book adds nothing to public knowledge about the essentials: Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers.

Mr. Cooke does make one contribution, more or less incidentally. He reveals his won opinions on the case as it unfolded, and in doing so paints a picture of the genus "Confused Liberal." First he thought the whole Chambers story preposterous. Later he saw that espionage had been committed in the thirties but doubted Hiss' part in it. Finally he felt that the weight of evidence seemed to be against the defendant. But like the rest of us, he still doesn't know what the final truth will be in the Hiss-Chambers story.