THE HISS CASE
487
in its most retrograde wing? It is scarcely an attractive company, and
the liberal must make a clean break with it. Just as the pro-Hiss liberal
claims his right not to be smeared as a Communist just because the
Communists agree with him in this case, so the anti-Hiss liberal must
insist on his right not to be labelled a reactionary just because re–
actionaries agree with him in this case.
This voice of conscience is never heard in Mr. Toledano and
Mr. Lasky's volume. There is no criticism of the un-American Ac–
tivities Committee, no dissociation from its purposes or from the pur–
poses of Hearst or the Republican Party. Nor do the authors of
Seeds
of Treason
make any discriminations of judgment on Chambers. Mr.
Toledano and Mr. Lasky go beyond believing Chambers told the truth.
They apparently regard him as a hero of our times, a martyr to prin–
ciple and to the security of the nation. Chambers is their hero, Hiss
their villain.
It
ig an unthoughtful and dangerous attitude; in logic, an untenable
one. There is nothing Hiss has done which Chambers did not do. It
must therefore be Chambers' repentance which makes him a hero. But it
would follow, then, that were Hiss to repent, he too would be a hero--–
unless Mr. Toledano and Mr. Lasky think it is too late for Hiss to
repent. But if they think it is too late for Hiss to repent, would they
be willing to name the precise date when it became impossible any
longer to wipe out the sin of having been a Communist?
Naturally, where any crime has been committed-I am setting aside
the whole delicate question of the moral difference between a crime
committed for personal gain and a crime committed in devotion to a
selfless goal-we are more sympathetic to the repentant person than
to the unrepentant. But repentance docs not retrospectively change a
crime into a virtue, any more than our sympathy for a repentant person
makes the unrepented crime any the more heinous.
It
is my sense of
Chambers that this is his own moral attitude vis
a
vis Hiss. Certainly
there is nothing in his conduct or in his public pronouncements cal–
culated to assert a moral superiority to Hiss. And this does him much
credit.
The defenders of Hiss have made Chambers out to be a sort
of moral monster. They have dreamed up or transmitted on hearsay
all manner of impalpable personal charges to explain away the palpable
evidence of documents transcribed in Hiss's handwriting or on Hiss's
typewriter from government papers available to Hiss. Some of these
specific charges either backfired or threatened to backfire if used in
court-the homosexual charge, for instance, of which Hiss's lawyers
