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made so much in their pre-trial investigations. Only the general al–
legation that he was a psychopath was brought to court, and even
this turned out to be more of a liability than an asset to the defense.
For what Hiss's lawyers failed to realize is that you cannot have things
like this only one way: if there are certain criteria for a psychopath,
they are as applicable to the psychiatrist--or the defendant-as to the
witness. Although the pro-Chambers people find it easy to understand
this, they do not seem to understand its corollary in the moral realm–
that if it is villainous for Hiss to have been a Communist agent, it is
equally villainous for Chambers.
Better, of course, that the concepts of heroism or villainy be
dropped from the discussion, for here they can only be concepts of
journalism, not of serious thought. And not only the personal suffer–
ing of the chief protagonists in the case, two men whose lives have
been ruined, but also and literally our fate as a nation requires that
it be dealt with on a higher than merely journalistic level, like that of
Seeds of Treason.
Mr. Toledano and Mr. Lasky speak of the case as
a tragedy. But the tone of their book is far indeed from the tone of
tragedy which, it seems to me, would be bound to accompany any
study of the Hiss case which proceeded from a wholesome political
premise-the premise that for the case to have served any useful pur–
pose there must be salvaged from it a better notion of liberalism.
A man in public life, like Hiss, is of necessity a man with many
friends. Even among public persons, however, Hiss would appear to
have had a special gift of friendship; everywhere one goes these days
one meets someone who knew him, either at college or at law school, in
Washington or through his work with the Carnegie Foundation-and
evidently to know him was to admire him. And yet, when one inquires
further into these relationships, it develops that most of Hiss's friends
W€lre not really friends at all, in the sense of being on frequent visiting
terms with him or in relationships of evolving intimacy. In fact, Hiss
seems to have had remarkably few friends, but a host of acquaintances
and associates for whom he suggested the possibility of friendship. His
looks, his manner, his career evidently symbolized for the men who
met him or worked with
him
some principle of their own personalities
which they would happily see fortified or multipled in their social world.
Every friend stands for something we either need or value in our own
characters, supplements what we lack or reinforces what we already
possess. For those who knew him Hiss apparently stood for a particular
kind of practical idealism-an idealism not wasted in fantasy or in an
