A Lovely Memoir of an Ugly Chapter in American History

“The View from Alger’s Window” is a love letter from a devoted son to a loving father.

It responds, with the deepest affection, to the letters Alger Hiss wrote to his wife and his young, lonely and troubled son half a century ago from the U.S. penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., where he spent 44 months after his conviction for perjury in one of the most famous spy cases in American history.

Alger’s letters--445 of them--form the backbone of Tony Hiss’ book, upon which he has hung a moving account of his own life and a sketch of the lives and personalities of his father, mother, brother and some memorable friends who stood by the family in its time of deepest trouble.

It must be hard for someone who does not remember the days of the beginning of the Cold War and the welling up of McCarthyism (after Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy) in the American public mind to imagine the tension, the turmoil and the fears of those years. Having just won World War II against Germany and Japan, America faced a new and ominous threat in the Soviet Union. Soviet agents, real and imagined, became an obsession with the American right wing.

Into this maelstrom fell Alger Hiss, Harvard graduate, committed New Dealer, State Department official, secretary-general of the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations. This stiff old-fashioned American, who had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., was accused by a scruffy former Time magazine writer, Whittaker Chambers, of having slipped secret U.S. government papers to him when Chambers was a Soviet agent in Washington, D.C.

Asked to testify before a grand jury, Hiss reluctantly agreed to testify and, because of his testimony there (with then-Rep. Richard M. Nixon in full cry after him), was indicted for perjury. He was tried, but the jury was hung; he was tried again and this time convicted. His son was 9 1/2 when his father went to jail and 13 when he was released. Tony Hiss writes that he has never doubted his father’s innocence. He acknowledges, though, that there were two Algers: one, the formal man some called arrogant; the other, the playful, sensitive man whom Tony got to know as a friend after Alger went to prison in the spring of 1951.

This man wrote Tony letters of great charm, often illustrated with little drawings, about the view from his prison window across the fields of Pennsylvania and the birds he saw there; about his job in the prison storeroom; and, enchantingly, about the adventures of the S.L.B.--the Sugar Lump Boy, Alger’s imaginative creation of a little creature who was much like young Tony and who, by example, helped Tony with the difficult business of growing up as the son of the imprisoned perjurer.

In this book, Tony Hiss also considers whether there was, indeed, a third Alger Hiss--the secretive schemer described by Chambers. The son concludes, not surprisingly, that there never was. His father was, as revealed in his prison letters, too gentle a creature. He and his wife in their hundreds of saved letters to one another mentioned communism only once and that sardonically, derisively.

And, in his father’s defense, there was Hiss’ reverence for Justice Holmes. That great American, a true hero of the Union in the Civil War, would never have countenanced a betrayal of the nation he nearly died helping to save, and Tony Hiss says that Alger never would have either. Tony Hiss writes that Alger’s more open, tender side might never have been revealed without his prison experience. During it, he looked long and straight at himself and his relations with his fellows, both prisoners and family.

Alger Hiss’ marriage to Tony’s mother, Priscilla, broke up after he got out of prison, but he seems to have been at peace with himself the rest of his life. He died in 1996 at 92. In recent years, two historians, Allen Weinstein and Sam Tanenhaus, have concluded that Chambers was telling the truth and Hiss was lying. But in this lovely book, Tony Hiss, for decades a writer for the New Yorker and now the father of a young son, seems to be at peace with himself too. With some historians, he has asked a federal judge to release the still-secret transcripts of the crucial grand jury testimony. The judge recently agreed but set no release date.