Tony Hiss: "My dad wrote 445 letters to us at home from prison."

The View From Alger’s Window; Alfred A. Knopf,

1999; 241 pages; $24 Type: nonfiction, memoir

Place: Manhattan; United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; Vermont Time: 1940s-present

Who Should Read This: Anyone old enough to have followed the Hiss-Chambers imbroglio or anyone so young that the names don’t ring a bell. Any hard-line Old Cold Warrior whose pantheon includes Whittaker Chambers; anybody outraged at Chambers’s Maryland farm being given Historic Landmark status. Anyone who wants to discover a way to make eloquent use of a parent’s letters, as Tony Hiss has done. Anyone curious as to how a man who graduated from Harvard Law so gracefully did 44 months of federal time.

Author: Tony Hiss, only child of Alger and Priscilla Hiss, was born in 1941 in Washington, D.C. Hiss’s father at that time was a New Deal bright star. A Harvard Law School graduate, the elder Hiss clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He joined President Roosevelt’s administration in 1933, first in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and then, in 1936, Hiss went to the State Department. Hiss was centrally present at several critical points in United States history: he accompanied President Roosevelt at the 1945 Yalta Conference and shortly after Roosevelt’s death, Hiss was a central figure at the San Francisco meeting that founded the United Nations. Hiss also played a significant role in' drafting the UN’s charter. In 1946, Hiss left government, moved his family to Manhattan, and became president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which had among its advisors John Foster Dulles. The Dalton School hired Priscilla Hiss as a teacher and Tony enrolled there. Life must have been pleasant for the Hisses.

In 1948, a plump and rumpled Time magazine editor, Whittaker Chambers, went before the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee and accused Alger Hiss, while a government employee, of having passed him classified documents. The documents, Chambers charged, were handed over to a Communist spy ring and thence to the Soviet government. Chambers further charged that he and Hiss during the 1930s had been Communist Party members. Hiss sued Chambers for slander. Chambers then produced microfilm that he had hidden in a pumpkin grown in a patch on his Westminster, Maryland, dairy farm. This microfilm showed documents identified as classified pages from the Departments of State, War, and Navy, some believed to have been marked by Hiss. Soon after, a federal grand jury indicted Hiss on charges of perjury. After two trials, the first ending in a hung jury, Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to serve five years in a federal penitentiary. In March 1951, after exhausting all legal appeals, Hiss entered federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he spent 44 months. After leaving prison, he could no longer work as a lawyer and so took a job as an office-supplies salesman. Hiss died in 1996, at 92.

The brouhaha that surrounded the Chambers-Hiss confrontations, hearings, and trials was similar to that produced in this era by O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. Everyone during those years had an opinion about Hiss’s guilt or innocence and Chambers’s veracity or lack of same. And, 50 years later, people who were not even alive in 1948 still hold surprisingly strong opinions as to whether Hiss or Chambers told the truth.

Tony Hiss was seven when the troubles began. His life was irrevocably changed. Although he was allowed to continue on at Dalton, his mother was let go. After Hiss left prison, he and Priscilla separated. Tony graduated from Harvard in 1963. He became a writer at The New Yorker, turning out hundreds of “Talk of the Town” pieces and longer signed features. “The ‘Talk’ pieces,” Hiss said, on the morning that we talked, “were fun; you were licensed to go have fun and to poke your nose into everything that was going on all over the city. Of course The New Yorker had a famous semireclusive editor, William Shawn, who was fascinated by the city but rarely left his office. So you would be his eyes and ears. He gave you many opportunities to go out and enrich your life.” Hiss is author of nine previous books, including the awardwinning The Experience of Place. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. Hiss and his wife, the writer Lois Metzger, and their son Jacob, live in Manhattan.

The View From Alger’s Window refers to the view from the window in the cell where Hiss was incarcerated. But the book also makes reference to views from windows in the Eighth Street Greenwich Village apartment where the Hisses lived when theirjtroubles began. Tony Hiss lives in that same apartment now.

Hiss and I talked about how unusual it was nowadays in America to live in the home where one grew up. “People do say that,” Hiss said. “I suppose in America it is incredibly unusual, although in Europe it’s still pretty ordinary. Certainly in New York there aren’t many people who live where they grew up. Actually, though, this is not the only place I’ve lived. When I *was growing up on Eighth Street I did have the hope that one day if some things went right I would some day live on Tenth Street. And I achieved that aim. But now I am back where I started from.

“It’s a lovely apartment. It’s affordable. It has this beautiful garden in the back that’s great for kids. It’s just irresistible. It’s certainly not that we’re thinking of it as a shrine or anything. When we got here I was a little hesitant about moving back in. My wife said, ‘Look, in the living room let’s just switch the place of this desk and these book shelves.’ We flipped them, and suddenly it was our apartment, not my parent’s apartment anymore, and we could just be grateful to them for having found it and for having brought some nice furniture up from Washington that we could still make use of and we’ve been very happy ever since. What was once my room is now my son’s room. A nice room for a kid.”

When, after Hiss’s mother’s death, Tony Hiss and his wife moved back into his parents' old apartment, he found in a closet a box filled with letters his father had written from prison. These letters are at the heart of the text of The View From Alger’s Window.

“In addition to the 445 letters my dad wrote to us at home from prison, there were all the letters that my mother and I and his brother and brother-in-law had written him while he was there that he had treasured and saved. Three letters a week my dad was sending home and seven letters a week he was receiving, all during this time of his incarceration. Also, there was the correspondence between my mother and father going back to 1924, the year they had met on an oceanliner going to Europe, one of the first years of cheap fares for students on the old oceanliners to Europe. And so it’s both wonderful to have so much of those lives recorded in such detail, and it makes you wonder what future generations are going to do to stay in touch with events after the fact. But here in his letters were the very critical years of my growing up that were recorded in such amazing detail.”

Before he began work on what became The View From Alger’s Window, Hiss visited the cell where his father lived.

“I think that was the other thing that unlocked this book for me. Not often are you able to acknowledge a profound debt of gratitude to the federal prison system, but it was people at the Bureau of Prisons who made it possible for my wife and me to go and visit the very cell that my dad had lived in, this room that he had never been able to leave and that I had never been able to enter. For 44 months. Standing in that little room and feeling the weight of that place on my shoulders, I was more than ever amazed at the beautiful, sparkling letters he had been able to write home to me. To me these letters really are a window into a soul. One of the ironies of the story is that it was there of all places that he and I got to be good friends. For the First time in my life my world-traveling father was in one place, and in a funny kind of way 1 had him all to myself. In another irony it was in this place that the innermost parts of his thoughtfulness and caring and sweetness and sense of humor and even silliness came bubbling up to the surface. Of all people, I was the recipient of this. It made me realize that I was in a position to help people see a human being behind the headlines, to show the many dimensions of a person, complex as all people worth knowing are.

“1 don’t think of this as a book that glamorizes my father. I do write about his shortcomings, his character traits that made it hard for him to defend himself, because he was such a true believer in, and even victim of, old-fashioned American morality, so convinced that the court system existed to exonerate the innocent, that if he could only have his day in court, the truth could be made plain. At the same time I think he presented to the world a rather cool, lawyerly, somewhat stuffy face. I could see how that had some overlap with the person whom I had known so well, but at the same time people who had only seen that face might have found some overlap between that and the truly monstrous picture of him that was being put forward by his opponents and enemies. But to me there was a total disconnect between the person I had grown up knowing and this strange Iago-like fellow that his opponents were writing about.

“The odd thing is that still, all these many years later, it’s one man’s word against another. So, how do you weigh the worth of anyone’s word? It seems to me that seeing what they’re like inside has a lot to do with that.”

Whittaker Chambers died in 1961, 60 years old. I asked Hiss if he ever wondered what life has been like for Chambers’s two children.

“Sure. I know very little about them. I once spoke on the phone to the son, who seems like a nice fellow. I do know that he lives on the family’s farm in Westminster, Maryland. The sister is married and lives in San Francisco.”

It must have been a very hard life for them, I said.

“I would think it must have been.” Hiss paused, then added, “I am sure they are proud of their father.”

I said that I found it interesting that opinions were still so strong about his father’s guilt or innocence.

“For some people,” Hiss said, “it is still a current event and not an historical event at all, and they debate the subject vehemently and passionately. I think it is possibly because both figures, Hiss and Chambers, became iconic emblems of the Cold War. I think particularly since the 1980s when Whittaker Chambers was officially elevated to such honored status with President Reagan awarding him, posthumously, the Medal of Freedom and the farm [where the so-called “Pumpkin Papers” were hidden] being made a National Historic Landmark that some people seemed very threatened by the idea that perhaps Chambers was not telling the truth.

“Oddly, there are those for whom it is still today’s news. But, then, too, many people remember nothing about the case. Studs Terkel told me he went out into the streets of Chicago in the 1980s interviewing people, asking, ‘Who’s Alger Hiss?’ And one man told him, ‘Black ball player, got in trouble with the government.’ Another man said, ‘Nazi spy.’ Of course there are people in their 20s who don’t know who you are talking about at all.”

I said that 1 would think it difficult to always be expected to defend his father.

“I have never set myself up as a scholar of the Hiss case. The only career decision I was able to come to as a college senior was not to become a lawyer, so I didn’t become a lawyer, and I didn’t become an historian and I didn’t become a Cold War researcher. With my father’s encouragement, I spent a long time trying to create a life that wasn’t just being the son of Alger Hiss. I’ve spent my life writing books about cities and landscapes. The only kind of book I could write would be a personal book, not a political book.”

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