Trial by Jury

A GENERATION ON TRIAL, U.S.A. v. ALGER Hiss (342 pp.)--Alistair Cooke --Knopf ($3.50).

Like most important U.S. trials, the case of the United States v. Alger Hiss was so fully reported that many surfeited newspaper readers still wonder just what went on in the courtroom. The most convenient and agreeable way to find out is to read A Generation on Trial by Alistair Cooke, brilliant U.S. correspondent of England's Manchester Guardian, himself a U.S. citizen since 1941.

Cooke has made no effort to go behind the trial evidence or to probe into the personal histories of Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Using only the court records and documents, and the evidence of his own eyes & ears as a reporter of the trials, Author Cooke has succeeded in the difficult twin task of fairly boiling down the thousands of pages of testimony while vividly restoring the sometimes dramatic, often boring, courtroom scene. Cooke never forgets that he has set out to be a reporter and not a judge; as one result, his book induces in the reader some of the tension that must have gripped the jury.

Yet if Cooke is laudably fair as a reporter, the title of his book is a misnomer --one that his introduction labors unsuccessfully to justify. He concedes that "though the count was perjury, the implied charge [against Alger Hiss] was espionage." At the same time, he works overtime to imply that Hiss's whole generation should now be saying to itself, there but for the grace of God go I.

Good reporter though he is, Cooke chooses to forget how few Americans were Communists even in the hungry '30s. Nor does he ever point up clearly the important difference between U.S. intellectuals who flirted with Marxism, and Communists who were committed to treason. His notion that the anti-Fascist climate of the '30s somehow establishes the need for present sympathy with traitors is charity gone wild and mars a fine journalistic performance.

On the trials themselves, Generation is a model of balance and lucidity. The tangled evidence is unraveled with easy assurance, the important issues coolly extricated from the legal verbiage that obscures them. What is almost as remarkable as Cooke's overall performance is his knack for indicating the worth of each piece of evidence as it came before the jury. Inevitably it becomes clear that the incriminating typewriter and the stolen State Department documents must doom the defendant. In the two trials, 20 of the 24 jurymen believed Chambers. Writes Cooke: "The verdict [in the second trial] galvanized the country into a bitter realization of the native American types who might well be dedicated to betrayal from within."

Quite apart from the importance of its subject, Generation is remarkably good reading. Every courtroom character from the principals to the least consequential witness comes sharply alive:

P: Judge Kaufman "darted in, flushed and lively-eyed. He was a small neat man with a sort of Disney apprehensiveness. His big black bow tie came over the top of the bench and he squatted like a meditative black rabbit."

P: Judge Goddard: "... a magnificent old American bald eagle with two white nests of hair sprouting from long ears, curving quizzical eyes, an imperial hook of nose, and a huge clapper of a mouth."

P: Defense Lawyer Stryker: "His bristly white hair grew in front to a single strand of rope, combed down like Caesar's; and he began to move easily around the courtroom with the proprietary air of an elder Roman senator managing to convey to the spectators, if not to the bench, that he had been called upon to share the dispensation of justice with the presiding judge."

P: Prosecutor Murphy: "The big face with small round features, the hair line symmetrical as a wig, the walrus mustache that slept peacefully between his nostrils and where his lower lip must be; and above all, the mild blue eyes: all this balanced on a vast straight back and sprawling limbs composed the regulation type of a conscientious British guards officer watching for any tactics not in keeping with the dignity of a court-martial. But when he came to his feet and opened his mouth, the likeness collapsed. If he recalled anything English at all, it was the solid guardian of the law whose midnight shadow ambles down every village lane quieting the fears of all good men and true."

P: Alger Hiss (at the end of the first trial) "sat quite rigid, with a keen dizzy look about his eyes, like a man steeling himself against the first undeniable symptom of an internal hemorrhage."

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