Slander of a Dead Man

FRIENDSHIP AND FRATRICIDE: AN ANALYSIS OF WHITTAKER CHAMBERS & ALGER HISS by Meyer A. Zeligs, M.D. 476 pages. Viking. $8.95.

This is not a conventional biography, but something that might be called a "psychograph." Like the recently published study by Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt of President Wilson, it applies psychoanalytic theory to a subject the author did not know, let alone treat.

To a whole new generation, the Hiss-Chambers case is only a dim memory or a hearsay mystery, but it retains its historical significance and fascination. If one assumes that Hiss was guilty, his behavior made perfect sense; by his denial of the charges against him, he was trying to hide his Communist past. But if one assumes that Hiss was innocent, the behavior of his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, made no sense at all; what could his motive have been for accusing an innocent man? The only plausible answer: he must have been mad. From the start, people who could not accept Hiss's guilt took refuge in that belief. Now a reputable psychiatrist has written a massive book in support of that thesis.

In 1950, a federal jury found Hiss guilty of lying when he denied having passed state secrets to Chambers, who had been a Communist spy. San Francisco's Dr. Meyer A. Zeligs asserts that he is not concerned with anyone's guilt or innocence. But he admits that "whatever imbalance" the book contains he has "carefully left untouched." That is putting it mildly. Zeligs has, in effect, undertaken to rewrite Chambers' autobiography, Witness, and reshape its author to fit a Procrustean bed of neuroses. To a more casual reader, Witness, while a little Wagnerian in style, presents the picture of a very emotional man who was driven by a capacity for total dedication, first to Communism and then to combatting Communism. But to Dr. Zeligs, Chambers was a sex freak, a gnome of evil spirit, whose life was a phantasmagoria of "psychic manipulations."

From his birth to his death (hinted in the book to be suicide, even though he was known to be seriously ill with heart trouble), Whittaker Chambers was a guilt-ridden man, in Zeligs' view. He felt guilty for his painful birth, guilty for his "hatred" of his parents, and guilty for his love of his brother Richard, a wild, leching lad who committed suicide at 22. Chambers' whole life, to hear Zeligs tell it, became a search for a mystical brother whom he could force to re-enact a ritual death pact. The consummation of that search was the symbolic destruction of his "mystical brother," Alger Hiss.

Pumpkin Idol. The rest of the analysis is equally imaginative. When Chambers climbs through a window (in the course of his tempestuous courtship of his future wife) he is not climbing through a window, he is "symbolically re-enacting the fantasy of his birth and the near-loss of his mother." His gift for self-dramatization and his vivid imagination are turned into alleged proof that nothing he said could be true.

The conspiratorial behavior characteristic of all spies is used as evidence of Chambers' psychopathic eccentricity. And the celebrated pumpkin was not a pumpkin at all but Chambers' own demented fantasy of "a pumpkin-shaped idol (Fate)," a sort of vegetable womb by which Chambers was able to "deliver himself" of a "brainchild." Writes Zeligs in all solemnity: "In the symbolic act of hiding the microfilm* for ten years (gestation), then transplanting (inseminating) it to the inside of a pumpkin from which he had scraped out the natural seeds (aborted), and then 'delivering' his self-created 'life preserver' to the committee investigators, there is discernible the recapitulation of his death-and-rebirth fantasy."

Granted that psychoanalysis speaks in metaphors, those who do not view human events solely through Dr. Zeligs' Freudian prism can only feebly object that when Chambers delivered his papers, he did not become a mother. The House Committee on Un-American Activities has been called many things, but it has never before been mistaken for a panel of gynecologists.

Freudian Jujus. Unfortunately for Dr. Zeligs' credibility, he is obliged to go outside his own closed system from time to time and face solid pieces of evidence. But even these become "magic objects," "fetishes," or "idols." Yet the object that sealed Hiss's verdict was no Freudian juju; it was a Woodstock typewriter, which could hardly have been conjured from Chambers' diseased imagination. Confronted with this fact, the imagination of others conjured up a second typewriter, constructed by persons to frame Hiss. For Dr. Zeligs, this infernal machine exists because it must exist, just as for some theorists about the Kennedy assassination there must be two Lee Harvey Oswalds.

Dr. Zeligs seems to consider almost anything admissible evidence. Chambers' alleged homosexuality is supported by a single unnamed witness who claimed that in 1932 he was assaulted by Chambers in his sleep. It is certainly remarkable, considering the pitiless scrutiny to which Chambers' life was subjected by numberless investigators eager to discredit him, that no stronger evidence than this was ever unearthed.

Although Dr. Zeligs' implacable curiosity has followed Chambers from behind the cradle to beyond the grave, the same psychiatric attentions have not been visited upon Alger Hiss. He is presented as a man of great capacity, singularly kind, though with a somewhat formal cast of mind. Unlike suicides in the Chambers family, which become clues to a sinister pathology of character, the suicides of Hiss's father and sister are simply private misfortunes borne with dignity and fortitude. But then, Chambers did not cooperate with his retrospective analyst, while Hiss did. In fact, Hiss corresponded voluminously with Zeligs and went over the manuscript before publication.

Friendship and Fratricide is an ingenious but grotesque book. It is also, in the guise of dispassionate scientific inquiry, the slander of a dead man.

* Some State Department documents and Hiss's handwritten notes about others, which Chambers testified he had received from him in 1938.

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