The Spy Who Loved Him.

Mr. Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir, by Tony Hiss (Knopf, 256 pp., $24)

Alger Hiss was an accomplished man when he was sent to Lewisburg federal penitentiary in 1951 for lying about his past as a Communist spy. Then 46, he had been clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes, shaper of FDR's First Hundred Days, Yalta negotiator, U.N. founding father, and head of the Carnegie Endowment. When Whittaker Chambers accused him of espionage, Hiss took his place among the most celebrated defendants in American history. No such luster for his son. "At 46," Tony Hiss tells us in his second volume of memoirs about his father, "I'd had one job and had been married for a couple of years; no kids yet. By the time Alger was the age I am now, his pre-Lewisburg existence was a thing of the past."

Tony Hiss has a habit of portraying himself as a loser, diffident to the point of paranoia. His childhood was wracked by nightmares, odd urges to throw himself under trains and off balconies, and various self-destructive "accidents." It's hard to think of a more depressing exercise than dredging up reminiscences of his monthly "don't- waste- even-a-drop-of-it" visits to his incarcerated father, and of Alger's attempts, in hundreds of letters, to get Tony back on the right track. And yet, it's clear that Tony Hiss developed a closeness to his father during his prison days that he never enjoyed before or after: "My world-traveling, dazzling, handsome, hardworking, so-often-away-from- home father, who, when home, had become my so-easily-monopolized-by- others father, had now been fastened in one fixed spot."

Perhaps rehabilitating well is the best revenge. Alger Hiss was a beloved inmate, particularly among mafiosi, whom he taught reading, astronomy, and geology, and who honored him as a "man of heart." They were right. Hiss's unwillingness to whine, while surely owing in part to a fear of further self-incrimination, also had in it a large measure of stoicism. "I of course have my share of boredom," he wrote, "but most of that comes from other men trying to kill time by aimless and rather pathetic chatter, not unique to prisons. But basically I find the concept of consciously killing time (a very literally true phrase, here) as repugnant and alien as ever. It strikes me as being partial suicide here as elsewhere." In prison, he entertained his son with epistolary fairy tales, taught him about art (his favorites: Picasso, Manet, Cezanne, Berthe Morisot), recommended shows and openings that Tony could visit as his "eyes and ears," bucked him up with tender words of praise, and sought to make a man of him. ("The most admirable psychological trait displayed here seems to me to be moral courage," one letter runs.) Alger Hiss's prison term was an education in humanity-for himself and for his son.

The mistake at the heart of this book is its author's assumption that being a mensch, a Renaissance man, or a stoic is somehow inconsistent with being a Communist spy. In prison, Hiss did renounce a side of himself-exploitative, power-hungry, mean-that had frightened even his defenders. While that renunciation may well have had a spiritual component, a bigger factor, which his son cannot admit, was surely his having retired. A Communist spy who gets caught is in the same position as a pitcher who throws his arm out: He can believe whatever he likes, but he has become forever useless in his chosen line of work.

Tony Hiss never saw this, and still doesn't. In fact, having doubts about his father's innocence "was one of the few problems I wasn't wrestling with." The son calls Whittaker Chambers a "serial liar" and sniggers at those who have "drunk from the Chambers waters." He complains that Chambers's autobiography, Witness, paints Hiss as "a strange, misshapen, mean-spirited, unlovely person." Witness, of course, does no such thing. It paints Hiss as ultimately deluded, certainly, but every bit the dashing, principled, driven, tough, brilliant man described in this book.

Early on in The View from Alger's Window, it dawns on the reader that Tony Hiss not only knows nothing about Whittaker Chambers; he has a very shaky hold on the facts of the Hiss-Chambers case itself. This is an ignorance the whole family cynically cultivated. Just beneath the surface luster of ooh-ahh art connoisseurship and epigrammatic drollery was a modus operandi that was self-righteous, brutal, humorless, and antinomian. "There is a war on and the fight is to the death," Alger Hiss's brother-in-law Tommy Fansler wrote to him in jail. "The war is not a war between haves and have nots but between the grabbers and the givers, between the aggressives and the passives, between the haters and those who love. . . . You were much too clean, too forgiving, too gentle, too honest, too loving."

But the main love on display in the Hiss family is self-love, which in the case of Tony's half-brother Tim reaches megalomaniacal levels. "In a way, my troubles were of my own making," the latter recalls. "I was too honest." Too honest in revealing his homosexuality to Navy authorities, that is, which left Tim worried he'd be blackmailed if he testified against Chambers. But he should have done it anyway, Tim Hiss now thinks: "If I had testified, [then] it would have been three- against-two at any rate-my word added to Alger's and [Hiss's wife] Prossy's against the testimony of the two Chambers[es]." It is hard to tell which is Tim's greater delusion: his refusal to acknowledge that Hiss was convicted not on hearsay but on a mountain of physical evidence that has since grown to Himalayan proportions; or his belief that his own testimony would have changed the shape of the 20th century. Today, Tim Hiss believes that if he'd taken the stand, Alger Hiss would have been vindicated. Hiss would have stayed at the Carnegie Endowment, where he would have kept McCarthyism from happening, and moved on to the U.N., where he would have prevented the Korean and Vietnam wars.

One can condemn the crimes of Alger Hiss and remark his sons' delusions without faulting Tony Hiss for writing this book. In any civilized world, filial piety will-and should-trump ideological responsibility or historical accuracy. Indeed, one of the most curious things about Communists turns out to have been their consistent inability to triumph over their bourgeois feelings for their families. Whittaker Chambers was a famously doting father, and Alger Hiss appears to have taken his son's troubles deeply to heart while in prison. At root, there was a great deal about Communism that even its most hardened adherents couldn't believe for an instant.