DATE: Sunday, June 15, 1997                 TAG: 9706100421

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY BROWN H. CARPENTER 

                                            LENGTH:   89 lines

DUMPY CHAMBERS BROUGHT DOWN NATTY HISS

WHITTAKER CHAMBERS

A Biography

SAM TANENHAUS

Random House. 638 pp. $35.

Who would think we need another look at Whittaker Chambers almost half a century after the anonymous, dumpy, ill-kempt Time magazine editor and former Russian agent fingered Alger Hiss, the natty, effete pride of the New Deal, as having been a Soviet spy during the 1930s while serving in the State Department?

The congressional hearings and subsequent perjury trial of Hiss seem hardly relevant today, although Chambers' accusations were political dynamite in 1948, when Republicans were eager to capture the White House and the Democrats seemed vulnerable to ``soft on communism'' charges.

After all, if Chambers' allegations were true, the crimes had occurred long before Russia was considered an enemy, and most of the documents Hiss supposedly passed on to Chambers, his handler, seem innocuous by contemporary espionage standards. The evidence was circumstantial and hard to piece together. And, of course, Hiss had left the government in 1947 to head the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and no longer posed a danger, whatever the case.

All that said, however, Hiss' perjury conviction for lying to the House Un-American Activities Committee - the statute of limitations prevented an espionage indictment - helped create the bitter left-right political debate that lasted until the Soviet Union broke up.

Hiss' downfall put Richard Nixon in the national spotlight, inspired Sen. Joseph McCarthy to launch his vicious search for communists in the government and sharply focused America's gathering Cold War paranoia.

Tanenhaus' book forces us to look at those years when the Cold War began, a time rank with illogical accusations as well as legitimate concern over Stalin's tyranny.

So who was this man who roiled the American political scene during the years after World War II? The boy born Jay Vivian Chambers in 1901 spent his mother-dominated childhood in Long Island as ``a pudgy `butterball' dressed like Lord Fauntleroy,'' author Sam Tanenhaus says. He later ditched ``Vivian'' and took the name of his maternal grandfather, Charles Whittaker.

Throughout his adulthood, Chambers was overweight, unhealthy, bookish and not too concerned with personal hygiene. He was a vibrant literary presence during his undergraduate years at Columbia University, where, during the 1920s, both faculty and students created a whirlwind of leftist intellectual activity in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

He dropped out of college, worked briefly at manual labor jobs and toured ideologically torn Europe, all the while honing his growing sympathy for the underdog. Later he translated German novels.

He joined the Communist Party in 1925, writing for the Daily Worker and other Marxist publications. In 1932, he agreed to spy for Moscow, dutifully copying U.S. government documents stolen by Hiss and others, passing the duplicates to his handler and returning the originals. He quit in 1938, terrorized and appalled by Stalin's mass murders, and evolved into a zealous anti-Communist who began alerting Time magazine readers about Soviet duplicity even before World War II ended.

Chambers came by his fears legitimately, as Tanenhaus succinctly puts it: ``For six years he had gone without a fixed identity, lived at a total of 21 different addresses, had signed false names to leases, passports, and checks, had invented aliases for his wife and children, had paid no income tax. His colleagues had included veterans of the Lenin School and of Siberian prisons. searching the faces he met for signs of treachery.''

And it was this experience that made him more than a match for Hiss when the two faced each other during that first televised congressional hearing in the summer of 1948. Chambers had a mission; Hiss' ``desperate measures - the evasions, the lies, the acting, the smears - had the mundane purpose of preserving an endangered reputation,'' Tanenhaus says.

The author also points out that the United States had already embarked against the Soviet menace with the Truman Plan, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift and a loyalty program, so Chambers' revelations didn't really matter much.

A successful biography should contain at least three elements: A thorough sense of what made the subject tick, the times that molded him and why his life is subject to the author's endeavors. Sam Tanenhaus succeeds admirably on all counts. MEMO: Brown H. Carpenter is a staff editor. ILLUSTRATION: FILE photo

Whittaker Chambers testified against Alger Hiss, charging him with

having been a Soviet spy during the 1930s while serving in the State

Department. Chambers said hiss passed him documents, which he copied

and sent on to the Soviets.

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