VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.

• Author: Ignatius, Davis
• Position: Review

VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America By John Earl Hatnes and Harvey Klebr Yale University Press, $30

I've never had much use for post-modern literary theories--which are always reminding you, usually in unreadable prose, of the rather obvious point that there's no "objective" meaning to a work of literature or historical event independent of its cultural context. That kind of theorizing makes me very glad I escaped graduate school before it was too late.

But these two books, both touching on the story of Alger Hiss, offer such radically different accounts that you can't help thinking that there really are different kinds of truth--conditioned by the different stances of the observers, derived from the differing nature of the evidence they cite, and ultimately incapable of speaking to each other. That's why some historical arguments never end, despite what one side regards as irrefutable factual support for its view. They can't agree on what "was" was.

Tony Hiss has written a loyal and loving memoir about his father, Alger Hiss, perhaps the most famous spy in modern American history. The book's title, "The View from Alger's Window," refers to the window in Greenwich Village from which the father would gaze, before he was sent off to Lewisburg Penitentiary on a perjury conviction, and from which the son would gaze during the 44 months his father was incarcerated. Tony Hiss calls it a "time funnel."

The memoir is based largely on the letters Alger wrote home to his family while he was in prison. Tony Hiss gathered the letters after his mother's death, and he has used them to recreate the kind of man his father really was--that is to say, the kind of man his son, through the letters, believes him to be. From a historian's perspective, they're the most subjective and unreliable record imaginable; since they represent Alger Hiss' attempt to explain himself to the people he loved. But they're endearing--if nothing else for Alger Hiss's absolute refusal to admit guilt, confess weakness, feel sorry for himself, or blame others.

Tony Hiss says of his father's letters: "They are a window flung open wide onto a life, a bird of the spirit springing into the air, a heart made plain." The son finds in the letters nothing whatsoever that would support any notion that his father was ever a communist, much less a spy. Instead, he finds a man who made up charming stories about the wily and resourceful Sugar Lump Boy to boost his son's spirits; a man...