BRIAN LAMB, HOST, CSPAN Q&A: Susan Jacoby, in the words of your mother, why another book on Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers?

SUSAN JACOBY, AUTHOR: Actually my mother’s exact words were, “Who the hell cares about that anymore?”

LAMB: And what’d you tell her?

JACOBY: Well, I told her – I explained to her that first of all that political intellectuals still cared about it a lot. And what she said was, well, all right, but you’re going to have to somehow explain in this book why anybody under the age of 70 should be interested in this at all.

LAMB: And what’d you tell us?

JACOBY: Well, one of the reasons people under the age of 70 should be interested in it is when I went back and I read the contemporary press accounts – and not just that but you know the debate that’s gone on for the last 60 years really – I saw how many of the arguments of which the Hiss case became symbolic are being played out in another form today.

A good example – I wrote this book before our economic crisis and before President Obama was elected – but one of the great issues surrounding the Alger Hiss case from the standpoint of the Right and the Left was – is that in many ways, because he was a New Deal official, it was part of the whole attempt to besmirch the New Deal on the part of the Right. And on the part of the Left, their reaction to it was the only reason you’re doing this is to besmirch the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Well like who could have imagined that in the last year we would have this revival of this argument over whether the New Deal was any good or not and have, say, Obama’s plans being talked about in terms of socialism? And you’ve seen it play out. Did the New Deal work? Did it not work?

It’s fascinating that some of these issues that this case raises are still around in another form. Only the grandchildren of the original participants are playing it out.

LAMB: What are your political beliefs today? Where do you put yourself on the spectrum?

JACOBY: About Hiss or in general?

LAMB: Just in general. I mean, just give us a snapshot.

JACOBY: Oh, in general I am an unabashed liberal and proud of it and have been – not a neo-liberal, not the kind of liberal who is obsessed with communism, just a liberal which I consider an honorable designation.

LAMB: And if you consider yourself a liberal, give us three or four things that you believe in.

JACOBY: That’s interesting. Nobody’s ever asked me that. First of all, I believe not in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. I believe that the Constitution is a living document. And I don’t believe those geniuses who wrote that Constitution in 1787 ever imagined that somebody was going to be saying 200 years from now – because they were men of vision. They knew that the economy they lived in wasn’t going to stay the same. That’s part of what the American Revolution was about. They would not have expected that things would have been interpreted exactly as they were in 1787.

So I believe that the Constitution is a living document. I don’t believe that it is to be interpreted exactly, and we should be looking into the minds of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin, which were very different minds anyway. That’s one thing.

I believe that it is the obligation of government to help those who can’t help themselves, as the late Hubert Humphrey said, concern for people in the dawn of life, in the shadows of life, in the twilight of life. I believe that.

I don’t believe that the free market is capable of fully governing itself without stronger government regulation. In other words, I believe in a modified free market, which is really what we’ve had but not enough lately. And I am an absolute civil libertarian.

Now, I don’t mean to – I don’t mean to say that I don’t think that we need to take national security measures or we don’t need an army or anything like that. But I mean if there is an issue about liberty versus national security, it has to meet a pretty high threshold for me to deny civil liberties.

LAMB: In your book you give us some hints along the way of where you’ve been in your life, including living for the first eight years in Chicago. Why were you there?

JACOBY: My mom met my father at a USO dance when he was stationed in the Army in Chicago during World War II, so that’s why I was in Chicago. Then my family moved to Michigan. Then after I graduated from Michigan State I went to work as a reporter for The Washington Post.

Then I went to Moscow with my then husband who was a correspondent for The Washington Post then, wrote my first books on Russia, which is where I really became interested in all this kind of thing about spying and national security because there was a lot of talk about that. And anybody who’s ever been in the Sovietology business, as it used to be called, obviously is interested in this and in the Cold War.

LAMB: And where do you live now?

JACOBY: New York.

LAMB: This book, “The Age of American Unreason,” has been a big success for you. What year did this come out?

JACOBY: That came out actually – it was first published in hardcover in the winter of 2008 at the height of the presidential primary campaign.

LAMB: So where does this book fit? And when did you start writing it? When did you start thinking about I guess would be the best question.

JACOBY: It had kind of been in the back of my mind because I do live – I do live in a capital of political intellectuals of both the Right and the Left. And one of the things that struck me as strange is how obsessed a lot of people on both the Left and the Right still are with this case.

But I didn’t really begin to think seriously about writing it until there was a conference about Alger Hiss in history at New York University in the spring of 2007, actually. And I had just finished “The Age of American Unreason” so I was kind of at loose ends that year before it came out.

And I went to this conference and what it was is there was some new research this time suggesting that Hiss really wasn’t a Soviet spy, that it was somebody else. I won’t go into all of the details. Nobody but academics is interested in that.

But who was there was Hiss’s stepson, Timothy Hobson who was in his 90s at the time. And one of the things – he spoke, and two of the things he said was, one, that he was prevented from testifying on his stepfather’s behalf at his trial by Alger Hiss because Timothy Hobson was gay and he had received you know a kind of discharge from the Army and so on. It would have you know he wouldn’t have you know wanted him to testify and have what would happen to his life.

And then secondly he said that he knew, he absolutely knew, that Hiss never knew Whittaker Chambers because he – who was eight or nine years old at the time – never saw Chambers come to his parents’ house. The whole room erupted in applause because – this was a left-wing intellectual conference. The whole room erupted in applause. And I thought to myself, this is –what I saw was a really pathetic spectacle of an old man trying to earn his stepfather’s love from beyond the grave, really.

And also utter irrationality. I couldn’t tell you who was in my parents’ house when I was eight years old except for people who were there all the time. The idea that that is some kind of accurate testimony for something to say in his 90s that I never saw this guy in the house you know it shows a kind of irrationality that surrounds this issue on the Left. And we’ll get to the Right, too, because neither of them like this book, neither the Left nor the Right.

LAMB: And why is that?

JACOBY: Well, the Right doesn’t like it because I say, well I’m absolutely certain that Alger Hiss was guilty of perjury. He knew Chambers. And there’s no way a man like Alger Hiss – first of all, he said he didn’t know him – there would be no reason for him to say he didn’t know him if they hadn’t both been engaged in far left circles together, which didn’t mean the same thing in the 1930s that it did today, but he lied on the stand.

But the reason the Right doesn’t like the book is that I’m only 98 percent sure that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. In other words, the little two percent bit of doubt as far as they’re concerned you know I might as well be thinking that dinosaurs and human beings roamed the earth together, which there are some right-wing people who do think that actually.

LAMB: And the Left didn’t like it because?

JACOBY: Well, it’s hard on the Left in that I do think Hiss was guilty. And I think that – I think that the Left was blind to this for a lot of reasons. And one of them is a reason I alluded to when we were talking a few minutes ago. I think that for a lot of the Left could never look at the evidence fairly about Hiss because the fact is that the anti – the McCarthy era, which the Hiss case leads into although it was before, but the Hiss case stands at the beginning of the McCarthy era. It’s only a couple weeks after Hiss is convicted of perjury that McCarthy waives his I-have-here-in-my-hand papers.

And the fact is that in many instances, McCarthy era was an attack on the New Deal. The idea being that Roosevelt wasn’t someone who was a good American who wanted to reform American government and save capitalism. But his administration was full of communists who were working for the interests of the Soviet Union and who did incalculable damage to the United States.

I think that very understandably for certain kinds of liberals – there are – there also have been liberals who’ve accepted Hiss’s guilt for years. But I’m talking about farther left people. And I think the fact that the attack on communists – the hunt for communists – was in many respects an attack on the New Deal is something that made it very difficult for liberals certainly who came to – who came of age in the 1940s or the 1950s to look at the evidence really.

LAMB: There is a footnote I wanted to ask you about. It’s not relevant to what you were just talking about here, but it’s about a fellow who you said – a guy by the name of George Koval.

JACOBY: Oh, oh the Soviet spy.

LAMB: Now leading up to that though, I’ve always been under the impression that Harry Truman didn’t know that we had the bomb when he became president.

JACOBY: That’s my impression, too, but I’m no expert on what Harry Truman knew about our weaponry when he became president.

LAMB: The reason I mentioned that is you say this fellow worked as a Russian spy – I mean, it’s one of your footnotes in here – and worked to the Manhattan Project.

JACOBY: Yes. He was the son of American communists who went back to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. But he was – he spent the first 18 years of his life here so he spoke perfect English. And at some point, having been trained you know by the Soviet GRU, which was the military arm of intelligence, they sent him back. He had a full college education, electronics, all that, and he actually did work in the Manhattan Project.

Now there’s a real spy, your perfect spy, somebody who grew up here so he spoke perfect idiomatic English, was taken back by his parents to the Soviet Union, which sort of disappeared him and trained him to be a spy to go back to America. Now that’s a real spy, a professionally trained spy, which most of the people who were called spies here – including Alger Hiss, if he was a spy or not.

What I said in that footnote was that the skills of a Koval bore approximately the same relationship to the skills of Hiss or Whittaker Chambers as Arturo Toscanini’s skills do the conductor of a high school orchestra.

LAMB: So Koval actually spread information to the Soviets about the Manhattan Project. So Stalin at Yalta knew there was a bomb.

JACOBY: Oh, Stalin, of course he knew.

LAMB: All along. And supposedly Truman did not even discuss it with him before they…

JACOBY: No. Of course the Soviets knew there was a bomb, and of course they were working on their own.

LAMB: So let’s go back to this.

JACOBY: Yes, that really is a footnote.

LAMB: No, it was but I found it interesting. What did you do after this conference then to get ready to write this book?

JACOBY: Oh dear. Well, one of the things, I was asked to write it, actually, by the publisher of the Yale University Press, Jonathan Brent, who is a Soviet expert himself, and they publish a lot of books on Soviet intelligence in America, not all of which I agree with. But anyway, this was to be a book, not rehashing the facts of the case but a book about the media and scholarly fight over the case the way it’s been presented, the position it’s occupied at different times, and sort of why this case had such a long history because one of the more natural things would have been that it would have just faded away after about 10 or 15 years. A lot of other Cold War cases did.

LAMB: Did he know before you were asked to write this book what your views were? Or did you know what your views were about Hiss?

JACOBY: About whether Hiss – about whether Hiss was a spy or what my political views are? Sure.

LAMB: No, but I mean he knew – you had already – you were sitting in that room full of people that thought Hiss was innocent it seems.

JACOBY: Yes.

LAMB: But you didn’t think he was innocent.

JACOBY: No.

LAMB: OK.

JACOBY: But the point of this book really wasn’t about whether Hiss was innocent or not but why people felt so intensely about this.

LAMB: Well give us the first reason you found.

JACOBY: Well, well one I’ve already mentioned is that the Hiss case you know should I give, (unintelligible) I think not all of – not all of our listeners will know the chronology of this. Whittaker Chambers goes to testify before HUAC. Chambers was a member of the Communist Party. He left in 1938. And he names a lot of names of people he says were his buddies, Communist Party. Among them, he says, was Alger Hiss who was an official in the State Department. He made the administrative arrangements for the Yalta conference, Hiss did.

And so Hiss, out of all of the people Chambers names, is the only one who comes back and says I want to testify, he’s absolutely lying. And that’s what he does. And meanwhile, Richard Nixon is the most active person on the House on American activities at the time pursuing this.

A lot of the members of HUAC at that time were convinced – because Chambers seemed really kind of overwrought. Hiss was the smoothest example of diplomatic polish. Everything you think of as an elite education and all of that, that was the image Hiss presented. By contrast, Chambers looked a little bit wildly undone.

LAMB: Let’s stop there so that the audience can – if they haven’t seen it before, they can see what they look like. We’ve just got a little bit of video from – and you point out in the book it was the first ever televised hearing?

JACOBY: Yes, but one thing – it was televised. But one thing that I point out in the book that is very important in terms of perceptions over the years is that this, the Hiss case was the last big event in which television really played very little role. Only ten percent of Americans had televisions in 1948 when these hearings, a part of them, were shown. People got their information from newspapers and from radio, and television really played very little role in shaping people’s perceptions of this.

LAMB: All right. First we’ll look at Alger Hiss and then I’ll ask you some more questions about him and then we’ll go to Whittaker Chambers. Here he is from – this is just so people can see what he looked like and what he sounded like.

BEGIN VIDEO

ALGER HISS: The other side of this question is the reliability of the allegations before this committee. The undocumented statements of the man who now calls himself Whittaker Chambers, is he a man of consistent reliability, truthfulness and honor? Clearly not. He admits it and the committee knows it. Indeed is he a man of sanity?

Getting the facts about Whittaker Chambers – if that is his name – will not be easy. My own counsel have made inquiries in the past few days and they’ve learned that his career is not like those of normal men an open book. His operations have been furtive and concealed. Why? What does he have to hide?

I am glad to help get the facts.

END VIDEO

LAMB: Tell us some more about him.

JACOBY: Well – about Hiss?

LAMB: Yes.

JACOBY: Yes, well I look at that and I can see why most of the members of the committee were impressed by this testimony. It was true. Chambers was a liar. Hiss, Hiss was a – he was – his mentor at Harvard was Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They were his mentors.

He then, after he graduated from Harvard Law School, he was Oliver Wendell Holmes’ law clerk at the Supreme Court. In other words, there is no bigger – there is no bigger elite background, then or now, than this kind of thing. Your mentor at Harvard is a future Supreme Court Justice; the job you get because of your Harvard connections is as clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. I mean, this is about as – then he went to work after the clerkship with Holmes for a hotshot white shoe law firm in New York.

Then in 1932 he comes back to work for FDR as Agricultural Adjustment Administration as a lawyer, which so many young people who were enthusiastic about the New Deal did. Then he switches over to the State Department – I’m abbreviating his career.

But the point is this is someone who was on a high career trajectory with great connections with all of the Eastern establishment credentials. It’s probably why Richard Nixon hated him right on sight because he was the sort of person who Richard Nixon absolutely hated. It’s probably why Nixon you know was more skeptical about him because this was the kind of person he was skeptical about.

In fact, the former New York Times columnist Tom Wicker in his biography of Nixon, “One of Us,” reports an incident when Nixon first met Hiss. And Hiss says you know I went – I went to Harvard. I believe your college was Whittier. I mean, that tells you everything about both Alger Hiss – and I can imagine how Richard Nixon must have felt about that.

LAMB: There was a common thread of some sorts between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. You say in your book that Alger Hiss’s father committed suicide at age five, Hiss’s age five?

JACOBY: Hiss was five when his father committed suicide. Whittaker Chambers had a brother who committed suicide. I don’t know you know how much of a common thread that is. But you know one of the reasons that I am so convinced that Hiss – and again, Hiss was right, by the way. Chambers was lying, too. The first thing he did when he testified was he said that as far as he knew, Hiss hadn’t engaged in any espionage. And the reason Chambers said that was is the statute of limitations for espionage hadn’t expired.

When Hiss makes his espionage charges and leads us to the Pumpkin Papers, statute of limitations on espionage had expired by then. Hiss couldn’t be prosecuted for espionage – I mean Chambers couldn’t be prosecuted for espionage, and neither could Hiss because the statute of limitations had expired for Hiss, too.

LAMB: Back in 1948, where did Alger Hiss live? And was he married, did he have children?

JACOBY: Alger Hiss was the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And he was married and he had one son with his wife. And also his son – this man I mentioned, Timothy Hobson, by his wife’s first husband – also lived with him. He was – he went from the State Department to be the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One of his biggest backers was Former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, which is a real irony of history.

LAMB: Going back to your parents, by the way, you say that your parents were for FDR and then went to Eisenhower.

JACOBY: Yes, but that you know that was perfectly common. That was what – you know my parents were what would be called moderates in today’s parlance. And the vast majority of Americans voted for both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

LAMB: But you also – going back to the intellectual thing you were talking about – the Adlai Stevenson image back then…

JACOBY: Intellectual – liberal intellectuals? No. But Adlai Stevenson – well, I mean Adlai Stevenson comes in later in this story. But Adlai Stevenson was the kind of person who was – one of the, one of the campaign arguments against him – not made by Eisenhower, by the way, who was not a crazed anti-Communist crusader at all – but one of the arguments made against Stevenson by the Right in 1952 was that he had been insufficiently condemnatory of Hiss.

LAMB: Let’s go to Whittaker Chambers so we can see what he looks like and sounds like. It’s from the same hearing.

BEGIN VIDEO

WHITTAKER CHAMBERS: I was very fond of Mr. Hiss.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: You were very fond of Mr. Hiss?

CHAMBERS: Indeed I was. He was perhaps my closest friend.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: Mr. Hiss was your closest friend?

CHAMBERS: Mr. Hiss. Yes. Certainly the closest friend I ever had in the Communist Party. I don’t hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends. But we are caught in the tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting and I am fighting.

I testified against him with remorse and pity.

END VIDEO

LAMB: By the way, that logo in the corner from American Writers is a program we did eight years ago. That’s why it’s there. But go ahead. You were going to say something.

JACOBY: Well, I mean – I mean that clip says it all. I mean, Chambers looks overwrought, almost undone, sounds overwrought, almost undone. If you put the two men together, anybody but Richard Nixon would think that the crazy one was Whittaker Chambers.

But Whittaker Chambers is a fascinating character. The best work on – there were two things. One, his own autobiography, “Witness,” which is a doorstop weight book, like a – it’s fascinating as an example of a really extreme temperament. Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of Chambers is also extremely good and talks about many of the things that Chambers himself doesn’t talk about.

But Chambers was a brilliant student at Columbia in the 1920s. He came – he came from a class of brilliant people. Mark Van Doren, the famous poet and father of Charles Van Doren – speaking of 50s icons – was his favorite teacher. He was in a class of brilliant people, people like Lionel Trilling.

And people who were all – who were Left intellectuals but who, unlike Chambers, joined the Communist Party in 1924. That was very early. Most American intellectuals did not join the Communist Party until the 1930s when they were shaken by the crisis of capitalism all around them and thought that you know maybe communism you know was the only, was the only thing to do. It was very unusual for an intellectual to – an American-born intellectual – to have joined the Party in the 20s.

Then by – Chambers actually was a spy, although I suspect not one who had access to very much because he was just kind of a – he was the editor of the New Masses, the Communist newspaper in New York in the early 1930s. Then in 1938 he leaves the Party.

LAMB: Why would somebody want to be a communist back then? And what did it mean?

JACOBY: Well, in the 1930s, why Chambers wanted to be – Chambers was somebody who was a real true believer. And you see that when he turns against communism as well. This is a man who needed – he was a Christian scientist before he was a Communist.

But this was a man who wanted and needed something to believe in. He kept in touch with all of his old friends from Columbia, but they couldn’t you know imagine you know why anybody would be a Communist in the 20s.

In the 30s it was much more understandable, for reasons that I just said, that what seemed to be the collapse of capitalism. And then later on in the decade really the Communists seemed to be the only, at the time – now you’re talking now about 1937, 1938, the time of Munich – seemed to be the only people who seemed to be standing up coherently when England and France were lying down you know for Hitler in Munich and America was trying to stay out of it at that time. The Communist Party seemed to many American intellectuals on the Left – especially Jews, by the way – that this was the only, this was the only force standing up to Nazi Germany. And this, of course, comes after the Spanish Civil War in which Hitler and Stalin used as their – you know – testing ground for what would eventually become World War II.

So it’s very understandable why a lot – Chambers’ trajectory was very unusual in that he left in 1938, a time when a lot of intellectuals were just getting around to joining. So his was always you know a very unusual trajectory.

And this was his whole career. I believe that he – that he was a close friend of Alger Hiss’s. I believe it not only because of what Chambers said because I don’t think a man like Chambers and a man like Hiss who were so different at such different social levels, such different backgrounds – one of whom had scruffed around being the editor of the New Masses in the 1930s, another who was on nothing but a rising career trajectory by conventional standards – I don’t see how they could have even met were it not for some kind of a political association.

LAMB: You mentioned HUAC – the House Un-American Activities Committee – which was meeting back then. What actually brought Chambers into the spotlight? And how did he then give these names? And who did he give them to?

JACOBY: Well, the HUAC committee of which Nixon was a member. Chambers wanted to testify. Where you know first of all after the war, we have the case of the Hollywood Ten, which was also HUAC. That of course was very widely covered and aroused interest, Communists in the movie industry.

But then HUAC wanted to go on to Communists and government. And Chambers, Chambers wanted to testify. He wanted to do everything he could to fight communism. And that’s how he thought he was doing it. As far as Chambers and Hiss go, I think that there was always something very, very personal. I mean, we now know – we didn’t know it from Chambers’ own autobiography – but we know from many documents in Tanenhaus that at the same time that Chambers was a Communist and he was leaving the Communist Party, he was also a homosexual at a time when homosexuality – although married – engaging by – you’d have to read Sam Tanenhaus’s book to read all of the history of this – engaging in one night stands up and down the Eastern seaboard.

And there is a lot of – there is a lot of stuff about overcoming personal problems and weaknesses through Christ in Chambers. Oh, Chambers – you know Chambers I think certainly was some kind of a mental case, but that doesn’t mean that he was lying about his relationship with Hiss. People who were intense and unbalanced and intense about all their political beliefs…paranoids can have real enemies, too.

LAMB: What was the source of you knowing that for sure he was a homosexual?

JACOBY: Well, that’s – it’s well documented. It’s all in Tanenhaus’s books. It’s been well known for many years. Tanenhaus was the first one who put it all together with everything else. Chambers was a homosexual.

LAMB: You say in your book that he admitted it to the FBI.

JACOBY: He admitted it to the FBI. It’s – the documents you know which Tanenhaus uses, they were released under the Freedom of Information Act eventually. Chambers did admit it to the FBI because he had to. He couldn’t have that coming out with his not having told. But it did not come out at the time of the hearings.

LAMB: So who’s left out in this world that really cares about this issue? And who writes about it? And where do you you know besides you?

JACOBY: Well, really, really there are not very many people left, except as my mother says, those people over 70 at right-wing and left-wing political conferences who care about Hiss per se. What gives this its resonance today and what people care about – and it’s why I got very slapped down by both the Right and the Left about this book – is this, that attitudes about the Hiss case are an absolute – they were an absolute litmus test for where we stood politically in the past.

But the debate, the issues that surrounded the Hiss case have not gone away. And here’s what we have. And just after this presidential election year – which now seems 100 years away – but we have several themes which the Hiss case bring up that are very relevant today and that people still care about and use to classify other people politically.

One, is the whole thing about the proper relationship between government and the society? You don’t hear too many people yelling communism except Rush Limbaugh anymore. But socialism has substituted for it that government – for example, government, public option for government healthcare would be socialism. The idea of slapping the Pinko label on something is very important to the Left and the Right.

And here is really – here’s the right-wing script that dates from the days of Alger Hiss. The Left was wrong about the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Left was wrong about the post-war Soviet threat. The Left was wrong about the Vietnam War, and the Left – skipping forward to the war in Iraq – the Left was wrong about the war in Iraq and about the measures we need to take to combat terrorism. Anyway, that’s the right-wing script about the Left.

And all of these issues were raised at the time of the Alger Hiss trials. What is patriotism? What do you have to do to be a real patriot? Who is a real patriot?

Now, the left-wing script is just – the far left script, not the liberal script, the very far left script – is just the opposite. The Right was wrong about the threat from Hitler in the 1930s – which it was. The Right was wrong about the need for government intervention in the economy in the 1930s – which it was in my view. Then the Right was wrong about the strength of the post-war communist threat – that again is the left-wing – and the Left was wrong about the Vietnam War. The Left is the reason we lost the Vietnam War. If only the Left had stood firm we would have won the Vietnam War. And finally today, the Left is wrong about the need for severe anti-terrorism measures. The Left is wrong about torture. The Left is wrong about Guantánamo. The Left is wrong about immigration.

In all of these things there’s a direct line. So Hiss himself isn’t important, but in some arguments about patriotism today, you can hear echoes of the same arguments that were made then.

LAMB: Let me go back to the Vietnam War because recently Robert McNamara died. And a lot of different publications wrote editorials and columns. And it’s hard here because we don’t have them all in front of us, but a lot of people were apology – made apologies for Robert McNamara saying basically he was a good man and that things didn’t go well in Vietnam but he did great things at the World Bank and all that. And you see the different sides on this. On the Right, often they said he was a better man than the Left thought he was.

Help me figure all this out. Where do you put Robert McNamara?

JACOBY: Well, this would you know this would be – anybody who was writing about how naïve the Left was about Alger Hiss, let’s say, in the 1970s when people were still writing about a lot, would also say that the Left has been much too hard on Robert McNamara. Your view of Robert McNamara is basically conditioned by your view of what the Vietnam War was.

And if your view about the Vietnam War was that it was a horrible disaster for this country ending in, ending in dishonor, your view of Robert McNamara – even though he may have done good things at the World Bank – can’t be that great.

If you were – if you supported the Vietnam War and you believe that if only Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon – who let us not forget, I mean Lyndon Johnson was the person who escalated the Vietnam War, but that war went on longer under Kissinger and Nixon than it did under Lyndon Johnson.

So you can’t – if you were opposed to the Vietnam War, you can’t think well of McNamara. But if you’re somebody who believes that the Vietnam War – for instance, the Right today believes that the use of the Vietnam War to argue against the war in Iraq is a terrible thing. And so you can see in all of the commentary on McNamara, from both the Right and the Left, you can see McNamara was a Cold War figure, whatever he did later on. And he was the chief architect of the Vietnam War, the chief policy architect of the Vietnam War, just as Dick Cheney and Wolfowitz and Crystal were the chief policy architects of the Iraq War.

LAMB: Where are you on the Vietnam War? What’s your – what was your – you were in Moscow part of the time during the war.

JACOBY: I was in Moscow. I was in Moscow – I’ll tell you. First of all, at the beginning of the Vietnam War I was working for the Washington Post. So I wasn’t involved in the typical anti-war activities that people of my age were because you couldn’t work for a newspaper then and be out on the streets demonstrating.

I was not initially as opposed to the Vietnam War as I later became you know quite frankly because I wasn’t paying attention. I was much more interested in the Civil Rights Movement in this country than I was in the Vietnam War. I would say that – I would say that my view was that of many Americans. I began to really turn against that war in 1968 or 1979.

But where I really became opposed to the Vietnam War was in Moscow. I lived in Moscow from 1969 to the end of 1971. I wrote my first two books on Russia when I came home from material I gathered there. And I was there on the day that the shootings at Kent State University, which you know the famous iconic picture of the young girl over the fallen student there shot by the National Guard. It was of course on the front page of Izvestia in Pravda that day.

And I had many Russian dissident friends who had an almost highly idealized view of the United States because the Soviet Union was so bad; the United States must be good. And the time I had, the question they asked was how you know when the thing we looked to for your country is that you allowed dissent. You don’t kill dissenters. You don’t put them in concentration camps. How do you reconcile that, my Russian dissident friends said, with this picture from Kent State?

First of all, they said – because they’re so used to, they were so used to doctored pictures – is this real? And I said, yes, it’s real you know I’ve seen it on the wire. But at this point I began to think what kind of a damage to our reputation, our best ideals, the best things that people around the world think America stands for, this is yet another thing. And I think that’s when I decisively turned against the Vietnam War, when I found it impossible to explain to Russians who had idealized America, how can we be shooting people for demonstrating against the Vietnam War?

LAMB: I bring it up, too, because this book, “The Age of American Unreason,” I wanted to ask you the premise on this book, but tie it also – and how much of the Vietnam War have, impact have on this country and where it is today?

JACOBY: Well, it wasn’t the only thing. In “The Age of American Unreason,” I have a very – I have a mixed view of the 60s. I think that there were a lot of things that were great about the 60s, things – again, and this by the way, this by the way is another thing that divides the people who think Alger Hiss was a terrible – was a great terrible, terrible evil guy, hate the 60s. They hate everything the 60s stands for. And they blame everything that happened on the 60s.

But I think that what happened in the 60s, even more than the Vietnam War obviously. Obviously you know two things happened in 60s of surpassing importance, the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protest, followed quite swiftly by the Women’s Movement. All of these things had to do with saying, well just because you’re the government or just because you’re the authorities, you don’t know best.

And I think that – I think unfortunately the Vietnam War has not had nearly as much of an impact as I would have thought it would have had because of the kind of historical amnesia that has characterized our country over the last four decades. And that begins a little bit in the 60s where the culture of celebrity begins to come in and people are getting all of their news from visual images which in one way is what turned people against the war. But I think of the late 60s as a time when begin the process of losing our attention span.

So I think in one way, I don’t think if the lessons of the Vietnam War were learned, I don’t think that Bush would have had so much overwhelming support early on for the Iraq War. So I’m not sure what a long-term effect the Vietnam War had on this country.

LAMB: I was in the middle of reading your book, “The Age of American Unreason,” when the Michael Jackson funeral came about. And I just thought it would be a perfect thing to ask you about. What was your reaction to all the coverage?

JACOBY: Well, briefly – and here’s one thing that has absolutely nothing to do with Alger Hiss. I think that the media deification of Jackson over the last couple of weeks, I know why it is. It’s about ratings, and that’s all – that’s about it.

I think it has been a nauseating example of anti-rationalism. Michael Jackson was a hugely talented singer and dancer. He is almost, almost a parable of a squandering of talent. Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson is an entertainer called a million times on TV this week and on the Internet as the greatest entertainer of all time.

He is a man who has not performed since 1993 because of the great problems in his personal life. He is a man who has spent millions of his fortune to make child molestation accusations go away. And for the – he is also a man who – I was amazed when I saw the clips – I had forgotten what a handsome young African-American man he was before he started having cosmetic surgery and turning his skin white. This is a man in a way whose troubled character is written on his face.

And for the news media to go along you know just with the funeral of the King of Pop as though this is some kind of a God – and speak no ill of the dead – is just ridiculous. I mean, I think there’s a lot to be said about Michael Jackson, and one is a parable of talent squandered.

LAMB: What is – you know based on all your research on your book, what’s going on with the television medium? They were – they have been devoting you know wall-to-wall coverage. It went on for two weeks that we know of – and when we’re recording this it could continue to go on – and the newscast when the president was in Russia was almost entirely devoted to it.

JACOBY: Obama’s trip to Russia was almost not covered because of – it was completely – Obama’s trip to Russia was completely displaced by the Michael Jackson stuff. And we know what it’s about. What it’s about is that the Michael Jackson coverage was going to draw huge ratings.

I think – and I’m not saying Michael Jackson’s death is not a news event. Of course it is, it’s a news event. But it’s not a news event that deserves the kind of coverage that the funeral of John F. Kennedy got in November of 1963. It’s not a news event that requires that people talk as though there was nothing wrong with this guy at all and so the only thing that’s legitimate to talk about is his great entertainment skills.

And but what this is about is ratings. TV is a medium which is losing viewers, particularly TV news. By doing this extensive coverage of all of the events surrounding Michael Jackson’s funeral and considering it a news event worth hours worth of coverage the day for his memorial service, which I would call the next marketing CD, as far as I’m concerned what TV should have done was ask the entertainment group at the Staples Center to pay for the time if they wanted to televise this.

LAMB: Well, contrast this. Go back to the Hiss/Chambers story and the kind of television – not television, the kind of journalism that was applied back then and talk about journalism today. And I’d eventually like to have you define, in your opinion after all the years you’ve spent in this business, what is journalism.

JACOBY: Well, I found reading the journalistic coverage, both the HUAC hearings and then Hiss’s trials in 1950, were front page news in every newspaper in the country, and they were heavily on the radio news as well. There were – there were many right-wing papers who covered it as though Hiss was guilty right from the beginning of the hearings. There were many – there were many moderate newspapers – which are considered demon Left newspapers by the Right then and now – which gave it very, very balanced coverage.

I think that you know they covered – they covered it at much greater length even than anything like this would be covered today, the long testimony of both Chambers and Hiss, long testimony at the trial. There was no reason why anybody who lived in New York or Washington you know or Los Angeles could not have gotten full and balanced coverage even though there were many newspapers which had very slanted coverage.

There was a lot of good coverage. There was a lot of good coverage even from the illogically – ideological publications. For example, The Nation – which was then and is now one of Hiss’s biggest supporters who felt the proceedings are unfair. Nevertheless, their then correspondent Robert Bendiner, who covered both trials, he wrote marvelous and I would say very fair articles.

There’s so many fascinating things about the Hiss trials. And one of them was that it was one of the first trials in which psychiatric testimony was used. Hiss’s defense lawyers called psychiatrists to describe why Chambers was crazy.

And what’s very fascinating about The Nation articles by Bendiner is he then talked to – psychiatrists didn’t testify in court all the time like they do today. It was an unusual thing then. And he talked to psychiatrists and he said, well – and the psychiatrist told him, well basically – and remember, this is, he’s writing for a publication that thinks that Hiss is telling the truth and Chambers is lying – and the psychiatrist basically said, look, Chambers may be crazy but you could get up and make a case you know that Hiss was crazy, too, just as easily.

And the idea that psychiatrists are objective people – which was not then totally accepted – the psychiatrist said to Bendiner, that’s nonsense. And this kind of reporting – it was extensive reporting, good reporting – Americans could have – but of course, most of the mass media and the radio and a lot of newspapers like the Chicago Tribune for instance you know covered it strictly from a one-sided anti-Hiss.

But still there were – there was a lot of newspaper coverage that really covered the testimony heavily. It was front-page news both at the time of the hearings and at the time of the trials.

LAMB: So define journalism as you see it today based on all the changes going on.

JACOBY: Oh, that’s very difficult. I’m thinking back of the coverage of the Hiss case in the past and the print coverage of the Hiss case in recent years as new books have come out, which has been pretty good. But it’s long analyses of long amounts of words are things that are dying out of our culture.

I don’t think – in fact, I will say this, that even the most biased right-wing coverage of the Hiss trials back in 1950 had enough of the testimony in it so you could learn something of what was actually being said. We are never going to have extensive – we know what’s happening with newspapers. We’re never going to have extensive print coverage of these kinds of things to the degree that it was covered by newspapers and magazines which are also shrinking today. That’s not going to happen.

There’s no use going on and bleating about the displacement of newspapers by the Internet. There’s something that’s much more concerning than that which is that people aren’t really you know the Internet has infinite space. You could do the kind of coverage on the Internet that was done in 1950 of various things.

But the Internet tries to distill news into as short a form as possible, things like POLITICO, Huffington Post, National Review Online, if you take a whole spectrum of political views. These are no substitute for newspapers. What they are commenting on is all information that’s gathered by the few number of papers left that still support actual reporting. What POLITICO and The Huffington Post and all of the online you know political blogs derive the news for their commentary from is from the dinosaurs, The Washington Post and The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

And what is going to happen when and if the newspapers continue to invest less and less in first-hand reporting? Look, these blogs are mostly people’s opinions about things. That’s fine. But there’s no – it’s all selected out. There’s no way you’re going to turn to The Huffington Post. It’s not there. If there’s a trial like the Hiss trial, you’re not going to see a transcript of the testimony on it.

And 10 years ago if you had talked to my editors at places like The Times and The Washington Post or for whom I still freelance, they thought that their online editions were going to save their newspapers. But unfortunately what has happened is that first of all the young people are about the same proportion of the online newspaper audience as of the traditional print edition, which is to say that there are a lot of young people who don’t read the online editions. They go straight to POLITICO or The Huffington Post where they’re getting opinions that they agree with solely.

You could – if you want to only read Huffington Post opinions, you can only read The Huffington Post, and a lot of people do.

LAMB: Not much time left, but I wanted to ask you about an important moment you write about in the book when somebody went to the farm. We’re going to show you some video. Have you ever been to the farm, by the way?

JACOBY: No, I have not been to the farm.

LAMB: The Whittaker Chambers farm. Let’s show the video and then I’ll ask you about the importance of this moment in the whole business of the HUAC hearings. What role did the event at this farm – and this is up here in Maryland not too far from here, an hour and a half or so…

JACOBY: Right.

LAMB: …where the so-called Pumpkin Papers play.

JACOBY: Actually they were Pumpkin microfilm. They were microfilms of government documents that Chambers said Hiss had handed over to him in the 1930s. Chambers does not lead the FBI to these papers in a hollowed out pumpkin, in a canister in a hollowed out pumpkin. If they’d just been lying in the pumpkin, even the microfilm would have been rotten.

LAMB: Let me just stop you to show you, as you turn the corner here you’re going to see the house. This is the farm. And the Pumpkin Papers are right there in that yard.

JACOBY: Right. They’re right – they’re right there.

LAMB: Or the microfilm.

JACOBY: They’re right there in that yard. There is no Hiss trial without the Pumpkin Papers because it was just a he-said/he-said thing. The – yes, there is where they were. And these are the documents which Chambers claimed that Hiss had handed over to him.

This is an absolutely crucial moment here because there is, for the first time, evidence even though Hiss was never tried for espionage. And the reason Chambers waits so long to do this is he wanted the statute of espionage, limitations for espionage, to be over for him, too, because after all, he was receiving the government papers. He could have been tried for espionage if he had revealed these before.

LAMB: This was in ’48 …

JACOBY: Forty-eight.

LAMB: … and what happened to Alger Hiss. When was he tried for perjury?

JACOBY: Nineteen fifty, which about – his first trial was about a year and a half later, ends in a hung jury. The second trial is in 1950 and he’s convicted of perjury and sentenced to four years.

LAMB: And you say in here he went to prison for 44 months.

JACOBY: Yes.

LAMB: Then what did he do for the rest of his life, and how long did he live?

JACOBY: Well, he lived into his 90s. He came out of prison. He had – he had – this is really condensing the whole political fights of 40 years. But there was a time, particularly in the 1960s, when America really turned against the Cold War, old Cold War assumptions about, about – and in the early 1970s – against the whole McCarthy era and so on. Hiss was a very popular speaker on college campuses then.

But then something happened in 1978. A scholar named Allen Weinstein published a book about Hiss. It’s called Perjury. And Weinstein – both right and left-wing scholars joined in requiring release of FBI documents under the Freedom of Information Act. They got them. It made the case that Hiss was lying much stronger.

And after that, Hiss never really recovered. I think if it hadn’t been for that book, Hiss never really recovered. That was when a lot of liberals decided that Hiss really had done it. There have been other documents released as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union. But I think in the end they are actually less significant than our own FBI documents.

LAMB: Ronald Reagan gave Whittaker Chambers the Medal of Freedom award. How long did he live? And I assume he wasn’t …

JACOBY: Whittaker Chambers died at a young age. He died in the early 1960s. I believe 1961 he died in. Chambers had long been dead. Ronald Reagan’s giving Chambers the Medal of Freedom really is really – I think it’s disgusting to give somebody like that the Medal of Freedom – and not because I don’t think Chambers was telling the truth – because I don’t think somebody who outs a couple of people who may have given some outdated government documents to him, that’s not my idea of the Medal of Freedom.

LAMB: What was the reaction overall to your book since it’s been out? Many people care about it? I mean …

JACOBY: Well, a lot of the people who care about Alger Hiss still, and the issues especially about how do we define patriotism, when does patriotism cross the line into disloyalty, when do ideals cross the line into disloyalty. I think you could probably make a case that even if Hiss was still spying at Yalta for the Soviets – which is really the unstated right-wing case against him – the idea that Hiss gave – that Hiss affected the American negotiating position at Yalta was ridiculous. The American negotiating position at Yalta was based on one thing, how far the Soviet troops were into Poland.

LAMB: What, if anything, have you planned for your next book?

JACOBY: I am going to keep that under wraps. But let me say that my next book is – concerns aging baby boomers. And I – and our attitudes toward age. And I suspect it’s going to make people a lot madder than the Alger Hiss book.

LAMB: And “The Age of American Unreason,” how’d that do?

JACOBY: That did very well, much to my surprise, actually. I thought, oh, this is going to be treated just as you know some old person who just hates cultural trends today and you know doesn’t like having an iPod in her ears. But there are a lot of people who are very concerned, particularly about the decline of education and I think you know of our educational system, which is one of the things I talk about here.

And I think that this was an issue in the presidential campaign. I think the attempt to portray President – then candidate – Obama as being too smart and too elitist didn’t work because I think a lot of people are really concerned about the state of our culture and our educational system.

LAMB: By the way, do you own an iPod?

JACOBY: Yes.

LAMB: Thank you, Susan Jacoby, for joining us. Appreciate it.