mandate, no government money. . . >> had to explain that political intellectuals cared about a lot. she said, you'll have to explain why somebody under the

age of 70 is interested at all. >> what did you tell us? >> one reason people under the age of 70 should be interested is, when i went back and read contemporary press accounts, not just that, but the debate going 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 right and the left 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. who could have imagined we'd have a revival of the argument of whether the new deal was good or not. you've seen it play out. did the new deal work? did it not work? it's fascinating that some of the issue this is case raises are still around in another form. only the grandchildren of the original participants are playing it out. >> what are your political beliefs today? where do you put yourself on the spectrum? >> about hiss or in general? >> in general. >> i'm an unabashed liberal, proud of it, have been, not a neoliberal, not the kind of liberal who is obsessed with communism, just a liberal, which i consider an honorable designation. >> if you consider yourself a liberal, give us three of four

things you believe in. >> that's interesting. nobody's ever asked me that. i believe not in an originalist interpretation of the constitution. i believe the constitution is a living document. i don't believe the geniuses who wrote the constitution in 1787 ever imagined that somebody would be saying 200 years from now, because they were men of vision, they knew the economy they were in wasn't going to stay the same, they would not have expected that things would have been interpreted exactly as they were in 1787. so i believe the constitution is a living document. i don't believe it is to be interpreted exactly, 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, the shadows of life, in the twilight of life. i believe that. i don't believe 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 say that i don't think we need to take national security measures or we don't need an army or anything like that. but i mean if there's an issue about liberty versus national security, it has meet a pretty high threshold for me to deny civil liberties. >> in your book, you give us 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? >> my mom met my father at a u.s.o. dance when he was stationed in chicago in world war ii. that's why i was in chicago. we moved to michigan and after i graduated from michigan state, i went to work for "the washington post." then i went to moscow with my then-husband, he was a correspondent for "the washington post" then. i wrote my first books on russia, which is where i became interested in spying and national security because there was a lot of talk about that. anybody who has ever been in the sovietology business as it used to be called is interested in this and the cold war. >> where do you live now? >> new york. >> this book, "the age of american unreason" has been a big success for you. what year did that come out? >> it was first published in hard cover in the winter of 2008 at the height of the

presidential primary campaign. >> so where does this book fit and when did you start writing it? when did you start thinking about it, i guess is the best question? >> it had been in the back of my mind because i do live in a capital of political intellectuals of both the right and the left. one thing that struck me as strange is how obsessed a lot of people on both the left and 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 at loose ends that year before it came out. i went to this conference, and what it was, there was some new research, this time suggesting

that hiss really wasn't a soviet spy, it was somebody else. i won't go into all the details. nobody but academics is interested in that. but who was there was hiss' stepson, timothy hobson, who was in his 90's at the time. one of the things, he spoke and two of the thing he is said was, one, that he was prevented from testifying on his stepfather's behalf at trial by alger hiss because timothy hobson was gay, he had received a kind of discharge from the army and so on. it would have -- he wouldn't have wanted him to testify and have what would happen to his life. then secondly, he said that he knew, he absolutely knew, that hiss never knew whitaker chambers, because he, who was 8 or 9 at the time, never saw chambers come to his parents' house. the whole room erupted in

applause because this was a left wick intellectual conference. the whole room erupted in applause and i thought to myself -- what i saw was a pathetic spectacle of an old man trying to earn his stepfather's love from beyond the grave, really. also, utter irrationality. i couldn't tell you who was in my parents' house when i was 8 years old, except people who were there all the time. the idea that that's accurate testimony, that i never saw this guy in the house, it shows a kind of irrationality that surrounds this issue on the left. we'll get to the right too, neither of them like this book. >> why is that? >> the right doesn't like it because, they say, i'm absolutely certain hiss was guilty of perjury, he knew chambers. there's no way -- he said he didn't know him.

there would be no reason to say he didn't know them if they hadn't been engaged in far left circles together, which didn't mean the same in the 1930's as it did today. he lied on the stand. the reason the right doesn't like the book is i'm only 98% sure that hiss was a soviet spy. the 2% of doubt, i might as well be thinking that dinosaurs and human beings roamed the earth together, which there are some right wing people who think that, actually. >> and the left didn't like it buzz? -- because? >> it's hard on the left in that i do think hiss was glt. -- guilty. i think that the left was blind to this for a lot of reasons. one of them is a reason i alluded to when we were talking

a few minutes ago. i think for a lot of the left, they could never look at the evidence fairly about hiss because the fact is that the -- the mccarthy era, which the hiss case leads into, though it was before, it stands at the beginning of the mccarthy era. it's only a couple of weeks that hiss is convicted of perjury that mccarthy waves his, i have here in think hand papers, but it 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. his administration was full of communists working for the interests of the soviet union and did incalculable damage to the united states. i think that, very understandably, for certain kinds of liberals, there are also -- there also have been liberals who accepted hiss' guilt for years. but i'm talking about farther left people. i think the fact that the attack on communists was in many respects an atk on the new deal is something that made it

difficult for liberals, certainly who came to -- who came -- of age in the 1940's or the 1950's, to look at the evidence, really. >> there is a footnote i wanted to ask you about. it's not relevant to what you're talking about here, but it's about a fellow a guy by the name of george coval. >> the soviet spy. >> leading up to that, though, i've been under the impression that harry truman didn't know we had the bomb when 4e became president? >> that's my impression, too, but i'm not an expert on what harry truman knew about her -- our weaponry when he became president. >> you say this fellow worked as a russian spy, it's one of your footnotes, and he worked at the manhattan project. >> he was the son of american

communists who went back to the soviet union in the 1930's but he spent the first year of his life here so he spoke perfect english. at some point, having been trained by the soviet g.r.u., the military intelligence, they sent him back. he had a full college education, electronics, all of that he did work in the manhattan project. now there's a real spy. your perfect spy. somebody who grew up here so he spoke idiomatic english, was taken back to the soviet union, which trained him to be a spy. that's a real spy a professionally trained spy. most of the people who were called spies, including alger hiss, if he was a spy, were not. what i said in the footnotes was that the skills of a corval bore approximately the same relationship to the skills of hiss as toscanini's do to a high school orchestra leader.

>> so stalin atall ta knew there stalin at yalta knew there was a bomb. >> stalin, of course he knew. >> all along. truman didn't even discuss it with him. >> of course the soviets knew there was a bomb and of course they were working on their own. >> let's go back to -- >> that really is a footnote. >> i found it interesting. what did you do after the conference to get ready to write the book? >> one of the thing, i was asked to write it by the publisher of the yale university press, jonathan brent, a soviet expert himself and they publish a lot of books on soviet intelligence in america, not all of which i agree with, but 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 the -- why the case had such a long history. one of the -- one of the more

natural things would have been it would have faded away after 10 or 15 years. a lot of other cold war cases did. >> did he know before you were asked to write this book what your views were? or did you know what your views were? >> about whether hiss was a spy? or what my political views are? sure. >> but he knew you had -- you were sitting in that room of people who thought hiss was innocent. >> yes. >> but you didn't think he was innocent? >> no. but the point of the book wasn't whether hiss was innocent or not, but why people felt so intensely about it. >> give us the big reasons you found. >> one is, the hiss case, not all of our listeners will know the chronology of this. whitaker chambers goes to testify, he was a member of the communist party, he left in 1938.

he named a lot of name he is said were his buddies in the communist party, among them, alger hiss, he made the administrative arrangements for thall ta conference, hiss did. -- for the yalta conference, hiss did. and so hiss, out of all the people chambers named, is the only one who comes become and says, i want to testify. he's absolutely lying. that's what he does. richard nixon is the most active person on the house un- american -- house on american activities. a lot of members of huac were convinced. hiss seemed overwrought. it was the smoothest example of diplomatic polish, elite education, that was the image hiss presented. by contrast, chambers looked a little wildly undone. >> let's stop there so the audience if they can't see -- if they haven't seen them

before, they can see them. we've got a little bit of video, it was the first ever televised hearing. >> yes. but what -- one thing, it was televised but one thing i point out that is very important in terms of perceptions over the years is that, the hiss case was the last big event in which television really played very little role. only 10% 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. >> first we'll look at alger hiss and i'll ask you some more questions about him, then we'll go to whitaker chambers. this is just so people can see what he looked and sounded like. >> the other side of the

question is the reliability of the allegations before this committee. the undocumented statements of the man who now calls himself whitaker chambers. is he a man of consistent reliability, truthfulness, and honor? no. he admits it and the committee knows it. is he a man of sanity? getting the facts about whitaker chambers, if that's his name, will not be easy. we have learned that his career is not, like those of normal men, aen open book. his operations have been furtive and concealed. why? what does he have to hide? i'm glad to help get this to the that. -- help get the facts. >> tell us more about him. >> about hiss? >> 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 was a -- he was his mentor at harvard was lewis bran dice and oliver wendell holmes. they were his mentors. after 4e gradge waited from -- after he graduated from harvard law school, he was oliver wendell holmes law clerk at the supreme court. 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 harvard connections is as clerk to oliver wendell holmes jr. this is about -- he went to work after the clerkship for a hot shot white shoe law firm in new york. then in 1932, he comes back to work for f.d.r.'s agricultural adjustment administration as a lawyer, which so many people who were enthusiastic about the new deal did. then he switches over to the

state department, i'm aabbreviating his career. but this is someone who was on a high career trajectory with great connections, with all the eastern establishment credentials. it's probably why richard nixon hated him on sight. he was the sort of person nixon hated. that's probably why nixon, you know, was more skeptical about him. 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 about when nixon first met hiss. i went to harvard, i believe your college was whittier. that tells you everything about alger hiss and i can imagine how nixon must have felt about that. >> there was a common thread of sorts between hiss and chambers. you said hiss' father committed

suicide at age 5? >> hiss was 5 when his father committed suicide. whitaker chambers had a brother who committed suicide. i don't know, you know, how much of a common thread that. is but one reason i'm so convinced that hiss -- again, hiss was right. chambers was lying too. the first thing he did when 4e testified was he said that as far as he knew, hiss hadn't engaged in espionage. and the reason chambers said that is the statute of limitations for espionage hadn't expired. when hiss made the espionage charge, statute of limitations had expired by then. hiss couldn't be pross cued for -- couldn't be prosecuted for espionage. chambers couldn't be prosecuted for espionage, and neither could hiss because the statute of limitations expired for hiss too.

>> back in 1948, where did hiss live, was he married? did he have children? >> he was head of the carnegie endowment for international peace. he was married, he had one son with his wife, and also a son 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 state john foster dulles, a real irony of history. >> going back to your parents you said they were for f.d.r. and went to eisenhower. >> that was perfectly common. my parents were what would be called moderates in today's parlance. the vast majority of americans voted for franklin roosevelt and dwight d. eisenhower. >> the adlai stevenson. >> liberal intellect chals? -- a liberal intellectuals?

no. but adlai stevenson comes in later in the story but he was the kind of person who was 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 argument made against stevenson by the right in 1952 was that he'd been insufficiently condemn in aer to of hiss. -- insufficiently condemnatory of hiss. >> let's go to whitaker chamber, so we can see what he looks like and sounds like. it's from the same hearing. >> i was very fond of mr. hiss. >> you were fond of him? >> indeed, i was. he was perhaps my closest friends. mr. hiss. certainly the closest friends i had in the communist party. i don't hate mr. hiss. we were close friends.

but we are caught in a tragedy of history. mr. hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting and i am fighting. i've testified against him with remorse and pity. >> by the way that logo in the corner from "american writers," that's a program we did eight years ago, that's why it's there. but you were going to say something. >> 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 the crazy one

was whitaker chambers. but whitaker chambers is a fascinating character, the best work -- there are two things, his own autobiography "witness," which is a doorstop weight book, it's fascinating, it's an example of an extreme personality. -- extreme temperament. and the biography of him is also good. it talks about things that chambers does not speak of. but chambers was a brilliant student at columbia in the 1920's, he came from a class of brilliant people, mark van doren, the famous poet and father of charles van dorne, speaking of 19's icons, was his -- speaking of 1950's icons, was his favorite teacher.

he was in a class of brilliant people, like lionel trilling and people who were left intellectuals but who joined the communist party in 1924. that was very early. most american intellectuals did not join the communist party until the 1930's, when they were shaken by the crisis of capitalism all around them and thought, you know, maybe communism was the only -- was the only thing to do. it's very unusual for an american-born intellectual to have joined in the 1920's. then by -- chambers actually was a spy, although, i expect not one who had access to very much because he was just kind of -- he was the editor of the communist newspaper in new york in the early 1930's, but in 1938, he leaves the party. >> why would somebody want to be a communist back then? what did it mean? >> in the 1930's, why chambers wanted to be -- he's somebody who is a real, true believer. 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. this was a man who wanted and needed something to believe. in he kept in touch with all his old friends from columbia, but they couldn't imagine, you know, why anybody would be a communist in the 1920's. in the 1930's, it was much more understandable, for reasons i just said what seemed to be the collapse of capitalism. later on in the decade, really, the communists seemed to be the only, at the time, you're talking now about 1937, 1938, seemed to be the only people who seemed to be standing up coherently when england and france were lying down, you know, for hitler at munich. 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 force standing up to nazi germany. this, of course, comes after the spanish civil war in which hitler and stalin used as their testing ground for what would become world war ii. it's very understandable why a lot -- chambers is -- chambers' trajectory was unusual in that he left in 1938, when a lot of intellectuals were just getting around to joining. his was always a very unusual trajectory. this was his whole career. i believe that he was a close friend of alger hiss'. i believe it not only because of what chambers said, because i don't think a man like chambers and a man like miss who were so different, at such different social levels, such different backgrounds, one of whom had scruffed around being editor of "the new masses" in the 1930's, another who was on

nothing but a rising career trajectory, i don't see how they could have met were it not for some kind of political association. >> you mention the house un- american activities committee. what brought chambers into the spotlight and how did he then give these names? who did he gave them to? >> the huac committee, of which nixon was a member. chambers wanted to testify. after the war, we have the case of the hollywood 10, which was also huac. that, of course, was very widely covered and aroused interests. communists in the movie industry. but then huac wanted to go to communists in government. chambers wanted to testify. he wanted to do everything he could to fight communism. 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, at the same time chambers was a communist and leaving the communist party, he was also homosexual at a time when homosexuality, though married, engaging by, you have to read the book to read 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. chambers i think certainly was some kind of mental case, but that doesn't mean he was lying about his relationship with hiss. people who are intense and unbalanced and intense about all their political beliefs, paranodes can have real enemies, too.

>> what was the source of you knowing for sure he was a homosexual? >> it's well documented. it's all in tenenhau s's book. chambers was a homosexual. >> you say he admitted it to the f.b.i. >> he admitted it to the f.b.i. the documents tanenhaus uses, they were released under the freedom of information act eventually. he admitted it to the f.b.i. he couldn't have that coming out with his not having told. >> who is left in this world who cares about this issue? who writes about it? besides you? >> well, really, there are not many people left except, as my mother said, people over 70, right wing and left wing political conferences who care about hiss per se.

what gives this resonance today and what people care about and why i got slapped down by both the right and left about this book, the attitudes about the hiss case are an absolute -- they were an absolute litmus test for where we stood in the past. but the debate, the issues that surrounded the hiss case, have not gone away. here's what we have. just after this presidential election year which now seems 100 years away, but we have several themes which the hiss case brings up that are relevant today and that people still care about and use to classify other people politically. one, the whole thing about the proper relationship between government and the set society. you don't hear too many people yelling communism except rush limbaugh anymore, but socialism has substituted for it. government a public option for

government health care would be socialism. the idea of slapping the pinko label on something is very important. here's the right-wing thinking from the days of alger hiss. the left was wrong about the soviet union in the 1930's, the left was wrong about the post- war soviet threat, the left was wrong about the vietnam war. and skipping forward to the war in iraq, the left was wrong about the war in iraq and the measureses we need to take to combat terrorism. that's right-wing script about the left. all of these issues were raised at the time of the -- of the alger hiss try. what is patriotism? what do you have to do to be a real patriot? who is a real patriot? the left wing script is just the far left script, not the liberal script, but the very far

left script, is just the opposite. the right was wrong about the threat from hitler in the 1930's, which it was. the right was wrong about the need for government intervention in the economy in the 1930's. which it was. my view. then the right was wrong about the strength of the post-war communist threat that, again, is the left-wing, and the right is wrong about the vietnam war. the left is the reason we lost the vietnam war, if the left had stood firm, we would have won the vietnam war. and finally, the left is wrong for the need for severe anti- terrorism measures. the left is wrong about torture, guantanamo, and immigration. all these things, there's a direct line. hiss himself isn't important, but in some aferingts about --

in some arguments about patriotism today, you can hear echos of the same arguments that were made then. >> let me go back to the vietnam war. recently, robert mcnamara died and a lot of publications wrote editorials and columns. it's hard here was we don't have them all in front of us, but a lot of people were -- made apologies for robert mcnamara, saying he was a good man and that things didn't go well at vietnam, but he did great things in the world bank. you see different sides on this the right said he was a better man than the left thought he was. where do you put robert mcnamara? >> this would be -- anybody who was writing about how nigh yeef -- naive the left was about alger hiss, let's say in the 1970's when people were writing about it a lot, would say the left has been too hard on robert mcnamara. your view is basically conditioned by your view of what the vietnam war was.

if your view about the vietnam war was that it was a horrible disaster for this country, ending in dishonor. , your view of robert mcnamara, though he may have done good things at the world bank, can't be that great. if you support 24ed vietnam war -- if you supported the vietnam war and believed that if only mcnamara and henry kissinger and richard nixon, let us not forget, lyndon johnson was the person who escalated the vietnam war. but that war went on longer under kissinger, and nixon than 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 the vietnam war, for instance, the right today believes the use of the vietnam war to argue against the war in iraq is a terrible thing. so you can see in all of the commentary on mcnamara from the

right and left, you can see mcnamara was a cold war figure. whatever he did later on. he was the chief architect of the vietnam war, the chief policy architect of the vietnam war, just as dick cheney and wolfowitz and kristal were that for the iraq war. >> you were in moscow for part of the time of the vietnam war. >> i was at -- at the beginning of the vietnam war, i was workinging for "the washington post." so i wasn't involved in typical anti-war activities, people 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 war as i later became, quite frankly because i wasn't paying attention. i was much more interested in the civil rights movement in this country than in the vietnam war. i would say my view was that of

many american, i began to really turn against that war in 1968 or 1979. but where i became opposed to the war was many moscow. -- was in moscow. i lived in moscow from 1969 until the end of 1971. i wrote my first two books on russia when i came home from from material i gathered there. i was there on the day that the shootings at kent state university, which 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 the newspaper in russia that day. i had many russian dissident friends who had an idealized view of the united states. if 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 look to for your country is that you allow dissent, you don't kill dissenters, you don't put them in concentration camp, how do you reconcile that? my russian dissident friend said this, with the mixture from kent state. -- but this picture from kent state. they were so used to doctored pictures, they said, is this real? i said yes, i've seen it on the wire. i began to think, what kind of damage to our rep -- our reputation, the best things that people around the world think america stands for, this is yet another thing. 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?

>> i bring it up too because this book, the age of american unreason, i wanted to ask you, the premise on this book, how much of the vietnam war have, impact have on this country and where it is today? >> it wasn't the only thing. in "the age of american unreason," i have a mixed view of the 1960's. there were a lot of things that were great about the 1960's. things -- again, this by the way is another thing that divides the people -- the people who think alger hiss was a terrible -- was a great -- a terrible, terrible, evil guy hate the 1960's. they hate everything the 1960's stand for and blame everything that happened on the 1960's. but i think that what happened in the 1960's, even more than the vietnam war, obviously, two things happened in the 1960's

of surpassing importance, the civil rights movement and anti- war protests, followed swiftly by the women's movement. all these things had to do with say, just because you're the government or the authorities, you don't know best. 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 kinds of historical amnesia that characterized our country over the last four decades. and that begins a little bit in the 1960's, 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 1960's as the time when we began 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 loverple effect of vietnam -- what long- term effect the vietnam war had on this country. >> i was in the middle of reading your book, "the age of american unreason," when the michael jackson funeral came about. i thought it would be the perfect thing to ask you about. what was your reaction to the coverage? >> here's one thing that has absolutely nothing to do with alger hiss. i think that the media deification of jackson, i know why it is, it's about ratings and that's about it. i think it has been nauseating example of anti-rationalism. michael jackson was a hugely talented singer and dancer. he is also almost a paraable of squandering of talent.

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's a man who has nod 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 charges go away. and for the -- he is also a man who -- i was amazed when i saw the clips, i'd 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 god, and speak no ill of the dead is just ridiculous.

i think there's a lot to be said about michael jackson and one is, a paraable of talent squandered. >> based on all your resedge on your book, what's going on with the television medium. they've been devoting, you know, wall-to-wall coverage, it went on for two weeks, that we know of, when we're recording this. it could continue to go on. the newscasts, when the president was in russia, was almost entirely forgotten. >> it was almost not covered. obama's trip to russia was completely displaced by the michael jackson stuff. we know what it's about. what it's about is that the michael jackson coverage was going to draw huge ratings. i think -- i'm not saying that michael jackson's death is not a news event. of course it is. but it's not a news event that

deserves the kind of tchooverpblg the funeral of john -- that kind of coverage 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, as though the only thing that's legitimate to talk about his is -- is his great entertainment skills. what this is about is ratings. tv is a medium which is losing viewers. particularly tv news. by doing this extensive coverage of all 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 c.d., what tv should have done is asked the entertainment group at the staples center to pay for the time if they wanted to televise this. >> go back to the hiss-chambers story and go become to the kind of journalism applied back then and talk about journalism today. i'd like to have you define,

after all the years you've spent in this business, what is journalism? >> you know, i've found, reading the journalistic coverage, both the huac hearings and his' trial, were front page news in every newspaper in the country. 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 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 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, even from ideological publications. for example, "the nation," which was then and is now, one of hiss' biggest supporters and felt the proceedings were unfair, nevertheless, their correspondent who covered both trials, wrote marvelous and i would say very fair articles. there are so many fascinating things about the hiss trials. one of them was, it was one of the first trials in which psychiatric testimony was used. hiss' defense lawyers called psychiatrists to describe why chambers was crazy. what's fascinating about "the nation" articles is, the reporter talked to the

psychiatrist. it was unusual for psychiatrists to testify in court then. he said -- he talked to the psychiatrist. he's writing for a publication that thinks hiss is telling the truth and chambers is liing and the psychiatrist said, look, chambers may be crazy, but you could get up and make a caisse, -- you could get up and make a case, you know, that hiss was crazy too, just as easily. and he -- the idea that psychiatrists are objective people, which is -- which was not then totally accepted, the psychiatrist said to the reporter, that's nonsense. this kind of reporting, it was extensive reporting, good reporting. americans could have. but of course most mass media and radio and newspapers like "the chicago tribune," covered it strictly from a one-sided, anti-hiss way. but 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. >> so define journalism, as you see it today, based on all the changes going on. >> that's very difficult. i'm thinking back on 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 longage cease of long amount -- long analyses of long amounts of words, things that are dying out of our culture. 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 bleeting 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 a -- into as short a form as possible. things like plit coe, huffington -- politico, huffington post, national review online to take a whole sprecktrum of -- a whole

spectrum of political views. those are no substitute for newspapers. what they are commenting on is information gathered by the few number of papers left that still support actual reporting. what po lit coe and the huff -- what politico and the huffington post and all the online political blogs derive the news for their commentary from is from dinosaurs, "the washington post," "the new york times," the "wall street journal," and what is going to happen when and if the newspapers continue to invest less and less in firsthand 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 won't see a transcript of testimony on it. 10 years ago if you'd talked to my editors at places like the times or "the washington post," for whom i still freelance, they thought that the -- their online editions were going to

save their newspapers. but unfortunately, what has happened is, 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 a lot of young people don't read the online editions, they go straight to politico or the huffington post where they're getting opinions they agree with, solely. if you're -- if you want to only read huffington post opinions, you can only read the huffington post. a lot of people do. >> i want to ask you about an important moment that you write about in the book when somebody went to the farm, we're going to show you video. have you ever been to the farm? >> no. >> whitaker chambers farm. 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 far from here, an hour and a half or so, where flrp so called pumpkin papers play? >> they were pumpkin microfilm. they were microfilms of government documents chambers said hiss had handed over to him in the 1930's. chambers does not lead the f.b.i. 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. >> as you turn the corner, you'll see the house. the pumpkin papers are in that yard. >> they're right there. they're right there in that yard. there's no hiss trial without the pumpkin papers, because it was just a he said-he said thing. yes, there's where they were. and these are the documents which chambers claimed hiss had handed over to him.

this is absolutely crucial moment here. there is for the first time evidence. even though hiss was never tried for espionage. the reason chambers waits so long to do this, he wanted the statute of limitations for espionage to be over for him too. he was receiving government papers. >> this is in 1948. >> 1948. >> what happened to hiss? when was he tried for perjury? >> 1950. his first trial was about a year and a half later. ends in a hung jury. the second trial is in 1950, he's sentenced to four years. >> he went to prison for 44 months. what did he do with the rest of his life? how long did he live? >> he lived into his 90's. he came out of prison.

this is condensing a lot. there was a time, particularly in the 1960's, when america really turned against the cold war, old cold war assumptions about -- and in the early 1970's, against the whole mccarthy era and so on. hiss is a popular speaker on college campuses then. but then, something happened in 1978, a scholar named allen weinstein published a book about hiss, called "perjury." wine steyn, both -- pine stein -- weinstein both right and left-wing people asked for documents and got them. it made the case against hiss stronger. 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 f.b.i. documents. >> ronald reagan gave whitaker chambers the medal of freedom award. how long did he live? >> whitaker chambers died at a young age, i believe in 1961 he died. chambers had long been dead. ronald reagan is giving chambers the medal of freedom 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 outdated government documents to him, that's not my idea of the medal of freedom. >> what was the reaction overall to your book since it's been out? do many people care about it? >> well, a lot of people who care about alger hiss 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 make a case that even if hiss was still spying atall ta for the soviets -- hiss was spying at yalta for the soviets, which is really the unstated right wing case against him, the idea that hiss gave -- that hiss suspected the -- hiss affected the american negotiating position atall ta is ridiculous. -- based on one thing, how far the troops were into poland. >> what have you planned for your next book? >> i'm going to keep that under wraps. but let me say my next book -- it concerns aging baby boomers. and our attitudes toward age. i suspect it's going to make people a lot madder than the alger hiss book. >> and the age of american unreason, how did that do? >> that did very well, much to my surprise, actually.

i thought, oh, this is going to be treated just as 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. i think that this was an issue in the presidential campaign. i think the attempt to portray president obama -- then candidate obama, as being too smart and too elitist didn't work because i think a lot of people are concerned about the state of our culture and our educational system. >> do you own an ipod? >> yes. >> thank you. appreciate you being here. \[captioning performed by national captioning institute] \[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] >> for a d.v.d. copy of this

program, call 1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts or to give us your comments thabt program, visit us at q-and-a.org. "q & a" programs are also available as c-span podcasts. >> next weekend on "q&a," bruce chad wick on his book, "i am murdered," the story of the murder of a signer of the declaration of independence, who had great influence over early american leaders. that's next sunday on "q&a." >> on tomorrow's "washington journal," net yearly on foreign- policy. also grover norquist and the

state department's acting inspector general on the cost of operating the u.s. embassy and iraq. also u.s. policy in afghanistan with the senior fellow for peace center for american progress. "washington journal" begins live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. the centers for disease control and prevention is releasing a new report and we will have that live here on c-span at 10:55 a.m. eastern. >> how is c-span funded? >> publicly funded. >> detonations, maybe. i have no idea. >> the government. >> maybe, i do not know. >> how is c-span funded? america's cable companies created c-span as a public service, a private business.