“now you are alone:” anticommunism, gender, and the cold war myths of hede massing andwhittaker...

diph_1051 699..722

v e r o n i c a a . w i l s o n

“Now You Are Alone:” Anticommunism, Gender, andthe Cold War Myths of Hede Massing and

Whittaker Chambers

When Hede Massing died in 1981, she left behind political writings and personalcorrespondence to shape others’ opinions about her. Made infamous in the1940s by her former marriage to Communist Gerhart Eisler and her role inAlger Hiss’s second perjury trial, Massing observed the notoriety gained byex-Communist government witnesses such as Elizabeth Bentley and WhittakerChambers, and tasted some of it firsthand. Her twenty-year marriage to PaulMassing, her greatest love, failed partly due to the stresses of public scrutiny oncethe Cold War began and federal officials discovered her role in the Hiss case.

Massing published a memoir, This Deception, in 1951, and then left her papersto posterity in 1981 to help continue the anticommunist crusade after her death.1

She surely hoped that her version of her life would not fade into obscurity or bereplaced by others’ representations. She knew the frustration of being portrayedas a seductress-spy, a Mata Hari, rather than as the complex woman she was atthe time of the Hiss case. Friends had abandoned her when she testified againstHiss in 1949. Hede afterward dreaded liberal slurs on her character and inter-preted unflattering press coverage in that light. She could not know that someconservatives would join in the myth making after her death, casting her as afemme fatale or minor adjunct to the heroic Whittaker Chambers—as a womanwhose subversion had been directed by men, her radicalism dictated by naivelove or problematic sexual desire.2 In analyzing Massing’s story, this articleexamines how Hede Massing’s life can be interpreted in ways other than thoseemployed by male commentators and how representations of Massing servedvarious interests and perpetuated certain ideologies and assumptions aboutcommunism, espionage, and women. Finally, I hope to restore some ofMassing’s voice that has been silenced by male commentary or inattention.

1. These are the Hede Massing Papers held at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolutionand Peace at Stanford University, San Jose, California (hereafter Hede Massing Papers, HooverInstitution Archives).

2. This happened although Hede did as much secret work as Chambers had—and perhapsmore. The Soviets sent her on assignments throughout Europe and the United States, andprovided her with trips to Moscow given only to elite foreign spies—something Chamberslied about receiving in order to inflate his own importance. See Sam Tanenhaus, WhittakerChambers: A Biography (New York, 1997), 86–88, 96–119.

bs_bs_banner

Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, No. 4 (September 2012). © 2012 The Society for Historians ofAmerican Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street,Malden, MA 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

699

Hede Massing claimed in her 1951 autobiography that her parents’ instabili-ties had led her to question authority at an early age and to yearn for a lifeenmeshed in the sorts of affection and idealism that she had not found at home.Hede’s mother was the daughter of a wandering Polish rabbi, and her father wasa former circus acrobat who barely managed to support his family. They hadmarried despite their differences in temperament, and regretted it bitterlyyears later, as did their three children. Decades after escaping her childhoodhome, Hede characterized her father as a “fop,” a “playboy,” and a “poorprovider” whose financial irresponsibility and liaisons with barmaids and pros-titutes caused the family much pain. Fifty years later Hede described a lovelessand conflict-ridden family life, claiming that even as a child she had vowed tofind or create a happy family of her own as soon as possible. In time, shebelieved, this longing had helped lead her to communism.3

At seventeen Hede became a young bohemian, joining Viennese theatergroups and cafe society. There she met her first husband, young Communistwriter Gerhart Eisler, who would later gain notoriety as an alleged Soviet secretagent, and agreed to share his life of revolutionary commitment.4 Hede was fondof several left-wing, intellectual young men who appealed to her need to giveand receive warmth and compassion. But she quickly became most attached toEisler, whose revolutionary passion earned her awe and respect. Indeed, Hedemight have been looking for everything that her absentee father did not possess:seriousness, responsibility, and commitment. After only two private meetingswith Eisler, she agreed to marry him. Years later, Hede implied that she was nevera “true” Communist, for she supposedly had never fully understood Marxist-Leninist theory or “identified with” the proletariat.5 But she had believed thatcommunism was humanitarian, and she wanted to support Eisler’s career.

Soon Eisler was invited to become an assistant editor of the Rote Fahne, themain Communist newspaper in Germany. The German Communist Party, orKPD, was well respected, a large, well-organized member of the Comintern,6 so

3. Hede Massing, This Deception (New York, 1951), 3–5, 7; Hede told much the same storyto FBI agents in the late 1940s as she did to the American public in her 1951 autobiography. Seeexcerpt from Hede Massing’s FBI Report, “Personal History of Hede Massing,” 1A, HedeMassing Papers, box 1, folder 5, Hoover Institution Archives (hereafter “Personal History”).

4. Massing, This Deception, 29–35; “Personal History,” 1A. Hede was swept off her feet byEisler’s determination to have her but also makes it clear that her desire to leave her childhoodhome played a significant role in her decision to marry him.

5. Massing, This Deception, 40.6. The Communist International (founded in 1919) was the governing body of represen-

tatives from the various Communist Parties around the world. Soviet Comintern membersenjoyed the greatest prestige because the USSR was the first (and, until 1949, the only) nationto experience a successful Marxist revolution. Presumably, then, Soviet Communists bestunderstood how to foster effective revolutionary techniques. Under Stalin’s goal of subordi-nating all Communist Parties to Soviet interests, the Comintern increasingly became a puppetof the USSR’s secret police, the GPU/NKVD, until its official dissolution in 1943. It waspartially reincarnated by Stalin’s creation of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform)in 1947, which gave tactical and financial support to socialist revolutionary movements andtried to shape them to Soviet interests and guidelines. See Franz Borkenau, World Communism:

700 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

Eisler leapt at the offer, which was, in fact, a promotion. He and Hede marriedbefore moving to Berlin in December 1920. Their lives were enmeshed in KPDcircles, and Hede helped Eisler host many political and theoretical discussionsin their home. Moving among the KPD elite, Hede’s commitment to socialismdeepened with personal friendships. Like many romantics, however, shebelieved in the revolution but did not have the commitment needed for everydayparty work. Although she tried to hide her ennui, she was bored with endlessmeetings and required readings. When she went to live with friends outsideBerlin in 1923, it was clear that the marriage was foundering. Hede and Gerhartdrifted apart; he was absorbed in party activities and had little time to visit her.In the meantime, she gravitated to another man.7

Hede adored wealthy, charismatic Communist publisher Julian Gumperz andleft Eisler for him.8 In 1926 the couple visited New York, where Hede learnedfluent English and Freudian psychoanalytic theory.9 Hede joined Julian inFrankfurt in 1928, where she considered studying psychology or social work,and became involved with radical student life. There she met Paul Massing,whose reputation for brilliance preceded him. Paul studied at the left-wingInstitute of Social Research (better known as the Frankfurt School) at theUniversity of Frankfurt am Main, where he was finishing the economics doc-torate he had begun at the Sorbonne. He was a leading member of the Marxiststudy group but refused to join the KPD, as he wanted to retain his indepen-dence of thought and action. Paul studied with Julian for their exams, and Hedefell violently in love with him. Soon the romance was mutual, and, after muchagonizing, Hede left Julian.10 This third marriage would be her last. PaulMassing was her grand passion, her greatest love. Decades later he would breakher heart, as she had supposedly done Julian Gumperz’s.

In late 1928 the Massings moved to Berlin, where they became part ofthe city’s vibrant leftist community, and remained in close contact withEisler and other KPD officials. In 1929 Paul moved to Moscow to work in theGerman department of the International Agrarian Institute. Hede assuagedher loneliness by spending even more time with party comrades. Soon her

A History of the Communist International (New York, 1939); E. H. Carr, Twilight of the Comintern,1930–1935 (New York, 1982); Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919–1943.Documents, 3 vols. (London, 1951); Helmut Graber, Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern:International Communism in the Era of Stalin’s Ascendancy (Garden City, NY, 1974); KevinMcDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism fromLenin to Stalin (New York, 1997).

7. Massing, This Deception, 40–41.8. Massing, This Deception, 44. Gerhart and Hede remained friends for several years.

During a time of financial difficulty, Eisler lived with the Gumperzs, and became romanticallyinvolved with Hede’s sister Ella. Ibid., 55–59.

9. Ibid., 55–59; “Personal History,” 2.10. Massing, This Deception, 30–31, 34. Wiggershaus claims that Paul left the Communist

Party in 1937, when in fact he only abandoned Stalin’s service as a fellow traveler, and had neverofficially joined the party. Massing, This Deception, 62–65.

“Now You Are Alone” : 701

dedication earned her special notice that permanently changed her life. Sovietspy Richard Sorge, whom she had known in Frankfurt, contacted her to do“special work” for the cause, introducing Hede to an agent called “Ludwig,”who successfully recruited her.11 Later she learned that this was Ignace Reiss, ahigh-ranking Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) official.12 Hede and her supe-rior treated her new work as doing party duty on a different level, and shesupposedly did not think of it as espionage or conspiracy. She was asked to makereports on people she knew, evaluating their potential for secret work. Hedelearned to evade surveillance and do errands such as giving anonymous Russianslessons in European manners or carrying packages to specified drop-off points.When Hede decided to join Paul in Moscow, her value had already beendemonstrated, and the stage was set for her later espionage assignments.13 In theUSSR, the Massings witnessed the suffering caused by ruthless collectivizationand the first Five Year Plan. They returned to Berlin in 1931 rather disillusionedwith the USSR. Yet Nazism was on the rise, and Hede and Paul believed thatonly Communists stood in the way.14

For the next several months, Hede arranged mail drops and safe apartmentsfor other agents. She networked among leftists and liberals, recruiting some asinformants.15 After Hitler’s ascent, the Massings joined the German under-ground resistance. Hede used her U.S. passport to get Jews and Communistssafely across the Czechoslovakian border. She soon fled to Paris, but Paul wasinterned in a concentration camp.16 While Paul’s wealthy family pressured forhis release, Ludwig assigned Hede to the United States.17

In January 1934 Paul was freed. Joining Hede in the United States, he taughteconomics and wrote about Nazi Germany.18 Hede remained in the apparatusdespite her misgivings, partly because her handler told her that no agent ever leftsecret work.19 Soon she met State Department official Noel Field, whom she

11. Massing, This Deception, 66–67. For more on Richard Sorge, see Gordon W. Prange,Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (New York, 1984).

12. Massing, This Deception, 76–77; See also the biography written by Reiss’s widow inElisabeth K. Poretsky, Our Own People: A Memoir of “Ignace Reiss” and his Friends (Ann Arbor,MI, 1969.) “Reiss” was, like “Ludwig” or “Ludwik,” an alias. The man’s true name was IgnacePoretsky. After his defection from Stalin’s service, Poretsky was considered a Trotskyite andtraitor by the Soviet regime. Like friend and fellow spy Walter Krivitsky, Poretsky was shot andkilled, a probable victim of NKVD assassins. Poretsky, Our Own People, x, 1–3, 218–74; Koch,Double Lives, 17–18, 53–55, 62–74, 309–10, 315–22; Brown and MacDonald, On a Field of Red,389–90.

13. Massing, This Deception, 79–82; “Personal History,” 3.14. Massing, This Deception, 84–93, 98–100.15. Ibid., 100.16. Ibid., 111–14.17. Ibid., 123–46; “Personal History,” 21.18. This was printed under an alias, with Lincoln Steffens writing the introduction for the

English translation. See Karl Bellinger, Fatherland (New York, 1935). Before his release, whichwas largely due to his family’s financial influence and community standing, Paul was torturedby Nazi soldiers.

19. Massing, This Deception, 153–58.


tried to recruit as an informant.20 In 1936 Field (by his own admission) intro-duced her to Alger Hiss, also in the State Department, who hoped to recruitNoel for his own spy apparatus: a group of federal workers in Washington.21

Hiss later denied that this conversation had ever occurred.22 Hede also recruitedState Department employee Laurence Duggan, a friend to Hiss and Field, butpassed him to another handler and did not know whether or how long he hadcontinued his involvement with the Soviets.23

During the 1930s great purge, Hede’s comrades began to disappear, andthe Massings’ connection to Ludwig, who publicly accused Stalin of betrayingthe revolution, nearly doomed them. Furthermore, Hede openly expressed herown dismay about the tragedy in Moscow; unlike many Communists, she couldnot believe that the revolutionaries who confessed to espionage and treasonand then were executed had all conspired against the USSR. Hede’s handlersreported her doubts to Moscow, where Stalin’s officials already considered hera disciple of the increasingly apostate Ludwig and believed that she had “sub-versive inclinations.”24 A comrade known as “Helen” visited in 1937 to ask whyHede wanted to leave espionage and why Paul was “so critical lately.” Helenurged them to go to Moscow to explain their feelings and now-suspect relation-ship with Ludwig. Soon newspapers revealed that Ludwig had been murderedin Switzerland, his body riddled with bullets.25

20. “Personal History,” 27–28. See also Flora Lewis, Red Pawn: The Story of Noel Field (NewYork, 1965). Lewis believed the Fields naive pawns instead of actual secret agents. Recentstudies, however, reveal that Noel Field was far more embroiled in the apparatus than he letHede believe. Spy rings often knew little or nothing about parallel networks, in order to protectthe rest of the apparatus if one portion were exposed. See Allen Weinstein and AlexanderVassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York, 1999), 4–8;John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB inAmerica (New Haven, CT, 2009), 4–12.

21. Massing, This Deception, 168–75. NKVD reports identify Hiss as an agent for Sovietmilitary intelligence (GRU), whose records have not been opened to the public. Hede toldsuperiors about meeting Hiss at the Fields’, triggering NKVD discussion about Hiss’s involve-ment with a group of government workers in Washington once managed by CommunistHarold Ware. This group’s courier was Whittaker Chambers, who worked for the GRU.See Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, 4–8, 38–49, and Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, Spies,esp. 1–14, 17–31, 143–93.

22. Koch, Double Lives, 324–27; “Ex-Wife of Eisler Links Hiss to Reds,” New York Times,December 6, 1949; “Woman against Hiss,” Newsweek, December 19, 1949, 16–17.

23. Massing, This Deception, 206–11; “Personal History,” 32–33. NKVD files reveal thatthe Soviets considered Hede (code named “redhead”) a good recruiter, and Alger Hiss andLawrence Duggan important sources of information. Hede’s handlers reported that Hiss andHede competed for Field, and that Duggan, unbeknownst to Hede, passed government docu-ments to NKVD official Norman Borodin in 1936 and 1937. NKVD files also reveal thatIgnace Reiss (“Ludwig”) and his wife had socialized with the Fields in Europe, and that Reisswas assassinated after his defection so he could not expose contacts such as Hiss, Duggan, andNoel Field. See Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 4–21; Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev,Spies, 220–45.

24. Massing, This Deception, 219; “Personal History,” 47–48.25. Massing, This Deception, 229–34. General Walter Krivitsky maintained in 1938 that he

had been ordered to arrange the murder, and that the command to kill his longtime comradecemented his own decision to defect soon afterward. In September 1937 Swiss investigators


Paul suggested that he go to Moscow to explain their position. Hede refusedto let him go alone, where he might be killed or used as a hostage to keep herworking for the Soviets. The Massings agreed to go to Russia, and did not notifyAmerican authorities, whom they distrusted more than the Soviets, and whoprotected a political and economic status quo that the Massings still foundcorrupt and offensive. They traveled to Moscow knowing they might neverreturn; yet they retained an emotional tie to communism that compelled themto set things right, to make an honorable break.26 They traveled under realnames and papers, and informed friends about their destination and return date.Hede soon believed that these preparations had saved their lives.27

According to Hede’s memoir and FBI files, Soviet intelligence officersquizzed her for weeks about her U.S. handlers and Ludwig, refusing to returntheir passports.28 Hede learned that Noel Field and his wife were in town,invited them over, and told them what had happened. The men monitoring theroom’s wiretaps realized that the Fields now knew the Massings’ situation. Hedephoned her U.S. handler (also in Moscow), demanding the return of theirpassports. Otherwise she would go to the American Legation for help. Thatevening they recovered their papers, and she and Paul returned home.29

traced an abandoned car to two guests who had registered in a nearby hotel on the same nightReiss’s body was found and abandoned baggage to a Communist resident of Rome and a ParisGRU agent. One suspect was Gertrude Schildbach, a German Communist, who had knownReiss’s family and had been seen in a restaurant with him the night he was murdered. SeePoretsky, Our Own People, 1–3, 227–42.

26. Massing, This Deception, 236–38. This emotional dynamic is seen in other former spies.Elizabeth Bentley spent nearly two years agonizing before cutting her ties with the Sovietunderground and going to the FBI. Whittaker Chambers hid out on his farm with a gun,watching for assassins, and told his story to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in 1939,more than a year after he had fled the apparatus.

27. Massing, This Deception, 239–40; “Personal History,” 49–50. Such arrangements wereHede’s insurance. She knew the NKVD tried to keep its operations secret lest the world learnabout Soviet-sponsored assassinations and react with the hostility then felt toward Hitler’sGestapo. The more public she made the details of her journey, the more likely would be anyoutcry if she and Paul vanished in the USSR.

28. Massing, This Deception, 247–71; “Personal History,” 50.29. Massing, This Deception, 276–79; “Personal History,” 31, 50. After serving in the State

Department, Field went to Switzerland to work in the Unitarian Service Committee. DuringWorld War II he was a liaison between OSS head Allen Dulles and European antifascists.In 1948 and 1949 Field was a journalist in Eastern Europe, where he remained, probably toescape prosecution in the Hiss case. In 1949 the NKVD imprisoned the Fields behind the IronCurtain. Charging Field with anti-Soviet espionage was ludicrous, but it fooled observers whodid not know better. Between 1949 and 1953 Stalin used the argument to purge EasternEuropean Communists whom he accused of being Field’s capitalist accomplices. Noel andHerta were held for the duration of the purges and show trials, as were their ward ErikaWallach and Noel’s brother Hermann, who came looking for the Fields and were captured.Noel Field was central to the terror Stalin unleashed to obtain Iron Curtain Communists’complete loyalty to theUSSR. Noel later admitted that he had indeed spied for the Soviets, andthat certain Communists, including Hede Massing, had been his contacts. Whether the Fieldswere willing accomplices (some sources aver that Noel boasted about assisting with Reiss’sassassination), or hapless victims, they emerged from captivity in 1954 mourning Stalin’s deathand willing to remain in Communist Hungary for the rest of their days. Hermann Field and


Recently declassified Soviet NKVD files, however, reveal that the Massingsagreed to continue secret work if they were freed, and this promise of futureassistance is most certainly what saved their lives and allowed them to return tothe United States. Soviet files reveal that they briefly reengaged in secret workseveral years later, once the United States and USSR were wartime allies. In1942 Hede and Paul referred their friend, German émigré scholar FranzNeumann, who worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to Sovietagents. Neumann provided information about OSS negotiations with Germanresistance groups and OSS economic reports on Germany and the USSR. Forunderstandable reasons, the Massings apparently never revealed this activity toU.S. authorities, even once they began cooperating with the FBI and the HouseUn-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947.30

Upon their return to the United States, the Massings found that starting anew life was harder than they had anticipated. How could they assimilate into acapitalist society they had long avoided? Their life together had begun in andcentered on communism; now they had to start over from scratch. By 1939,many of their friends had abandoned them for distancing themselves fromcommunism and critically discussing the Soviet Purges, and the Massings leftNew York for a farm near Quakertown, Pennsylvania, where they remodeledan old country house. Hede took in paying guests, and during World War IImanaged the women’s night shift at a Hoboken shipyard. She and Paul onlyspent weekends together, and the couple drifted apart. Tension and distancehad grown between them, their lives no longer sealed by the romance of therevolutionary enterprise. Hede later realized that when they decided to leaveCommunism, “Paul’s relationship to me . . . suffered a deadly blow.”31 Ludwig’swidow urged Hede to contact State Department security officer RaymondMurphy to unburden her conscience and reduce the risk of future prosecution.32

There was also the matter of Paul’s U.S. citizenship, which he’d applied for butbeen denied, presumably because of his Communist connections. Hede met

Erika Wallach, imprisoned in Poland and a Soviet labor camp, were released in 1954, andreturned to the United States. See Hermann and Kate Field, Trapped in the Cold War: The Ordealof an American Family (Stanford, CA, 1999); Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, Spies, esp. 4–12,30–31, 230–32, 369–71; Maria Schmidt, Battle of Wits: Beliefs, Ideologies and Secret Agents in the20th Century (Budapest, 2007).

30. See Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 249–51, Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev,Spies, 317–22. We can only speculate about the spirit in which the Massings referred Neumann:fear, or wartime solidarity with the USSR?

31. Massing, This Deception, 289, 297.32. Murphy worked for the State Department’s European Affairs division and became the

principal debriefer for Communist defectors, working with Elisabeth Poretsky and the widowof Comintern agent Heinz Neumann (brother to Franz Neumann), who had been killed inStalin’s purge. Margarete Buber-Neumann was held in a Siberian labor camp from 1936 to1939 and then released to the Nazis in a prisoner exchange. In 1945 she was liberated by theAllies, and Murphy arranged for her to move to the United States. Eventually Hede becamefriends with Poretsky and Buber-Neumann. All in all, Murphy handled more than one hundredex-Communist emigres. See Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone—Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York, 1999), 146–147.


privately with Murphy in 1945, which seemed preferable to naming namesbefore the FBI or HUAC.33

Eventually Hede grew far more conservative than Paul, who remainedwedded to Frankfurt School cultural Marxism. Paul vehemently disapproved oftotalitarianism, but he continued to advocate democratic socialism and criticizethe capitalism that many of Hede’s new allies saw as the only bulwark againstinternational communism and the source of American prosperity and progress.Paul was a committed anti-Stalinist but would not abandon his belief thatcapitalism was a repressive, unjust economic system.34 In 1947 the Massingsseparated, their estrangement hastened by FBI visits in 1946 and 1947.Prompted by Murphy, Special Agent Robert Lamphere contacted Hede abouther ex-husband Gerhart Eisler, whom officials believed managed spy networksin the United States.35 Hede admitted her espionage and broadly outlined herrole in the Soviet apparatus, not yet naming Hiss or Duggan. Paul refused tocooperate.36

Despite Paul’s wishes that she avoid telling the full story to HUAC or theFBI, Hede decided she would not be able to avoid a public telling of her story.On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, whom she had never met but hadheard a great deal about in party circles, discussed his party days, his experiencesin the underground, his break with Communism in 1938, and his previousrelationship with Alger Hiss, whom he claimed he had known as a Communist.In September 1948, after Hiss slapped him with a slander suit, Chambers raisedthe ante, claiming that Hiss had been not only a Communist, but also a Sovietspy who had passed foreign policy information to Chambers. Hede knewChambers had left the apparatus but had never expected this bombshell a decade

33. According to Robert Lamphere, by the 1940s G-men suspected that the Massings wereSoviet agents but had no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. When Lamphere asked anti-Stalinist Ruth Fischer about her estranged brother Gerhart Eisler, Fischer suggested that hequestion Hede. Lamphere interviewed Hede several times in 1946 and 1947 and cultivated heras a witness in the Hiss case. See Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Schactman, The FBI-KGB War:A Special Agent’s Story (New York, 1986), 49–57.

34. Like his more famous colleagues Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal,and Herbert Marcuse, Paul Massing continued to critically analyze capitalism as well as thepolitical structures and cultural paradigms capitalism produced. Paul saw no contradictionbetween his hatred of Stalin and his continued faith that he and his colleagues were the rightfulheirs to Marx and Engels’s sort of social criticism. For more on the Frankfurt School, itswartime activities in the United States, and Massing’s role, see Wiggershaus, The FrankfurtSchool.

35. Lamphere and Schactman, FBI-KGB War, 48–49.36. Ibid. See also Massing, This Deception, 316–17. Paul believed that the FBI had given

derogatory information about him to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).Lamphere knew that Paul’s suspicions about the FBI and INS were correct but self-righteouslyinformed Paul that “becoming a citizen was a privilege, not a right,” and that Paul “had livedsafe and secure in the United States during the war, whereas if he’d stayed in Germany theNazis would long since have killed him.” Hede may have cooperated more fully out of fear thatPaul would never become a citizen or that he would be deported, as officials were consideringdoing with Eisler. Paul did receive citizenship in the 1950s.


after the supposed events in question.37 Soon Hede was subpoenaed to affirmChambers’ story. She appeared before the grand jury that indicted Hiss and atHiss’s second perjury trial in 1949.38 Recalling her conversation with Hiss aboutField’s value as an informant, she helped government lawyers connect Hiss withSoviet espionage.39

Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 and sentenced to five years in prison.At the same time, Hede’s marriage collapsed.40 Hiss’s lawyers had probed theMassings’ pasts, hoping to portray Hede as a woman of dubious character(indeed, they claimed that German leftists called Hede “the whore of Vienna”)and undermine her value as a witness.41 Hede’s subpoenas had reopened oldwounds and kept Hede more connected to the past than either of the Massingswished. Paul was angry that Hede had exposed them to such publicity whenhe had longed to build a new life. He and his peers, including his friends of theFrankfurt School, saw nothing to be gained by a red scare that might endangertheir own careers. Hiss’s conviction persuaded many that the government wasrife with Communists. Paul rued Hede’s contributions to that myth, and theloyalty hearings and political purges that followed.

Paul was also distressed that Hede would not obey his wishes and refuse totestify. Over the years, the Massings had fallen into rather patriarchal maritalroles. Paul was supposedly more analytical and level-headed, handling theirfinances, earning more money, and mastering abstract theoretical concepts,while Hede was his gracious hostess and warm companion. Despite their defi-ance of some bourgeois norms—Hede had various careers, and no children—theMassings adopted fairly conventional gender roles in which Paul’s authorityusually prevailed.42

37. Massing, This Deception, 330. See also Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 203–89.38. Judge Samuel H. Kaufman decided that Hede was an inadmissible witness during Hiss’s

first trial, persuaded by the defense that her story was not germane to Chambers’s and thatHede herself was a questionable witness, given her self-confessed espionage and her threemarriages. See “Ex-Wife of Eisler Barred as Witness in the Trial of Hiss,” New York Times, July2, 1949; “House Group Decides Not to Hear Witnesses Barred at Hiss Trial,” New York Times,July 13, 1949; “Eisler’s First Wife Kept Out As Side Issue,” New York World Telegram, July 12,1949.

39. Massing, This Deception, 329–31. Hede discussed Hiss’s espionage once his denialsconvinced her that he remained loyal to the Soviets. She also empathized with Chambers,whose initial discussion of Hiss as a Communist but not as a spy she interpreted as Chambers’sreluctance to ruin lives by “blast[ing] forth with all he knew from the very beginning.” Bothhoped that Hiss would confess his espionage, but for the rest of his life Hiss maintained hisinnocence and attributed their testimony to delusion or malice. Alger Hiss, In the Court ofPublic Opinion (New York, 1957); Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 431–39, 496–97, 515–20;Weinstein, Perjury, 478–80, 494–532.

40. Massing, This Deception, 289, 319.41. See “Ex-Wife of Eisler Barred as Witness in the Trial of Hiss,” New York Times, July 2,

1949; “Ex-Wife of Eisler Links Hiss to Reds,” New York Times, December 6, 1949.42. For evidence of this mutual gendered “type-casting,” see Massing, This Deception,

63–64, 228–29, 240, 293–95. See also Paul Massing to Hede Massing, September 1, 21, 1933,May 3, 1935, July 22, 1946, June 20, 1950, March 7, 1952, Hede Massing Papers, box 1, folder“Paul,” and box 2, folders 2 and 5, Hoover Institution Archives.


What a blow it must have been, then, to Paul and to the comfortablemaintenance of their usual roles and assumptions, for Hede to begin a phase ofher life over which he had so little authority. Paul was summoned before HUAConly once, and the congressmen were most interested in Hede’s experiences.Hede had received warm welcomes in progressive circles due to her statusas Paul’s wife—the mate of an antifascist scholar who had survived to writeabout Hitler’s camps. But now Paul was eclipsed, as Hede’s work with the Sovietunderground in the United States became the public focus. Newspapers mayhave called her “Mrs. Paul Massing” or “Mrs. Hede Massing” when discussingher role in the Hiss case, but they focused their attention on Hede’s earlier life,especially her marriage to Gerhart Eisler, to whom she had not been married formore than twenty years.43

And, despite the rather traditional gender roles the Massings had adopted,Hede was no traditional woman. She had married three men, divorced two, andwas childless. Bohemians and radicals frequently formed and dissolved romanticrelationships according to their own emotional and sexual standards, consideredthemselves married in the absence of legal or religious ceremony, and founddivorce or separation a mature rather than a controversial decision; but this wasnot true for most Americans. Divorce had become more legally attainablethroughout the twentieth century, yet in the 1950s it was still considered asomewhat scandalous condition. During the early Cold War, film and printmedia often portrayed divorced women as manipulative, hard, selfish, orwanton; they were dangerous, sexually mature, and probably sexually frustratedwomen who posed a temptation to married men, a threat to monogamy, and adanger to the traditional nuclear family. Hede seemed to some observers anembodiment of illicit sexuality made even more exotic by her connections toradicalism and espionage. Most of Eisler’s U.S. secret work had occurred in the1930s. Yet late 1940s commentators described him as an evil genius and sinisterComintern conspirator and focused on Hede’s relationship with Eisler or herthree marriages. Some, especially Hiss’s supporters, used both to discredit her.Others hoped to whet readers’ appetites and sell newspapers or magazines.

Time magazine called Hede a “woman with a past,” thus implying sexualadventures and Hede’s dubious virtue, and hinting that her “past” was as muchsexual as political in nature. It may also have been an unconscious acknowledge-ment that so many Americans seemed to find the spy a compelling dark eroticfigure.44 To Americans who heroized G-Men, devoured spy novels, and feared

43. New York Times, June 29, July 1, 2, 10, 13, November 6, 15, December 10, 1949;Washington Post, December 10, 1949. The New York Times headline of December 10, “Ex-Wifeof Eisler Links Hiss to Reds,” was typical. By now Eisler had escaped the United States and anypossible punishment in his contempt of Congress case, aboard the Polish liner Batory out ofNew York. His flight seemed to many to confirm the Justice Department’s espionage chargesagainst him. Hence, Hede’s link to Eisler seemed to underscore the seriousness of her ownespionage and thus Hiss’s alleged own.

44. “Woman with a Past,” Time, December 19, 1949, 11.


Soviet subversion, the underground seemed a forbidden exotic place whereCommunists plotted treason, spied on government officials, lived by their ownrules, and committed illicit, shameless sexual acts. Drawing on such myths, Timedescribed Hede as the elegant “ex-wife of Communist Underground ChieftainGerhart Eisler.” The writer evoked the glamour of European cafes and wartimeintrigue by describing her as “a vampish Viennese actress” in her spy days. This“woman with a past” could decide a man’s fate and ruin his life.45

Newsweek’s commentator (probably Chambers’s friend Ralph de Toledano)falsely claimed that Hede had “worked at [Eisler’s] side in the Communistunderground in the United States.” Wrongly implying that Eisler had intro-duced his (innocent) wife to espionage, Newsweek ignored Hede’s agency in thematter. She had divorced Eisler long before becoming a spy and had joined (anddeparted) the apparatus out of her own convictions. Then Newsweek threw in theMata Hari association as well. The “former Viennese actress,” who was “stillchic and coquettish at 49,” had a scandalous past that would implicate Hiss in a“damning” way.46

Hence the nation’s leading news magazines tantalized readers with glimpsesof sex and the shadowy Soviet underground while assuring them that a now-reformed Hede would help the government defeat communism. Readers couldbe safely, secretly thrilled by Red lawlessness while still wanting governmentauthorities to prevail. It was the turned temptress Hede whose dearly boughtinside knowledge of espionage helped the anticommunist crusade. She symbol-ized both the Communist danger that justified America’s Cold War and thegovernment’s comforting assurance of pending victory. Even Hede’s FBI contact,Robert Lamphere, was not immune. Despite Hede’s insistence that her sexual lifehad ended with her marriage to Paul, Lamphere, who was intensely aware of her“vivaciousness” and “wit,” opined that sex could never be unimportant to such awoman and that it was “easy to see why many men had desired her.”47

Hiss’s attorneys similarly implied that the taint of illicit sexuality clung to her.Explaining her meeting with Hiss, Hede testified, “I had met Mr. Field in 1934and knew him very intimately. My husband had been released from a concen-tration camp in Germany.” Defense counsel Claude Cross rebutted, “We’re notinterested in that, or in what husband it was.” Recognizing Cross’s implication,Hede continued, “Paul Massing is my third husband, and I have been married tohim for eighteen years. For the benefit of Mr. Cross, Mr. Massing is my thirdhusband, not my second, or my eighth.” Hiss’s counsel had persuaded the judgein the first perjury trial to bar Hede’s testimony on the grounds that Hede wasautomatically an inflammatory witness as the former wife of Gerhart Eisler anda thrice-married woman.48

45. Ibid.46. “Woman against Hiss,” Newsweek, December 19, 1949, 16.47. Lamphere and Schachtman, FBI-KGB War, 51.48. “Woman against Hiss,” Newsweek, December 19, 1949, 16


Paul had been eclipsed, and Hede was determined to tell her story fully andtruthfully. She did not relish having to testify but believed that she owed it to herconscience and to America, her adopted country, and willingly took the standwhen finally called in 1949. She saw it as a matter of integrity, of doing her partto smash the Soviet regime, the “deception” that had destroyed so many lives. Inall likelihood, Paul could not have stopped her even if he had tried, and from1946 onward it was Hede’s past, not shared goals or his career or desires, thatmost shaped their daily lives. As early as 1946, Paul insisted that he and Hedeseriously discuss their relationship, which he felt lacked trust and intimacydespite the fact that Hede was the “best friend and comrade a man could have.”49

Months later they had separated, Paul claiming loneliness and revulsion at thepublicity created by the trial.50 Hede was distraught by the separation, which sheinitially “did not seem to be able to cope with.” She “was not made to be alone”51

and had never been without a romantic partner since 1917. Paul had not decidedupon divorce, however, and continued to provide for many of Hede’s financialneeds while she supplemented this income with anticommunist writing andresearch.52

This state of affairs continued for several years while Hede and Paul tookvarious jobs that required them to travel—Paul for academic posts and research,and Hede for anticommunist assignments. Their divergence was both symbol-ized and exacerbated by these quite different milieus; Paul remained in left-liberal academic circles, while Hede moved rightward over the decade after theHiss trial. By the mid-1950s she accepted research assignments sponsored by theCentral Intelligence Agency.53 Paul, in the meantime, worked in the sociologydepartment at Rutgers University, where he remained on good terms with hisFrankfurt School colleagues.54 In 1953 Hede worked for the United States

49. Paul Massing to Hede Massing, circa 1946, dated only “Tuesday Night,” Hede MassingPapers, box 1, folder 5, Hoover Institution Archives.

50. Massing, 319–20, describes Paul’s intense desire to avoid media and governmentscrutiny.

51. Hede Massing, “Christmas in Santa Monica,” Hede Massing Papers, box 2, HooverInstitution Archives.

52. See John Haynes Holmes to Hede Massing, March 22, 1949, North AmericanNewspaper Alliance to Hede Massing, May 12, 1952, Evron M. Kirkpatrick (Operations andPolicy Research) to Hede Massing, February 4, 1959, Hede Massing Papers, box 2, HooverInstitution Archives. See also Hede Massing, “Another Piece of the Soviet Puzzle,” and “Underthe Soviet Steamroller,” in New Leader, June 11 and December 17, 1951. For a time, Hede alsodid research for Paul’s employers at the Institute for Social Research and the American JewishCommittee.

53. Ibid.; see Leo Cherne (International Rescue Committee) to Eugene Lyons re HedeMassing, November 5, 1956, Hede Massing to Leo Cherne, November 9, 1956, Harold Oram(International Rescue Committee) to Hede Massing, March 19, 1957, Hede Massing Papers,box 2, Hoover Institution Archives.

54. Paul continued to collaborate with Frankfurt School colleagues on projects such as theanalysis of anti-Semitism for the American Jewish Committee and a study of Voice of America(VOA) radio broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain. In 1961 several Frankfurt School colleaguesand prominent sociologists at Berkeley and Columbia recommended Paul for promotion to afull professorship within the Rutgers Sociology Department. These recommendations came


Information Agency (USIA), a State Department office that hired her toexamine publications received by American-maintained libraries in Germany.She read ninety-six newspapers and reported their political attitudes toward theUnited States and USSR in a project that helped determine U.S. foreign policyfor Europe.55

Soon she learned that Senator Joseph McCarthy’s aide Roy Cohn wantedher to “come home and testify” about the research.56 As chief counsel forMcCarthy’s Committee on Government Operations, Cohn investigated theInternational Information Agency (IIA), the State Department office thatcirculated American printed propaganda overseas. After a European tour inwhich Cohn and fellow aide David Schine tried to purge IIA libraries of“Communist” books such as leftist Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon,the men gained reputations as book-burning bullies. They also investigatedalleged Communist infiltration of the Voice of America (VOA), the StateDepartment’s overseas broadcast organization. They found no Communists,but the investigation pressured dozens of VOA employees to resign, and one tocommit suicide.57

Hede’s work looked like more of the same to Paul, whose anger was alsolikely due to his friendship with Frankfurt School colleague Paul Lazarsfeld andhis ex-wife, communications scholar Herta Herzog. In the 1940s Lazarsfeld,Herzog, and Paul Massing had collaborated on the Frankfurt School’s majorstudy of Western anti-Semitism.58 In 1952 they had jointly analyzed VOAprogram content and listener response, in an attempt to judge the effectivenessof State Department radio broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain. Paul thus knewsome VOA employees and the trouble McCarthy had caused that organization.59

from Leo Lowenthal, Philip Selznick, Robert Merton, and Seymour Lipset. Rutgers CollegeDean’s Office Personnel Records, Former Faculty 1946–48 files, University Archives, RutgersUniversity, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

55. Hede Massing to Paul Massing, September 18, 1953, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 4, Hoover Institution Archives.

56. Ibid.57. See Ellen W. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston, 1998),

256–57; Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn (New York, 1988), 144–58; David M. Oshinsky,A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York, 1983), 266–85. The VOA andthe Overseas Library Program were part of the State Department’s International InformationAgency. McCarthy targeted the agency as a result of disgruntled employees’ charges that theVOA employed Communists who prevented the VOA from broadcasting more overtly pro-Western propaganda. It was also a way for McCarthy to attack the State Department, which hehad considered effete and hopelessly compromised in the fight against Communism ever sinceHiss, Field, and other State Department employees had been accused of Soviet espionage.

58. This was undertaken at the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University,sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, and published in several books. These includedPaul Massing’s Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany(New York, 1949); Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Gutermann’s Prophets of Deceit: A Study ofthe Techniques of the American Agitator (New York, 1949); and Theodor W. Adorno et al.’s TheAuthoritarian Personality (New York, 1949).

59. For Paul Massing, “Content Analysis for the Voice of America: A Symposium,” in theState Department’s Public Opinion Quarterly 16, no. 4 (Winter 1952/53): 618–22; and also


Paul could not excuse Hede’s apparent role in McCarthy’s excesses.Hede argued that upon receiving Cohn’s orders to testify, she had resigned “bytelegram and then by a long letter.” She sent Paul a copy of her letter as proof.Hede asked, “Has your enviable security within a job and a new environmentblinded you so much that you are . . . inclined to believe the negative about me?”She protested, “Paul, you know me. I have not changed.”60

Yet they both had changed, a result of the Cold War and their divergingbeliefs. Despite Paul’s regular admonitions about how Hede should have the carserviced, manage money sensibly, and not trust people readily, in years past hehad leavened such criticism with praise for her loving nature. But now theirmarriage rapidly disintegrated, and several months after accusing her of assistingMcCarthy’s purge, Paul warned Hede that if they managed to reconcile, hemight not devote himself to her happiness. She resented his martyred attitude:“And why should you, say I? When even after 20 years of marriage it is not yourconcern.”61

Months later, Hede said that Paul no longer knew her and that she did notwant the divorce he now requested. “In your crowd,” she accused, hinting thathis sophisticated academic peers in New York City had changed him, “it is notstylish to have a great love.” Given all they had been through, it was his“responsibility” to “stick it out with” her after she had waited with him for apeaceful middle age. Hede acknowledged that Paul was seeing other women butinsisted that these relationships were almost meaningless. She argued that sincehe claimed to be in no hurry for the divorce, he had obviously formed no “greatand urgent affection with anyone else,” certainly nothing that would rival theyears and the deep love they had shared. Hede said she loved him still,and mightwish to live with him again when she returned to the United States.62 Paul’sresponse was cutting; if Hede would not agree to a divorce, he would get oneanyway: “It will mean my financial ruin and the destruction of what little securityI have been able to build up for myself and for you. It will also mean the end ofall personal relations between us.” To salvage their friendship and her economicsecurity, Hede must give him up.63

“Experiences with the Iron Curtain Press,” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 15, no 2( June 1952): 53–57. In addition, Paul would have known that Cohn and Schine made a greatdeal of trouble while they were in his beloved Frankfurt, where they investigated AmericaHouse, the U.S. cultural center in that city, and picked through the library’s large collection ofbooks and periodicals. Cohn dismissed the director’s assertion that America House carriedanticommunist magazines, such as Time and Newsweek, and insisted that the library would dobetter to subscribe to the American Legion Monthly instead. See von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, 153.

60. Hede Massing to Paul Massing, September 18, 1953, 2, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 4, Hoover Institution Archives.

61. Hede Massing to Paul Massing, January 12, 1954, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 4, Hoover Institution Archives.

62. Ibid.63. Paul Massing to Hede Massing, February 25, 1954, 1, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,

folder 4, Hoover Institution Archives.


Soon after the divorce was finalized, Paul married communications scholarHerta Herzog, the ex-wife of Frankfurt School colleague Paul Lazarsfeld.64

The news devastated Hede, who had believed that Paul loved no one seriously.65

Their union, forged in revolutionary romance, had died in the tense atmosphereof Cold War. Hede and Paul continued to correspond and to consider oneanother friends, although it was difficult for Hede, who eschewed romanticrelationships, focusing instead upon friendships with American anticommunistsand German comrades who had departed Soviet service. Her role in the Hisscase had earned their respect, as well as some of her liberal friends’ disdain, and inher loneliness Hede drew closer to anticommunists who understood her experi-ences and validated them.66 In 1951 Hede had received many letters reacting toher autobiography This Deception both approvingly and critically, but some ofher liberal friends’ responses shocked her. American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) director Roger Baldwin, a friend who had advised her against testifyingin the Hiss trial, praised her memoir’s “net-effect,” which he hoped withstrengthen national “rejection of the Stalin police-state.”67 But he also criticizedher discussion of Lawrence Duggan, who had allegedly passed information to theSoviets in the 1930s and who had mysteriously plummeted to his death in 1948,after Chambers had publicly accused Hiss of espionage. Baldwin felt that Hedemaligned Duggan by claiming that he had seriously considered joining theapparatus and thus that she had “exposed” a dead man who could not defendhimself. The ACLU director somewhat condescendingly assured her of his andhis wife’s continued affection: “Your book doesn’t spoil our love; it just makes usa little sad in spots.”68 Friend Evelyn Preston wrote similarly that Hede hadwrongly “put Duggan on a par with Hiss and Field,” and complained that “all theparts about your feelings toward your various husbands are very distasteful.”69

No matter friends’ responses, This Deception enjoyed good sales and favor-able reviews, and wedded Freudian theory to Hede’s anticommunism. Her

64. In January, Hede had challenged Paul that he could not just ignore the twenty yearsthey had spent together and turn to someone else. She asked how it would be “when you getmarried again and have to send me $200 monthly somewhere? Do you believe that you willhave stopped caring about me? . . . You told me that you have no new passion, not even a newlove; you’ve always portrayed your relationship with Herta as a friendship.” Hede Massing toPaul Massing, January 12, 1954, Hede Massing Papers, box 2, folder 4, Hoover InstitutionArchives. Translation from original German passages courtesy of Professor Judith Klinger.

65. Paul Massing to Hede Massing, January 10, 1955, Hede Massing Papers, box 2, folder4, Hoover Institution Archives.

66. Hede remained in contact with prominent anticommunists such as William F. Buckley,Jr., fellow National Review editor Suzanne La Follette, Babette Gross (Willi Muenzenburg’swidow), Elisabeth Poretsky (“Ludwig”’s widow), journalist Isaac Don Levine, and Reader’sDigest editor Eugene Lyons, as well as various former leftist German friends, and, of course,Whittaker Chambers. See Massing, This Deception, 328, 332.

67. Roger Baldwin to Hede Massing, March 3, 1951, Hede Massing Papers, box 2, HooverInstitution Archives.

68. Ibid.69. Evelyn Preston to Hede Massing, March 8, 1951, Hede Massing Papers, box 2, Hoover

Institution Archives.


explanation for her communism and espionage, and for her three marriages,was simple: a product of an unhappy childhood and unresolved Electra complex,she had sought patriarchal love and security with her three husbands and in theparty. Her ties had been personal, not political, and her youthful Marxism theresult of neurosis and naivete rather than any valid socioeconomic philosophy.Casting her life as a narrative of personal progress and self-realization, Hedeelicited critics’ sympathy and satisfied commentators’ beliefs about women andcommunism. Hede’s argument fit neatly into two sets of Cold War assumptions:sexist beliefs about female irrationality and emotionalism and psychoanalyticexplanations of communism as a haven for maladjusted individuals who couldnot succeed in capitalist society and flouted bourgeois political and gendernorms. Hede’s memoir presented postwar critics with themes of which theyalready approved: women misled by their own neuroses, chastened adults madeself-aware through psychoanalysis, and communism arising from mental andemotional disorders instead of real social problems. Hede thus promoted theCold War therapeutic ethos that one must reform oneself, not society, to behappy. In her memoir, Hede was a virtual advertisement for anticommunism,psychoanalysis, and the importance of the patriarchal family for rearing healthyloyal citizens. Only after leaving communism, she explained to an audiencewhose sympathies she craved, had she “begun to understand how deeply, tragi-cally, [she] had missed parental love, the security of a normal family life, and howthere was no substitute for it—ever.”70

The New York Herald Tribune’s Lewis Gannett claimed that This Deceptionwas “the most readable as well as psychologically the most convincing story yettold by an ex-Communist.” By describing her own alleged neuroses, Hede wasspared being labeled with the neuroses supposedly common to ex-Communistsand unrepentant radicals as well. The Memphis Commercial Appeal approved ofthe “new Hede Massing” who had learned a hard lesson and could now “live inand love the country she once was in league against.” Christian Science Monitorreviewer Samuel Orcutt praised Hede for her womanly qualities: “Her storyis that of a spontaneous, warm-blooded girl and woman whose slow process ofdisillusion wasn’t primarily an intellectual process.” John Oakes of the New YorkTimes Book Review found the memoir “disarming, unpretentious and sometimesmoving,” because Hede remained sympathetic to the men she discussed. ArthurSchlesinger, Jr., was pleased that her “moving book” contained no bitterness.This admirable lack indicated a “mature” absence of anger on Hede’s part.Schlesinger found other former Communists’ memoirs “shrill and sterile,” andpreferred Hede’s “compassion and understanding”—proper womanly qualitiesthat seemed less threatening than female anger.71

70. Massing, This Deception, 312.71. See book review clippings in Hede Massing Papers, box 2, folder 1, Hoover Institution

Archives.


Further legitimizing Hede’s memoir was its introduction by ACLU counselMorris Ernst, who considered Hede’s “moving and extraordinary story” crucialto understanding why people joined and renounced communism. Ernst saw ThisDeception as valuable insight into the backgrounds that made persons “escapefrom family rejection by substituting familial ties and comradeship for commu-nism” and then later need to escape this false security. Ernst concludes that the“drive” to communism is “related to Oedipus,” that radical politics are youthfulrebellion instead of valid dissent, and a product of damaged childhoods ratherthan of real social injustice. “For many years I have been persuaded,” he said,“that Communism in the United States has little, if any, economic base. It doesnot primarily appeal to the poor and downtrodden.”72

Hede glossed over the fact that her marriage had failed due to anticommunismand her service to the government—that she had chosen loyalty to the capitaliststate over obedience to her husband. Cold War cultural prescriptions for women,and traditional equations of patriotism, domesticity and happiness, would notpermit such exploration. Nor would Hede’s right-wing allies have appreciatedsuch blunt honesty (much as they would have abhorred the Massings’ efforts tohelp the Soviets during World War II, years after their supposed final break fromcommunism). Once Hede became known as a former spy, she believed that thebest ways she could earn a living were through research and writing. Anticom-munist acquaintances provided research jobs and publishing forums, and Hedecould not risk alienating them. Hence, she tailored her memoir in ways suited togratify conservative readers as well as a wider audience.73

Hede faded from public view, her story eclipsed by the publication of Whit-taker Chambers’ Witness in 1952. While Hede and Chambers’s lives weresomewhat parallel and at certain places entwined, Chambers is famous, butMassing is virtually forgotten. There are many reasons for this, ranging fromChambers’s renown in intellectual circles prior to the Hiss case to Witness’ssheer size and literary accomplishment. Another reason, however, is thatChambers was lionized by anticommunist writers who after his death paintedhim as a doomed hero, tortured genius, and apocalyptic political prophet.Writers such as William F. Buckley, Jr., Ralph de Toledano, and Isaac DonLevine (all Hede’s friends as well) preserved and augmented Chambers’scultural standing, their admiration for the man admitting little real criticism.

Hede developed a strong friendship with Chambers, whose accusations hadfirst brought Hiss to trial and whose memoir Witness would soon reach best-seller lists.74 Hede had corroborated Chambers’s trial testimony, but she had not

72. Massing, This Deception, xi.73. In contrast to Paul’s earlier refusals to cooperate with FBI agent Robert Lamphere,

Hede remembered her FBI contacts warmly in This Deception and sent an advance copy toJ. Edgar Hoover.

74. See Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 460–71. Chambers’s memoir prompted manycritical and approving reviews. Some of the most impressive are Granville Hicks, “WhittakerChambers’s Testament,” New Leader, May 26, 1952, 19–22; Irving Howe, “God, Man, and


made his acquaintance until she sent him a copy of her memoir in April 1951,explaining, “what you will think of it is of the greatest value to me.”75 SoonChambers wrote to express his appreciation. With a characteristic sense ofhimself as a Cold War symbol, Chambers included Hede in the lonely commu-nity of truth-telling ex-Communists:

All of us are doomed people. For some this doom will be mercifully shorterthan for others—perhaps very short. I do not suppose there is one of us in theback of whose mind there does not burn continually, the words written on thehara-kiri swords: To die with honor, when it is no longer possible to live withhonor. I suppose each of us must pray for nothing so much as to know themoment when to use the sword.76

Hede and Chambers shared grief over dead comrades and sadness and angerthat other friends had remained Communists or sympathetic “liberals.” AfterHede and Paul had separated, Hede had concluded her memoir on a desolatenote:

[I]t takes more courage to break [from the Party] than it takes to join. The stepto renounce the brotherhood of men that believed they are working for a betterlife for all, to divorce yourself from the pioneering of mankind, from thefighters for a great cause, is very difficult. To leave the warmth, the safety andfriendship that have been given you [in the party] is a tragedy . . . Once youhave recovered, you know that you must expose the Communist conspiracy.You shrink because you do not want to expose the friends you have loved . . .

You have lost your first set of friends [the Communists] when you leave thefold. Then, when your battle of conscience has been fought and won, and yougo out into the open, you have lost your second set of friends [the liberals].Now you are alone.77

With these words, Hede became a kindred spirit.78 Chambers wrote, “Whenmy wife and I find someone to communicate with, we are very happy . . . like

Stalin,” Nation, May 24, 1952, 502–04; Max Ascoli, “Lives and Deaths of Whittaker Cham-bers,” Reporter, July 8, 1952, 5–8; Rebecca West, “Whittaker Chambers,” Atlantic Monthly, June1952, 33–39; Sidney Hook, “The Faiths of Whittaker Chambers,” New York Times Book Review,May 25, 1952, 34–35; John Cogley, “Witness: Whittaker Chambers,” Commonweal, May 23,1952, 176–77; John Dos Passos, “Mr. Chambers’s Descent Into Hell,” Saturday Review, May 24,1952, 11–12.

75. Hede Massing to Whittaker Chambers, April 23, 1951, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

76. Whittaker Chambers to Hede Massing, May 23, 1951, 2. Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

77. Massing, This Deception, 335.78. Chambers presumed that America was the anti-Communist stronghold of the West and

that Europe was hopelessly compromised. He also believed that religious morality was the onlyvalid yardstick to measure Western willingness to resist communism. For more, see WhittakerChambers and Duncan Norton-Taylor, eds., Cold Friday (New York, 1964); Chambers, Witness;and Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 449–50, 462–71.


seeks like. But it is you who wrote the terrible last line of your book; and so I donot have to explain to you.”79 “One of the shrivelling [sic] things about the [Hiss]Case,” he said, was that “no one would jeopardize his little safety or his littlecomplacency to say one word for right against manifest wrong.” He wondered,“Are there no good men left in the world . . . in whom wrenched honor mustproduce a crisis?” As if aware of his language, Chambers added that women,“rather than men,” played “the better part in the Hiss Case, and understoodit better.”80

By objective comparison, Chambers had less reason for such despair andresignation. He lived with his wife and children; by 1956 he had begun writingfor the National Review and was considered a guru for a growing community ofconservative intellectuals.81 Yet, driven by his apocalyptic vision of a final conflictbetween the West and the USSR, which the former, compromised by traitorsand liberalism, would surely lose, Chambers was often melancholy despitesteadfast support from family and friends.82

Hede felt equally lonely and hopeless, knowing she had lost her marriage aswell as many friends. Like Chambers, she had come from a broken home andcarried the scars.83 But despite the tensions that had resulted from Chambers’sespionage, his break with Communism, and his role in the Hiss case, to saynothing of his youthful sexual adventures, he could always rely upon his wifeEsther’s love, friendship, and support.84 By contrast, after the divorce, Hede wasleft with a handful of friends and her dog Seppi, upon whom she lavished almostall her affection.

Ironic, then, were contemporary reactions to Chambers and Massing.Chambers received more press attention, partly because he possessed a (male)cultural authority that derived from his reputation for brilliance—established inliterary circles before the Hiss case made him a household name. Since becom-ing a Cold War icon, Chambers had gained critics and admirers who praised his

79. Whittaker Chambers to Hede Massing, May 23, 1951, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

80. Ibid.81. William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ralph de Toledano both remember Chambers as one of the

foremost influences on their intellectual conservatism. See William F. Buckley, Jr., Odysseyof a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. (New York, 1969); Ralph deToledano, Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949–1960 (Washington, DC, 1997); Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 416, 444, 449, 451, 483,485–92, 497–503.

82. Contemporaries were clearly struck by Chambers’s unmistakable pessimism—hisopinion, stated forcefully in Witness, that communism would triumph over the spiritually deadWest, which was enfeebled by secularism and modernist cynicism. See Tanenhaus, WhittakerChambers, 462, 466–69, 500, 512; Weinstein, Perjury, 479, 480; Buckley, Odyssey of a Friend,56–63, 78–84; 142–43, 229, 240, 263–65.

83. Chambers’s childhood, marked by poverty, relatives’ madness, and deaths, is describedin the harrowing “Story of a Middle-Class Family” in Witness, 91–187.

84. For examples of Chambers’s homosexual encounters and romantic indiscretions duringhis party days, as well as Esther’s devotion, see ibid., 39–42, 61–65, 210, 265–68, 342–45;Weinstein, Perjury, 63, 89–91, 103–04, 357–60.


talent even when they diverged on questions of his morality and truthfulness.Most commentators, including detractors, acknowledged Chambers’s creativegenius and Witness’s bleak literary beauty.85

Despite effusive praises and his victory in the Hiss case, Chambers neverrecovered from the harsh judgments of the embattled Left. Conservative anti-communists heeded his pain but could not wholly assuage it.86 Hede, however,provided some comfort, and stroked Chambers’ ego. In fact, she encouraged hisauthoritarianism, saying that it was “of utmost importance” what he thought ofher, for “next to Paul,” his “judgement [sic] mean[t] the most.”87

Hede needed Chambers, particularly during the first years of her divorce,and contentedly let him make pronouncements about politics and history. Shehad long ago learned to listen while men discussed ideology and clearly enjoyedthe approval this brought her. It would have been easy for her to form such arelationship with the passionate and sometimes self-absorbed Chambers, givenher attraction to intense, intellectual men.88 Throughout their correspondence,Chambers maintained a controlling, if fond, demeanor. Asking Hede to visit hisfarm, explaining how her “salvation” was assured by her ability to perseveredespite her past, and reminding her of the “true” historical significance of theHiss case, Chambers set the terms of their relationship and often spoke in afashion that discouraged real debate.

Once Witness was completed, Hede’s deference deepened. Separated fromPaul and very lonely, she wrote Chambers after reading the book’s introduction,the now famous “A Letter to My Children,” in which Chambers explainedanticommunists as soldiers battling for the soul of the West and described theisolation and despair he had felt during the Hiss case. “How dearly I love you andhow deeply grateful I am to you!” Hede enthused. “I did hope that you would havethe answer to my worries, to my problem, to my pain. It seems you have.”89

Ultimately, however, Chambers could not alleviate Hede’s loneliness,because he did not fully understand or share it, despite his melancholy and

85. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 462–73; For specific examples, see footnote 74 above,and Paul Hutchinson, “The Works of God?” Christian Century, June 11, 1952, 700–01; JohnStrachey, “The Absolutists,” in Nation, October 4, 1952, 291–93; Fr. John S. Kennedy, “TheWitness of Whittaker Chambers,” in Catholic World, July 1952, 260–65; Irving Howe,“Madness, Vision, Stupidity,” in Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism,1953–1966 (New York, 1966), 263–68.

86. Chambers seems to have been melancholy throughout much of his life and, given themoods of suicidal despair he and his family of origin suffered, may have been clinicallydepressed. In addition, he retained a Communist-style contempt about the shallowness ofcapitalist society and looked with pessimism upon the future of the human race. See Tanenhaus,Whittaker Chambers, 42–43, 51–55; Weinstein, Perjury, 72–84; Chambers, Witness, 98–187.

87. Hede Massing to Whittaker Chambers, April 23, 1951, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

88. Hede’s role in these dynamics may not have resulted from conscious decisions on herpart but were doubtlessly one source of the “feminine charm” that many commentators notedin her and that had drawn so many suitors.

89. Hede Massing to Whittaker Chambers, January 18, 1952, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 3, Hoover Institution Archives.


empathy. No matter how depressed he became, or however ill with heartdisease, and no matter that he alternately feared and hoped in various yearsthat “this is my last spring,” Chambers was not alone.90 His wife and childrenwere devoted to him, and friends such as Massing, Buckley, and de Toledanorevered and visited him. Hede, on the other hand, felt that she had no homeonce her separation from Paul was permanent. Her apartment in New YorkCity was convenient and comfortable but afforded nothing of the contentmentshe had known with her husband. Sometimes she lived in Germany withfriends who loved her, but divided Germany, which was partly occupiedby the Soviets she had once served, was a permanent physical reminderof her fraught past, as well as a constant symbol of the Cold War that had sodisrupted Hede’s life.91

Furthermore, Chambers inadvertently underscored Hede’s isolation byrevealing the psychological distance between their respective worldviews. AfterPaul’s remarriage, Chambers continued to discuss loneliness, melancholy, andthe significance of the Hiss case in his correspondence with Hede and used hisauthority in a somewhat clumsy attempt to comfort her. He encouraged her notto regret, despair, or be hurt by the fact that one-time comrades now hated her:because of the Hiss case and the roles he and Hede had played in the affair, suchreactions were inevitable, and evidence of the ex-Communists’ heroism and“gallantry.” He argued,

They cannot, from their basic position, understand our position, or forgive orspare us who made it real by acts; or do anything but hate, and, given thechance, destroy us like dogs. And their attitude is whipped to cold or foamingfury because we, from our humane position, can understand, and, under-standing, forgive, and insofar as war permits, seek to spare them.92

Chambers died from his final heart attack in 1961. Devastated by his passing,Hede wrote his wife Esther: “Not since the death of my mother, not any deathof a friend has left me so terribl[y] empty and hollow and grief stricken asWhittaker’s.”93

As the years passed, Hede suffered from occasional severe depression shetried to shake off, telling herself that her isolation was not sufficient, not new

90. Whittaker Chambers to Hede Massing, May 5(?), 1958, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

91. Hede Massing to Paul Massing, September 18, 1953, Hede Massing to Paul Massing,January 12, 1954, Hede Massing Papers, box 2, folder 4, Hoover Institution Archives.

92. Whittaker Chambers to Hede Massing, June 7, 1957, Hede Massing Papers, box 2,folder 3, Hoover Institution Archives. This was in response to Hede’s defense of Chambers inNational Review, which printed anticommunist responses to the recent release of Alger Hiss’s Inthe Court of Public Opinion. Hede’s comments appeared alongside reactions by James Burnham,Anthony Bouscaren, Jay Lovestone, J. B. Matthews, Frank Meyer, Herbert Philbrick, RichardRovere, Ralph de Toledano, and Bertram Wolfe. National Review, May 25, 1957.

93. Hede Massing to Esther Chambers, July 14, 1961, Hede Massing Papers, box 2, folder3, Hoover Institution Archives.


enough, to trigger such melancholy.94 When Seppi died, Hede was bereft. In1975 Paul, still a central figure in her life, and a steady source of friendship andblunt chastisement, condemned her desire not “to continue a life which hasbecome meaningless.” “How can you now,” he demanded, “when you needGod most, defy him and behave rather like a pagan instead of a Catholic?”95

Unlike Chambers, who discussed the seductive merits of hara-kiri, Paul askedwhy she did not live up to her convictions now, when she had spent whole herlife doing so.96

Hede must have taken Paul’s advice to heart, for she outlived him by twoyears, surviving until 1981, when she died of emphysema in her home onWashington Square.97 After her death, familiar myths of her life flourished anew,and she could no longer contest them. Ralph de Toledano, a friend to Chambersand to anticommunists affiliated with National Review, wrote an obituary for thatmagazine. Acknowledging that Hede had “seen hope overcome by despair,” heemphasized that she had persevered and found “hope returning.” Toledanoassumed that Hede’s roles in and against Soviet service were more importantthan the personal consequences of her political choices, which he did notdiscuss. Emphasizing Hede’s “ability to laugh, which dismayed the liberalswho reviled her,” de Toledano insisted that “if she was ever bitter, it was notfor long.”98

94. Hede Massing to Helene (no last name apparent), December 26, 1967, Hede MassingPapers, box 2, correspondence folder (no folder number), Hoover Institution Archives.

95. Paul Massing to Hede Massing, June 28, 1975, Hede Massing Papers, box 2, folder 4,Hoover Institution Archives.

96. Ibid. Paul was as capable of advising Hede on this topic as Chambers had been; he hadlived with a brain aneurism and the prospect of sudden death since 1959 and had also developedParkinson’s disease. See also Paul and Herta Massing to Hede Massing, October 21, 1977,Hede Massing Papers, box 2, folder 4, Hoover Institution Archives.

97. She continued to write well into her eighties, submitting a novel to publishers andpreparing This Deception for rerelease. In 1978 she reviewed Allen Weinstein’s Perjury, a studyof the Hiss case. Having become in her own words a “crotchety old lady,” Hede voiced her ownopinions of the Chambers-Hiss drama—including assessments that varied greatly from Cham-bers’s own. Hede argued that Chambers had granted too much power and dignity to Hiss, whorefused to admit the “truth” in order to preserve his reputation rather than out of any noblerefusal to betray communism. Hiss was not, she argued, “a sort of hero transformed by fate andcircumstance into the eager agent of absolute evil.” She also speculated, based on Chambers’sconfessions of homosexual affairs to the FBI, and her own memories of Chambers’s pain overhis lost friendship with Hiss, that “homosexual love” for the former State Department officialperhaps had blinded Chambers to Hiss’s “somewhat colorless and narrow personality.”

In “Doomsday for Alger Hiss,” Hede aptly defended herself against Nation editor VictorNavasky, who had recently repeated Hiss’s argument that Hede had testified against Hissbecause federal authorities had threatened to deport her. This, she said, was “utterly false,”since by the time of the Hiss trials she had long been an American citizen. People like Navasky,she believed, were only in denial about Hiss’s guilt. As for Hiss himself, she said, “Most of uswhen we pass 70, take some sort of stock of what we have done with the one chance at life thatthe fates gave us. Did we spend it well or badly,” as “a force for good or a force for evil?” Shehad made such a moral inventory, guided by the religious faith of which Paul had reminded her.“If I were Alger Hiss,” she stated, “I would smash all the mirrors in my house.” See HedeMassing, “Doomsday for Alger Hiss,” Midstream, December 1978, 68–69.

98. Ralph de Toledano, “Hede Massing, R.I.P.,” National Review, April 17, 1981, 405.


Such a tribute, while paying homage to Hede’s strength, also did her aninjustice. She would have been disturbed to find no mention of Paul, who hadbeen at the center of her life for many decades. Unlike Chambers, who por-trayed his struggle against communism as the classically lonely war of oneman’s conscience and intellect, Hede had always emphasized the interpersonalconnections communism had given her: the people she had loved and lost tothe purge or as a result of her defection. To focus upon her alleged lack ofbitterness while sidestepping the failure of her final marriage is to ignoreher sacrifices for her convictions’ sake. It is to disregard the unhappinessthat resulted from her political choices, and thus, ironically, to de-emphasizethe moral courage for which de Toledano praised her. To imply that herdespair was caused by “liberals who reviled her” is to perpetuate themisrepresentation.

But had de Toledano revealed that Hede’s anticommunism had endedher marriage, it might have seemed an implied criticism of Hede’s choices.Traditionalist conservatives would in different circumstances disapprove of awoman defying her husband’s wishes to the point of sundering their marriage;their ideal was usually a woman like Esther Chambers, who abided by herhusband’s choices, placing her devotion to him above all other considerations,including politics. Yet when a wife’s loyalty to the state was at stake, suchconservatives would have grudgingly admitted that domestic strife and evendivorce were acceptable alternatives to treason. When a woman’s prescribeddomestic and citizenly roles conflicted, many Cold Warriors believed it wasbetter for her to exert an intimately subversive independence and to activelydisobey her man or leave him than to assist in his radicalism. The bottom linewas that for many anticommunist Americans, even (or, perhaps especially)conservatives usually concerned with maintaining traditional gender roles inthe postwar era, subversion of the state was a far greater crime than disloyaltyto one’s husband.99

Furthermore, if de Toledano had discussed Paul Massing, he would haveundermined his own fictional, romanticized claim that Hede had fallen in lovewith spy Richard Sorge, who “took her into that netherworld of Communistintrigue and espionage.” She had not understood Marxist theory, de Toledanoclaimed, echoing Hede’s disingenuous argument in This Deception, but “had

99. In the 1950s, wives of Communists convicted under the Smith Act organized theFamilies Committee to send imprisoned leaders’ children to summer camp, facilitate wives’prison visits, and help husbands with commissary expenses. In its campaign, the committeetried to use 1950s domesticity to its advantage, playing upon Americans’ sympathies fordisrupted families. “Is Family Loyalty Now Subversive?” Committee pamphlets asked rhetori-cally, claiming that the United States was “violating its own values by attacking families.”Anticommunist conservatives would have answered the question in the affirmative: theybelieved communist households mockeries of “true” American families. See Deborah A.Gerson, “ ‘Is Family Loyalty Now Subversive?’: Familialism against McCarthyism,” in NotJune Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz(Philadelphia, 1994), 151–76.


warmth and good looks and an instinctive understanding of human nature,”so she was “valuable to the Party.”100

Equally misleading was Hede’s obituary in the New York Times, which falselystated that she was still married to Eisler in 1949, while he faced “charges ofpassport fraud and contempt of Congress.” Paul, who had a far greater impacton Hede’s life, was not mentioned.101 Adding insult to injury, the New York Timeserroneously printed a photo of Eisler’s third wife. This obituary reveals bothcareless research and certain gendered cultural assumptions: most commenta-tors, including the New York Times’ obituary writer, spoke of Chambers’s life asa journey, an evolution, while Hede’s was portrayed only in relationship to aman.102

In the end, the National Review and the New York Times, so frequentlyopposed in political opinion, reiterated similar myths that commentators hadcreated years before, when they spoke of her as a femme fatale, a sultry actressand spy-wife of Gerhart Eisler. In 1981 commentators still described her as theyhad done more than three decades before: as a “woman with a past.”

Hede Massing, the only witness to corroborate Chambers’s testimony, wasessential to Chambers’s legal victory and public acceptance of his story. Hence,she played a crucial role in fomenting the anticommunist crusades of the earlyCold War. Yet Hede was mostly eclipsed from view, often ignored by commen-tators or turned into a stereotyped bit actress in the drama, which writers havecentered around Hiss’s and Chambers’s tribulations. De Toledano, Chambers,and Massing herself had lamented how liberals had tried to stop her from tellingher story and then “reviled” her for defying them. But by the time of Hede’sdeath, conservative commentators virtually ignored her in their hagiographicretellings of Chambers’s life or only discussed her in romanticized terms. Onceagain she was silenced—this time by friends and allies on the Right.

100. De Toledano, “Hede Massing, R.I.P.,” National Review, April 17, 1981, 405.101. “Hede Massing, 81, Ex-Soviet Spy Who Was Witness Against Hiss,” New York Times,

March 9, 1981.102. For Whittaker Chambers’s obituary, see “Chambers Is Dead; Hiss Case Witness,”

New York Times, July 12, 1961. For other tributes, many of which discussed Chambers’s life andcreative brilliance, see “Death of the Witness,” Time, July 21, 1961, 16–17; James O’Gara,“Death of a Witness,” Commonweal, February 26, 1965, 695, 696. Even socialist Irving Howe,who remained implacably disapproving, conceded that Chambers was “harassed by a vision”that, however mad or mistaken, directed his life and made him yearn “to discard his soiledAmerican self and appear—reincarnate, in ascetic leanness—as a twentieth-century Dosto-evski” (see Howe. “God, Man, and Stalin”). Even such criticism imparts more dignity to itssubject than do treatments such as those afforded Hede in her National Review and New YorkTimes obituaries.
