The one-sentence summary of this extraordinary book is that it is about the dirty tricks employed by Richard Nixon and his allies in the late 1940s and early 1950s to secure the conviction of Alger Hiss, a former government official, on a trumped-up charge of perjury. That leaves out many material facts. Joan Brady was only eight years old when a former Communist Party member, Whittaker Chambers, told the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Hiss was a communist. She was not quite ten when Hiss was convicted in January 1950. But in 1960 she was living with Dexter Masters, whom she later married. Masters was an old friend of Hiss. Hiss came to dinner and remained friends with Brady until his death in 1996.
As that might suggest, the book is part autobiography, part memoir of Hiss, part thriller, and also a reminder of what happens when a society becomes infected by the paranoia that produced the American “Red Scares” after the First and Second World Wars. The threat to civil liberties posed today by the “war on terror” is an unobtrusive backdrop but a substantial element of what motivated the writing of the book. Another element is very personal. Brady’s parents were economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and when academics were required to sign oaths of loyalty to keep their jobs, her father led the resistance and organised a boycott. He crumpled as pressure from the administration and capitulation by colleagues undermined the campaign. Disgusted by his surrender, he took an overdose that did not kill him, but did something worse, leaving him in a vegetative state. Brady’s loathing for the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s is complete.
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