Truth or Consequences : WHITTAKER CHAMBERS: A Biography.<i> By Sam Tanenhaus</i> .<i> Random House: 638 pp., $35</i>

As the Reagan administration wound down, it made a big-time symbolic gesture to its loyal conservative constituency. The true believers had watched the so-called Reagan Revolution with some dismay. Reagan had not dismantled the New Deal, had friendly dealings with “Red China,” had negotiated significant arms reduction treaties with the “Evil Empire” and had sent the national debt and budget deficits soaring to unbelievable heights.

But the faithful had a moment in 1989 when Interior Secretary Donald Hodel overruled the unanimous recommendation of the National Park Service Advisory Board to designate an isolated bit of Maryland farmland as a national historical landmark. This was no ordinary piece of real estate but land that had belonged to Cold War icon Whittaker Chambers, where microfilm hidden in a pumpkin provided “conclusive” evidence that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration harbored communist spies, opening the way for Richard Nixon’s meteoric rise in American politics. The farm receives about two visitors a year. Like that of its former owner, the pumpkin patch’s fame had long since expired.

Chambers burst onto the public scene in 1948 with sensational allegations that Alger Hiss, a onetime prominent New Deal official, was a deeply committed Communist in the 1930s and had belonged to a cell of covert Soviet agents. Hiss vehemently denied the charges but subsequently was indicted for perjury about his knowledge of Chambers and his own spying activities. His first trial resulted in a hung jury, but in 1950, a second jury convicted him, significantly, as the Cold War intensified with Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons, new spy charges and the triumph of the Chinese Communists.

Hiss emerged after 44 months in jail and jauntily remarked that it had been a useful corrective to his three years in Harvard Law School. He became a martyr and a Cold War victim for some, while Chambers was celebrated in other quarters. Those who acknowledged Hiss’ guilt nevertheless found Chambers a dubious hero and hardly the savior that he and his ardent supporters imagined him to be. For himself, Chambers ambivalently described the case to one of his acolytes as “a waste,” “a calamity.” Chambers and Hiss--the names conjure bitterly contested memories of a time when many viewed the Cold War in religious terms as a mortal struggle against the atheistic demon of communism, or in secular terms as a long-running battle for “history.”

Sam Tanenhaus’ “Whittaker Chambers” labors mightily to resurrect Chambers. It is a relentless effort to place his subject at the vortex of 20th century political history, to take him beyond a mere “witness” (the title of Chambers’ memoir), and to make him the prophetic hero of a morality play in which nothing less than the outcome of history was at stake. Yet Tanenhaus has also marshaled evidence that reveals a man who vastly inflated his importance and whose mind-set, in fact, remained conditioned all his life by the discipline he had acquired as a Communist. The biography takes us no closer to settling the Hiss-Chambers controversy--both sides will be reinforced in their beliefs--but it does take us to a fuller understanding of Chambers.

Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers in 1901. The middle name was bestowed by an adoring, domineering mother, and his first name was for his often-absent father, a man largely uninterested in his child. The father was bisexual and disappeared for long periods; he was, his son said, a man of “separate compartments.” And so would the son be, “with far greater complexity,” as Tanenhaus notes in a rare understatement. John Kenneth Galbraith called Chambers “one of the most avidly intellectual men of the century.” Columbia literature professor Mark Van Doren called him the best of all his famous undergraduates--surely a bit of hyperbole for a student who amazed his teacher by ardently promoting the cause of the “great man” in 1920: Calvin Coolidge. Chambers always seemed to be in pursuit of a cause or a faith. He left Columbia, went to Europe, read Fabian socialist literature, Georges Sorel’s reflections on syndicalism and violence and numerous reactionary tracts that celebrated Catholicism and monarchy.

It also was a sexually confusing time for Chambers, a time when he had his first affair with a woman and possibly fathered a child. Yet all this might have been a cover for his growing attraction to men, as Tanenhaus acknowledges. His sexual confusion and various family crises intensified his search as a secular pilgrim for some political faith to fill the voids and resolve the confusions in his life. Given the political currents, Lenin’s authoritarianism proved the most attractive. Lenin alone, Chambers wrote, “engaged in bringing to birth, in bringing to reality, a new age of history.” And Chambers was going to ride the train into that new age. He had found his church, and he joined the Communist Party. The party offered a sense of belonging, an important matter for a man who felt so desperately alienated and marginalized, even by his given name.

Chambers’ time in the party was typical for an intellectual. Alas, there was a need to make money, and Chambers took on various outside writing assignments, most notably a translation of the children’s tale “Bambi.” The party gave him the intellectual status he believed he deserved, and he wrote extensively for the Daily Worker and the New Masses. He found himself embroiled in sectarian disputes and fended off challenges that he was a closet Trotskyite. “I was not then and never have been a Trotskyist” is the ironic language he offered in his memoir. He certainly became a committed Stalinist. Soon, Chambers was the “purest Bolshevik writer ever to function in the United States,” as Murray Kempton noted. Tanenhaus insists that Chambers’ stories were not ordinary agitprop, yet he functioned as a “literary commissar.” As the new editor of the New Masses in 1932, he solemnly laid down a classic Leninist warning to intellectuals:

“You are either pioneers and builders of civilization, or you are nothing. You will either aid in molding history, or history will mold you, and in the case of the latter, you can rest assured that you will be indescribably crushed and maimed in the process. And the end will be total destruction. History is not a blind goddess, and does not pardon the blindness of others. In history, defeat is the penalty of blindness or apathy--and sometimes annihilation.”

The same pervasive secular belief in history’s inevitable sweep would always dominate Chambers, who never lost faith in that conviction, even when he became a certified mortal enemy of communism. At the end, one of his lifelong friends told him: “You never changed, Whit, you just changed sides.” He had only switched sides, yet Chambers’ gloomy, pessimistic nature (his father nicknamed him “Beadle”) convinced him that he had chosen the losing side. His later associates at Time magazine thought he still believed that it was the communists’, not Henry Luce’s, “American Century.”

In 1932, the party took its hottest literary property and sent him underground as a mere courier. Why? Because Chambers was a native, a WASP and so different from other party members who were foreign-born, as Chambers and Tanenhaus have suggested? Perhaps. Whatever the explanation, Chambers carried copied documents from Soviet contacts in Washington to his Soviet paymasters.

At this point, Chambers and Hiss undoubtedly encountered one another, probably with Chambers as “Carl” or “George Crosley” or whatever clandestine name he used. Unquestionably, Chambers had contacts with others who admittedly passed secret material to him. The value of Chambers’ work remains hotly disputed, but let Chambers speak for himself: “It all seemed trivial in the context of the great political events of the day.”

Soviet spying in the period, according to Chambers, was insignificant: “The secrets of foreign offices are notoriously overrated. There was little about political espionage, it seemed to me, that an intelligent man who knew the forces, factors and general direction of history could not arrive at by using political imagination, backed by a careful study of the available legitimate facts.” All too true. Stalin had Richard Sorge, who delivered precious secrets of Japanese military intentions toward the Soviet Union, but that was rare.

After seven years in the “underground,” Chambers decided to abandon the communists. The “inhuman forces of history”--specifically, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939--forced him to act, but that union resulted from the all-too-human cynical calculations of Hitler and Stalin.

Chambers worried about Soviet retaliation and feared for his safety. Stalin’s long reach was well known. Walter Krivitsky, the prominent NKVD defector, eventually was a “suicide”; Leon Trotsky, fortified in Mexico, could not escape his assassin. Chambers made a great to-do about hiding, yet his friends knew where he was. Eventually, he went to work for Time magazine, which hardly was a secret. Until he testified publicly in 1948, Chambers worked in New York and commuted periodically to visit his family in Maryland. And the Soviets could not find him? The alternative is more mundane and more persuasive: Chambers was small potatoes.

At Time, Chambers rose rapidly, particularly ingratiating himself with Henry Luce. At a crucial point near the end of World War II, Chambers became Time’s foreign news editor in New York. His philosophy as a Bolshevik literary commissar served him well in the internecine rivalries of the magazine, which strangely mirrored the sectarian controversies of his communist past.

The Hiss-Chambers affair made a national figure out of an obscure first-term California congressman. Richard Nixon’s biographers (especially Roger Morris) have analyzed his role in the case as essential to understanding the man and his later career. Yet anyone who studies the encounter, including Tanenhaus, knows that Nixon exaggerated his role and that without the persistence of its staff members, the House Un-American Activities Committee, including Nixon, would have backed away from the case. For Nixon, nevertheless, the case was his lodestar. During his final crisis in 1973-74, he constantly urged his staff to read his account of Hiss’ conviction, a rather bizarre suggestion considering that Nixon’s tale centered on a man done in by his own lying.

Chambers, of course, admired the young Nixon, and for all too long he unabashedly supported Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy. Chambers’ failure to denounce McCarthy disappointed several of his old friends. “Tell me,” one asked, “why was it that McCarthy never found a single Communist, not one?” Tanenhaus relates that Chambers smiled enigmatically and replied: “The last time I saw McCarthy, he sat in that chair where you are now and cried.”

For Tanenhaus, there are no doubts, no uncertainties, about Chambers or Hiss. He uncritically follows the research and findings of Allen Weinstein, who in his 1978 book “Perjury” concluded that Hiss was guilty. Yet Weinstein has retracted and qualified some of his findings, and he has consistently closed his source material to others, Tanenhaus being a notable exception. The recently released National Security Agency’s “Verona” cables allude to an agent code-named “Ales,” and an anonymous NSA bureaucrat later concluded (and Tanenhaus concurs) it was “probably Alger Hiss.” But the documents are incomplete and tentative, and their evidentiary value would be dubious in a court of law or at the bar of history.

Make no mistake: This is a biography with a political mission not only to salvage Chambers but to savage his detractors. “What sets the Hiss case apart, then and now, was not its mystery but the passionate belief that Hiss must be innocent no matter what the evidence,” Tanenhaus writes. Like Chambers, he has exaggerated this dichotomy, viewing the case as a conflict of intellectuals and liberals (although many of them supported Chambers) versus conservatives and patriots. Whatever Hiss’ vulnerabilities, Tanenhaus’ attempts to exalt Chambers as the “hero of our times” is lame and ultimately doomed.

We will go on interminably about Hiss and Chambers. But now, half a century later, certain things are clear. Hiss, despite his death last year at 92, continues to command devoted believers in his innocence, who see him as a martyr, a symbol for “a generation on trial” (as Alistair Cooke described the affair), while demonizing both Chambers and Nixon.

Meanwhile, the likes of William Buckley Jr. have beatified Chambers as the “witness” who exposed the perfidy and dangers of atheistic communism. All that is overblown, out of proportion to the core complex course of history. The core achievements of the New Deal have endured, Alger Hiss and Ronald Reagan notwithstanding, and we would have won the Cold War without Whittaker Chambers. Commenting on the recent cases of Russian infiltration of the CIA, a former CIA officer noted, “I think we were fairly well-penetrated. But the point is, so what? It didn’t save the Soviet Union. And it didn’t bring down the United States.” Exactly.