Word: herbst
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more pertinent question posed by Langer's book might be: How well did Herbst's friends and admirers really know her? Apparently, not well enough. The misunderstanding is rooted in Herbst's involvement in the Communist Party after 1930. As Langer regretfully relates, when party interests were at stake Herbst was an accomplished liar. On occasion she could deceive herself. In 1930 the writer and her husband John Herrmann journeyed to the U.S.S.R. at the invitation of a party official. When they came home, Herbst plunged into party activities, just short of membership. Herrmann joined...
Langer's one-page account of the couple's decisive journey to the U.S.S.R. blandly echoes the letters Herbst was writing home at the time. Russians in the street look "vital and alert." The workers' kitchens are "so shining." This was the year of the great famine, a direct result of Stalin's enforced collectivization. Though Herbst may have been shielded from the grislier effects of the mass starvation that cost 6 million peasant lives, she could not have failed to see what other travelers were reporting: hordes of hollow-eyed families begging at every railway...
Thirty-eight years later Herbst published a brief reminiscence of the trip that should have prodded Langer, usually an indefatigable researcher, into inquiring about conditions in the U.S.S.R. at the time of the visit. Herbst wrote that she had failed to ask about the collectivization that had uprooted "flocks of human beings, to starve or die." Instead, not a word about the famine appears in Langer's book...
...Herbst's behavior in connection with the Hiss-Chambers case further demonstrates her growing inability to discern truth. In 1948 Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of having been a fellow spy in the Communist underground. Herbst was privy to information that partly substantiated Chambers' claim. In fact, as this book discloses, Herbst's husband, in his role as aide to the party's chief recruiter of agents in Washington, first introduced Chambers and Hiss...
...repeatedly lied to FBI investigators. At the same time, she solicited a meeting with attorneys for Hiss in the hope of giving aid and support. The encounter was a disaster. The lawyers were appalled by Herbst's offhand attitude about espionage. In their notes they observed that she had "no real concern about people working for the Government, taking papers and supplying information surreptitiously to the Communist Party." Later Herbst confided to a friend, "The Hiss case was handled wrongly....as indeed I suggested to his lawyers all along. He should have been more frank... Admitting smaller things would...