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The conspiratorial behavior characteristic of all spies is used as evidence of Chambers' psychopathic eccentricity. And the celebrated pumpkin was not a pumpkin at all but Chambers' own demented fantasy of "a pumpkin-shaped idol (Fate)," a sort of vegetable womb by which Chambers was able to "deliver himself" of a "brainchild." Writes Zeligs in all solemnity: "In the symbolic act of hiding the microfilm* for ten years (gestation), then transplanting (inseminating) it to the inside of a pumpkin from which he had scraped out the natural seeds (aborted), and then 'delivering' his self-created 'life preserver' to the committee investigators, there is discernible the recapitulation of his death-and-rebirth fantasy."
Granted that psychoanalysis speaks in metaphors, those who do not view human events solely through Dr. Zeligs' Freudian prism can only feebly object that when Chambers delivered his papers, he did not become a mother. The House Committee on Un-American Activities has been called many things, but it has never before been mistaken for a panel of gynecologists.
Freudian Jujus. Unfortunately for Dr. Zeligs' credibility, he is obliged to go outside his own closed system from time to time and face solid pieces of evidence. But even these become "magic objects," "fetishes," or "idols." Yet the object that sealed Hiss's verdict was no Freudian juju; it was a Woodstock typewriter, which could hardly have been conjured from Chambers' diseased imagination. Confronted with this fact, the imagination of others conjured up a second typewriter, constructed by persons to frame Hiss. For Dr. Zeligs, this infernal machine exists because it must exist, just as for some theorists about the Kennedy assassination there must be two Lee Harvey Oswalds.
Dr. Zeligs seems to consider almost anything admissible evidence. Chambers' alleged homosexuality is supported by a single unnamed witness who claimed that in 1932 he was assaulted by Chambers in his sleep. It is certainly remarkable, considering the pitiless scrutiny to which Chambers' life was subjected by numberless investigators eager to discredit him, that no stronger evidence than this was ever unearthed.
Although Dr. Zeligs' implacable curiosity has followed Chambers from behind the cradle to beyond the grave, the same psychiatric attentions have not been visited upon Alger Hiss. He is presented as a man of great capacity, singularly kind, though with a somewhat formal cast of mind. Unlike suicides in the Chambers family, which become clues to a sinister pathology of character, the suicides of Hiss's father and sister are simply private misfortunes borne with dignity and fortitude. But then, Chambers did not cooperate with his retrospective analyst, while Hiss did. In fact, Hiss corresponded voluminously with Zeligs and went over the manuscript before publication.
Friendship and Fratricide is an ingenious but grotesque book. It is also, in the guise of dispassionate scientific inquiry, the slander of a dead man.
* Some State Department documents and Hiss's handwritten notes about others, which Chambers testified he had received from him in 1938.