Red Puppeteer

Red Conspirator

Martha Holmes / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images

J. Peters and the American Communist Underground

by Thomas Sakmyster

Illinois, 280 pp., $50

Readers might react to news of yet another biography of a Communist involved in the Hiss-Chambers spy case with a tired shrug and dismissive comment about how, surely, we have learned everything there is to know.

That would be a mistake, as Thomas Sakmyster’s fascinating account of the remarkable life of Sandor Goldberger, better known in the United States as József (or J.) Peters makes clear. Most biographies of American Communist apparatchiks have been accounts of the lives of party leaders like Earl Browder, William Foster, Eugene Dennis, or stories of rank-and-file figures. There are a handful of biographies of party cadres like Steve Nelson or Hosea Hudson—but most of their activities took place outside of New York and party headquarters, and both were mostly involved in mass activities, not internal party machinations. And unlike Whittaker Chambers, his onetime friend and comrade in the underground, Peters remained, to the end of his long life, a devoted Communist, intent on taking his secrets to the grave.

Based on careful and extensive digging in American and foreign archives, particularly in Hungary, Red Conspirator is both a lively and well-written book, and the best life story yet published in English of a particular Communist type: the professional revolutionary who lived virtually his entire life in the shadowy netherworld where legality shaded into illegality and loyalty to Moscow and the world revolution trumped national identity. That its protagonist was a central figure in the most explosive American espionage case in the 20th century only adds spice to the mix.