WHENEVER I AM TOLD that if only we had the White House tapes or a Liddy confession or a rigorous impeachment trial, we could determine the truth about Watergate and sift the guilty from the innocent, I think of reports of the Alger Hiss case, 25 years ago. I remember his accusers and defenders, his typewriter, his Ford and his Petersboro trip, the apartment he subletted and the carpet he received. I think of the facts and the denials, the interpretations and the reexaminations, the two trials and the endless press speculation. It has been almost a quarter century since the jury convicted Alger Hiss, and since then even more information has been dredged up to the surface. We have more details, the picture grows more complete, but somehow we know that we shall never have a satisfactory answer to the question: Did Alger Hiss pass State Department documents to Whitaker Chambers as part of a Communist conspiracy? Was Hiss guilty?

The FBI announced recently that it was releasing its files on the Hiss case for scholarly use, so the pursuers of that fleeting mystery will soon have a new store of ammunition. Hopefully they will make better use of it than Texan professor Anthony Kubek made of a batch of dispatches from wartime China that the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to publish three years ago. That committee, which is not in the habit of collecting scholarly information on the Far East, obtained this material in 1945 in a rather spectacular fashion. After an agent of the OSS (wartime precursor of the CIA) noticed passages from a classified report printed verbatim in the left-wing journal Amerasia, he alerted his superiors, touching off a surreptitious investigation. The investigation culminated in a nighttime raid of the magazine's offices, where government agents seized piles of documents. Some of these dispatches (plus many others, as John S. Service observes in an excellent monograph on his own published reports) were collected in 1970 under the title, The Amerasia Papers, and this occasion provided Professor Kubek with an opportunity to direct another attack at those men who reported from China during the war.

I mention the Amerasia case not only because it is another McCarthy-era mystery that time has not solved, but also because Kubek's contribution, along with Cedric Belfrage's The American Inquisition and Lately Thomas's When Even Angels Wept, forms a perfect Trinity of Ignorance: See No Evil, See No Good, See Nothing. By once again posing that time-eroded question--who lost China?--Kubek has oversimplified the true picture and, in the McCarthyite manner, painted portraits, portraits of heroes and villains, portraits in which all (and this, of course, is the tip-off) the subjects are Americans. Somehow hundreds of millions of Chinese are forgotten.

Kubek's essay is a transplanted period piece, but Belfrage's book is no less dated. Editor of the National Guardian and a British citizen, Belfrage was deported from the United States in 1955. He has now written a detailed but superficial chronicle of the persecution of American radicals--whom he prefers to call "heretics"--in the post-World War II, pre-New Frontier era.

The American Inquisition is written with all the attention to style and accuracy of a political flyer. The prose is so sodden with self-righteousness and heavy irony that only the faithful (i.e., "heretics") might hope to find it tolerable. And Belfrage has also retained that annoying C.P. habit of stating a half-truth as gospel and then scampering off to make a different point. He notes that no one accused of espionage by Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz or Whitaker Chambers "was ever convicted of spying," without bothering to add that the statue of limitation for espionage protected most of the accused. He never mentions that Alger Hiss, for example, was convicted of perjury for lying about his involvement with Chambers and that this verdict was delivered at the end of a trial which, the judge declared, centered on whether Chambers was telling the truth. Belfrage is too busy rushing on to spout another unsupported statement: "With respect to the Bomb, the Russians were fully capable of making their own..." This scattershot method, of course, was invented by that famous American political leader who once said that if this story didn't work, he had another which would: the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy.

Belfrage, like Kubek and McCarthy, views a world of villains and heroes. Until recently, and certainly during the fifties, it was easier to sympathize with the Belfrages. There was a civil war going on then, and for some men, including Belfrage, it took courage to speak out. It was easy to agree, during the fifties, that while the "heretics" might not be blameless, their punishments far outweighed their crimes. Certainly, their inquisitors represented a reactionary force, while the "heretics," for the most part, advocated social reform and perhaps social revolution. What's more, innocent bystanders suffered--because McCarthy, McCarran and their cohorts, especially on the local level, rarely exercised a surgeon's care in excising the red sores from the body politic.

BUT THE WAR has died down now. We have the right to demand more than pamphlets bound between hard covers. Belfrage's book resembles Kubek's not only in its vituperative writing style, but more importantly, in the questions it chooses to ask and the way it chooses to remain within the intellectual context of the fifties. Was Owen Lattimore the number-one Soviet espionage agent in America? Did Hiss maneuver the Yalta sell-out? Did the denial of a passport to W.E.B. DuBois uphold the principles or security of this nation? No. Granted. But...so what?

Lately Thomas bills his book as "an objective reappraisal of The Senator Joseph McCarthy Affair," which gives us cause for hope; to underline the point, he subtitles it, "A Story Without a Hero." But if you thought that his dispassionate study would strip away the polemics and reveal the historical significance of the political turnaround in mid-twentieth century America, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. Thomas fell into the onion trap; he was so busy stripping away he forgot to leave anything over; and his book, to switch vegetables, has all the force of a squeezed lemon.

Thomas is a readable writer, and the events of the McCarthy period provide fine substance for his narrative sweep. Although he warns that his book is not a biography, Thomas convincingly illustrates the days of McCarthy's life. He settles on the metaphor of the buccaneer, and the book's thesis--if it can be said to have one--is that McCarthy had neither principles nor politics, but only the pirate's instinct to hit and run. One wonders why Thomas insists on so distinguishing this book as a non-biography. To be sure, he has glossed over the Senator's childhood and concentrated on McCarthy's age of glory. But what has he gained? He still views history with the biographer's myopia: events are the footprints of the great man. He has written a book that is not a biography, but not a history either--merely a biography manque.

He admits as much in his note on sources. His account is drawn from contemporary press coverage, "the aim being to convey something of the episode's immediacy by recounting it in its own contemporaneous terms." If we take Thomas at his word, and accept that he limited his sources through design and not simply out of laziness, we come face to face with the central problem of the book. If his goal was simply to recreate a drama and "to appreciate the impact it produced on that [original] audience," perhaps he was correct to restrict his reading. But an "objective reappraisal," by this definition, is only a watered down, flattened out version of the original story. No depth is added, no illumination attempted. Kubek and Belfrage asked the wrong questions; Thomas asks no questions at all.

PERHAPS WE STILL can't answer the important questions, perhaps we will never be able to answer them. They are nonetheless worth asking. It doesn't matter to history whether Alger Hiss actually passed those documents. What matters is that people believed that he could have; that, in fact, they were right--he' could have; and the unanswered question is why. And why, at his trial 15 years later, trying to explain or at least to understand what had happened to the world, Hiss could say only, "It was quite a different atmosphere in Washington then than today."

He was obviously correct. The atmosphere in Washington is a weatherman's nightmare: It changes all the time. Right now we witness another phantasmagoria of events in Washington, and we are tempted to insist on knowing who did what to whom when and why. More facts come in, and they confuse us. We will never know, we complain, expecting to judge men's guilt with the omnipotence of the Old Testament God. We probably will never know the answers to those questions. But we should ask other questions. The truths of history go beyond the guilt and innocence of individual men.