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Alger Hiss

The Hiss case was a Dreyfus affair which went wrong. The case became a focus of obsessive fascination, a morass of conspiracy theories and lingering doubts of the sort later seen among Kennedy assassination buffs.

Whittaker Chambers was born April 1, 1901, to a politically conservative family of intellectual and artistic achievement. From his boyhood on Long Island, New York, he went to Columbia University and there became radicalized to Marxism. In 1925 he dropped out of Columbia and joined the Communist Party. Initially employing his literary talent as a writer for The Daily Worker, he later went underground as an espionage agent. He came to Washington in the latter capacity in 1934 and made contact with several government officials identified as party members or sympathizers. His duties included obtaining information from these officials and passing it on to a Soviet intelligence operative in New York.

Among his Washington contacts was Alger Hiss. Hiss had impeccable establishment credentials. Educated at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, he became a protege of Prof. Felix Frankfurter, arranged for him to work as a clerk for Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1933, at Frankfurter's urging, Hiss joined President Roosevelt's New Deal Administration. Hiss moved to the State Department in 1936, where he became director of the Office of Special Political Affairs.

Hiss held progressively more responsible posts in the State Department before leaving government service in 1946 to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. While at the State Department he helped arrange United States participation in the Yalta Conference and organized the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences leading to establishment of the United Nations.

Influenced by Josef Stalin's party purges, Chambers defected from the Communist Party in April 1938. In September 1939, further disaffected by Stalin's pact with Adolf Hitler, he informed Assistant Secretary of State Adolph A. Berle, Jr., of Hiss's Communist affiliation and activity. Berle was slow to investigate and dropped the matter after President Franklin D. Roosevelt belittled Chambers's story and Dean Acheson and Justice Felix Frankfurter, Hiss's former law professor and friend, vouched for Hiss.3 Discouraged by this response and wishing to build a new life for himself and his family, Chambers now sought to distance himself from his past. He immersed himself in his career at Time, where he began as a book reviewer in 1939 and rose to senior editor by 1948; in hard labor on his Westminster, Maryland, farm; and in the Quaker faith to which he converted.

As Soviet-American relations deteriorated after World War II, concerns about domestic Communist infiltration and subversion were taken more seriously. The FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began a series of investigations, during which the record of Chambers's 1939 interview with Berle was uncovered, On August 3, 1948, Chambers appeared before the HUAC under subpoena and publicly named the members of his former Communist apparatus in Washington, including Hiss. Two days later Hiss testified that he had never been a Communist Party member or sympathizer and had never known Chambers.

With his impressive background, high-placed connections, and polished, self-assured manner, Hiss made a far better impression on most committee members and observers than Chambers, a rumpled, admitted ex-Communist of dubious reputation. But a few, notably Rep. Richard M. Nixon and HUAC investigator Robert Stripling, were unpersuaded by Hiss's denials. Nixon followed up with at least two unpublicized visits to Chambers's farm the week of August 9 and became convinced that Chambers was telling the truth about his association with Hiss, with whom he claimed a close family friendship.

Doubts about Hiss spread when Chambers, questioned further by the HUAC in executive session, detailed many aspects of Hiss's personal and family life that Hiss then corroborated in further independent testimony. When the committee finally brought them together on August 17, Hiss claimed to recall Chambers as George Crosley, a free-lance writer to whom he had briefly rented rooms, but continued to deny any closer association or Communist connection. He sought to discredit his accuser as mentally unstable. Asked by Nixon on August 25 about his motivations, Chambers replied, "The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this Nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise."

Hiss challenged Chambers to repeat his accusation outside privileged testimony so he could sue Chambers for libel, and Chambers obliged on "Meet the Press." Hiss was then forced to follow through, much to his detriment. In a pretrial examination Hiss's lawyer asked Chambers if he had anything from Hiss, leading Chambers to recover and hand over State Department documents in Hiss's handwriting that he had hidden away a decade earlier. With this first clear indication that Hiss was not only a Communist but was involved in espionage, the case took on a new dimension.

The HUAC quickly subpoenaed any further evidence Chambers might have, and on December 2 he produced the famous "pumpkin papers" microfilmed copies of additional State Department documents that were found to have been retyped on Hiss's Woodstock typewriter. On December 15 a grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury for denying under oath that he had delivered copies of restricted documents to Chambers in early 1938 and that he had seen and conversed with Chambers at that time. (The more serious charge of espionage could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had run, but the perjury indictment incorporated espionage in fact.)

The Hiss trial got underway May 31, 1949, at the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square, New York City. Chambers testified that Hiss had given him the document copies submitted in evidence at Hiss's home on Volta Place in Washington; Hiss persisted in denying the transfers and his close relationship to Chambers. The trial ended on July 7 with a hung jury divided eight to four for conviction. A second trial began November 17, and on January 20, 1950, its jury found Hiss guilty on both counts.

Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison, appealed unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court, and ultimately served three years and eight months in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

For many, however, the case did not end with Hiss's conviction. Hiss continued to vigorously assert his innocence, and although such previously sympathetic liberals as John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., became convinced of his guilt, others instinctively resisted this conclusion. As one recent writer has put it, "The case was the Rashomon drama of the Cold War. One's interpretation of the evidence and the characters involved became a litmus test of one's politics, character and loyalties. Sympathy with either Hiss or Chambers was more an article of faith than a determination of fact."

Chambers' book "Witness" appeared in 1952 and became an immediate best-seller. Its portrayal of the inexorable advance of totalitarianism and the Hiss case had a strong influence on the resurgent conservative movement. The writer Andre Malraux, another convert from Communism, wrote Chambers after reading it, "You are one of those who did not return from Hell with empty hands." During the same period, however, the excesses of McCarthyism lent credence to the notion that Hiss may have been framed. Chambers deplored McCarthy as "a witless primitive whose antics endangered the entire anti-Communist movement," according to Allen Weinstein.

When Richard Nixon was discredited by the Watergate scandal in 1973-74, many among a new generation unfamiliar with the facts of the Hiss case were prepared to believe that any enemy of Nixon's must be innocent. Chambers had died in 1961, but Hiss survived to profit from Nixon's downfall and became a popular lecturer on college campuses.

Among those inclined to his innocence was Allen Weinstein, a Smith College history professor who embarked on a definitive study of the case. In the course of his exhaustive research he obtained previously closed FBI files and interviewed virtually everyone associated with it. The result was "Perjury; The Hiss-Chambers Case", published in 1978. Its conclusion was all the more convincing for contradicting its author's preconception: "the body of available evidence proves that [Hiss] did in fact perjure himself when describing his secret dealings with Chambers, so that the lurors in the second trial made no mistake in finding Alger Hiss guilty as charged."

In 1996 the National Security Agency released a collection of newly declassified documents, the VENONA intercepts, that included a message sent by a Soviet spy in Washington to Moscow in 1945. This message identified a high-level State Department official present at Yalta as an agent, code-named Ales. The cable said the agent had worked for Soviet military intelligence since 1935 and had flown on to Moscow after the Yalta conference. There was a notation on the document, by someone at the National Security Agency, suggesting that Ales was "probably Alger Hiss."