Alger Hiss

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the Hiss trials and his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "I am amazed; until the day I die I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter." - Alger Hiss "We won the Hiss case in the papers. We did. I had to leak stuff all over the place. Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it. Hoover didn't even cooperate.... It was won in the papers. I leaked out the papers.... I leaked out the testimony. I had Hiss convicted before he ever got to the grand jury.... Go back and read the chapter on the Hiss case in Six Crises and you'll see how it was done. It wasn't done waiting for the goddamn courts or the attorney general or the FBI." - Richard Nixon Shortly after World War II, Congress' House Committee on Un-American Activities began investigating Americans across the country for suspected ties to Communism. The most famous victims of these witch hunts were Hollywood actors, such as Charlie Chaplin, whose "Un-American activity" was being neutral at the beginning of World War II, but at the beginning of the Cold War, many Americans had the Red Scare, and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy would make waves in 1950 by telling the Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia that he had a list of dozens of known Communists working in the State Department. The political theater helped Senator McCarthy become the prominent anti-Communist crusader in the government, and McCarthy continued to claim he held evidence suggesting Communist infiltration throughout the government, but anytime he was pressed to produce his evidence, McCarthy would not name names. Instead, he'd accuse those who questioned his evidence of being Communists themselves. Among the people called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, none are as controversial as Alger Hiss. Hiss had graduated from Harvard Law, after which he worked as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, worked in the Roosevelt administration for the Agricultural Adjustment Association, and was Head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That background didn't exactly sound like one held by a Soviet spy, let alone a Communist, but Elizabeth Bentley, a former Communist, notified the Committee about a suspected spy ring and named several names, including Hiss. More notably, Hiss was also accused of being a Communist and Soviet spy by an admitted Communist, Whittaker Chambers. The Hiss case came at a time when the Committee was populated by right-wing zealots, including a young Congressman from California named Richard Nixon. Decorum was in scarce supply, and "Hiss was everything Nixon despised...wealthy, liberal, educated and handsome." Although Hiss was believed at first and Nixon was cast as the public villain for doggedly questioning him over Communist ties, Chambers eventually produced State Department documents typed on Hiss's typewriter, and Hiss was forced to admit that he previously knew and had associated with Chambers, who had renounced his Communism and had become editor of Time Magazine. Though the FBI and the Committee were never able to prove Hiss was a spy, they were able to get Hiss on a charge of perjury, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison, and the conviction of Hiss added to the luster of Nixon's anti-communist credentials. To this day, controversy still swirls over whether Hiss was actually a Soviet spy. Hiss claimed he was innocent of the charges his entire life, but the authors of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America strongly assert Hiss was actually a spy, writing that "continued claims for Hiss's innocence are akin to a terminal case of ideological blindness." Conversely, others have cited lack of hard evidence and available Soviet documents to make definitive conclusions.