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November 16, 1996
By JANNY SCOTT
Alger Hiss, 92, Central Figure in Long-Running Cold War Controversy
In This Article:
The Chambers Charges: Disloyalty and Subversion The Slander Suit: Accusations of Espionage The Nixon Connection: Search for Smoking Gun
lger Hiss, the erudite diplomat and Harvard-trained government lawyer who was convicted of perjury in an espionage case that became one of the great riddles of the Cold War, died Friday in New York City. He was 92.
In a case that catapulted Richard M. Nixon to national attention and helped lay the groundwork for McCarthyism, Hiss was accused in 1948 of having been a Communist spy while working in the State Department in the 1930s.
He denied the accusations in a sensational series of congressional hearings and two trials that mesmerized the public, pitting the slender, self-possessed patrician against his portly, rumpled accuser, Whittaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor and onetime Soviet agent.
The evidence was strange and dramatic: microfilm hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin, the telltale tracks of an old Woodstock typewriter, a birdwatcher's excited recollection of a rare sighting of a prothonotary warbler.
Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 and served 44 months in prison. Then he spent the remainder of his life trying to clear his name, his reputation seeming to wax and wane with each new turn in the fortunes of Nixon.
The case, meanwhile, became a source of obsessive fascination, a tangle of conspiracy theories and lingering doubts that inspired the kind of interest later seen among Kennedy assassination buffs and followers of the O.J. Simpson trials.
It was a kind of morality play that severed society along ideological and emotional lines. At Hiss' death, nearly 50 years after he was first publicly accused, followers of the case remained bitterly split over whether he was guilty, innocent or something in between.
To some on the left, he was what William Reuben, a friend and the author of one of the dozens of books on the case, called "an American saint" -- an idealistic New Dealer and rising star in the foreign policy establishment of the 1940s whose career was ruined when he was framed, in part to discredit the New Deal.
To many on the right, he was a traitor whose case proved beyond doubt the existence of Communist penetration of the government. As George Will, the conservative columnist, put it, Hiss' claim to innocence had become "one of the long-running lies of modern American history."
Still others had come to suspect that Hiss had lied but were inclined to excuse him on the grounds that the times had changed -- that steps taken to help the Soviet Union in the face of Hitler's rise in the mid-1930s might have been condoned at that time but looked quite different in the late-1940s.
In recent years, scraps of purported evidence have continued to surface -- declassified government documents, accounts of the contents of Soviet archives. Each time, one side or the other has claimed either to have sealed the case for innocence or to have unearthed a long-sought "smoking gun."
Tony Hiss, Hiss' son who until recently was a staff writer for The New Yorker, came to describe his family's experience as "like living inside a fairy tale, with a curse that couldn't be lifted." As Chambers himself once put it, the case became "a permanent war."
"The Hiss case reveals in stark terms the national mood at the time it occurred," said John Morton Blum, a professor of history emeritus at Yale. "It became significant because of the times, and it remains significant for what it says about the times."
Born in Baltimore on Nov. 11, 1904, Alger Hiss was the product of a certain uneasy gentility, the fourth of five children of an executive in a wholesale dry-goods firm who committed suicide when Alger was 2, leaving his children to be raised by their mother and an unmarried aunt.
He graduated from the Baltimore public schools and Johns Hopkins University and spent his summers on Maryland's Eastern Shore. At Harvard Law School, he became a protege of Professor Felix Frankfurter, who arranged for him to work as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upon graduating in 1929.
In 1933, at Frankfurter's urging, Hiss joined President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, working first in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, then as counsel to a congressional committee investigating the munitions industry, then in the Justice Department.
He moved to the State Department in 1936, became director of the Office of Special Political Affairs and accompanied Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference in 1945, in which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin drew the map of postwar Europe, setting the stage for the Cold War.
Hiss also helped found the United Nations, as an organizer of the conferences that laid its foundation and drafted its charter and as chief adviser to the U.S. delegation at the first meeting of the General Assembly in 1946. Later that year, he left government to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Chambers Charges: Disloyalty and Subversion
lger Hiss was just the perfect symbol," Alan Brinkley, a professor of history at Columbia University, said in a recent interview. "He epitomized everything that the reigning Democratic, liberal, elitist establishment seemed to be. Bringing him down was a way of bringing the whole thing down."
The accusations against Hiss first surfaced publicly on Aug. 3, 1948, when Whittaker Chambers appeared voluntarily before the House Un-American Activities Committee and testified that he had worked during the 1930s as a courier for an elite underground Communist organization in Washington.
Chambers, who had become a fervent anti-Communist after leaving the Communist Party in 1938, testified that the underground organization's aim had been to install Communists and fellow travelers in government posts. One of its members, he said, was Hiss.
It was not the first time Chambers had accused Hiss. As early as 1939, he had made similar charges in private to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle Jr. But friends of Hiss, including Frankfurter, had assured Berle that the allegations were untrue.
Under oath, Hiss denied having been a Communist or knowing anyone named Whittaker Chambers. So the committee brought the men together at the Commodore Hotel in New York City. There, Hiss identified Chambers as George Crosley, a free-lance writer he said he had known in the mid-1930s.
Crosley was one of a number of aliases that Chambers had used during his Communist years.
The committee then staged a dramatic confrontation between the two men in a marble-columned caucus room in Washington packed with more than 500 people. Under hours of questioning and the glare of kleig lights, the two men differed widely in their accounts of their earlier contacts.
Hiss said Crosley had first approached him as a free-lance writer looking for information for articles. He said he had sublet an apartment to Crosley, loaned him money and given him the use of an old Ford, but that the relationship had ended badly when Crosley turned out to be a deadbeat.
Chambers, however, said Hiss had given the car to the Communist Party, not to him, for organizational work. He described Hiss as his closest friend in the party. He testified that when he decided to quit, he went to Hiss' house and tried without success to persuade him to leave, too.
He knew details of Hiss' life that seemed to suggest close association. For example, he had told the committee in private how Hiss and his wife, Priscilla, were birdwatchers and had once excitedly recounted how they had spotted a rare prothonotary warbler.
So at the hearing, a committee member set a trap for Hiss: Had he ever seen such a bird? "I have right here on the Potomac," Hiss answered.
A member of the committee who played an increasingly prominent role in the hearings was Nixon, then a first-term Republican congressman from California, who would observe years later that, without his part in the Hiss case, he would never have become vice president in 1952 and a presidential candidate in 1960.
At the Washington hearing, Hiss challenged Chambers to make his charges outside of the hearing room, without congressional immunity. So when he was asked about his charges on the radio program "Meet The Press," Chambers answered: "Alger Hiss was a Communist and may be now."
The Slander Suit: Accusations of Espionage
iss sued him for slander. And, in a deposition in the case, Chambers suddenly broadened his allegations.
He now accused Hiss of espionage -- stealing State Department documents and passing them to him for transmission to Moscow. He produced handwritten notes in Hiss' writing and dozens of pages State Department dispatches from late 1937 and early 1938 that he said Mrs. Hiss had retyped.
In an episode that came to define the case, Chambers then led federal agents to his Maryland farm and to the so-called pumpkin papers -- two strips of developed film and three rolls of undeveloped film containing State Department and Navy Department documents, hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Hiss, summoned before a grand jury, denied that he had given documents to Chambers or had seen him after January 1937. Because the statute of limitations on espionage had expired, the grand jury indicted him on two counts of perjury for allegedly lying about his dealings with Chambers.
At his first trial, in 1949, Hiss acknowledged having written some of the documents but denied giving them to Chambers. He and Mrs. Hiss testified that by late 1937, they had given away the Woodstock typewriter that the FBI said had been used to copy the documents, including some dated 1938.
The trial ended in a hung jury, split eight to four for conviction. But in a second trial, which began in November 1949, Hede Massing, who had been prevented from testifying the first time, testified that she had been a Soviet agent and had known Hiss to be a Communist in 1935. On Jan. 21, 1950, he was convicted. Four days later, he was sentenced to five years in prison.
When Dean Acheson, then secretary of state, said in a news conference that day that he did not intend to turn his back on Alger Hiss, a little-known Republican senator named Joseph R. McCarthy seized on the comment to begin charging that the State Department was "thoroughly infested" with Communists.
"Alger Hiss' conviction gave McCarthy and his supporters the essential touch of credibility, making their charges of Communist involvement against other officials headline copy instead of back-page filler," Allen Weinstein, a historian, wrote in his 1978 book, "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case."
Hiss' court appeals failed, and he was sent to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa. He became a model prisoner. With characteristic wry stoicism, Hiss later described his prison years to his son as "a good corrective to three years at Harvard."
He emerged in late 1954 -- jobless and disbarred from the law, with Congress about to deny him his pension. His marriage foundered; he and his wife separated in 1959. He found work as an administrative assistant in a firm that made combs out of pressed piano wire, then selling stationery to businesses.
"He said he wasn't a great salesman but he could get in any door," Tony Hiss recalled in a recent interview. "Because when the boss heard that Alger Hiss was in the lobby, he wanted to see what he looked like."
Hiss' few public appearances prompted protests. In early 1956, Princeton University came under heavy fire from alumni and others when an undergraduate debating club invited Hiss to speak and the university administration declined to intervene.
And when Howard K. Smith interviewed Hiss in 1962 on an ABC television network special entitled "The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon," several major advertisers tried to cancel more than $1 million worth of advertising contracts with the network.
But the scrutiny faded as time passed. By the time the New School for Social Research in New York City hired Hiss in 1967 to do a series of lectures on the New Deal, the school received only one outraged letter and one telephone call. Five hundred people turned out to hear the first talk.
During the 1970s, the Watergate scandal and Nixon's fall helped rehabilitate Hiss in some quarters. He became a popular speaker on American and British campuses. Tony Hiss interviewed him for Rolling Stone. He was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar. And in 1972, he even enjoyed a rare victory in the courts.
A federal court overturned the so-called Hiss Act, the law that Congress had passed to bar him from collecting his pension. The act had been applied in an unconstitutional manner, the court ruled, ordering the government to pay Hiss his pension retroactive to November 1966 -- $61 a month.
All along, he had been trying to clear his name. While still in prison, he had filed a motion for a new trial, arguing that the typewriter used as evidence against him had been tampered with -- equipped with a new type face and planted on the defense. The court, unconvinced, had denied the motion.
In 1957, Hiss published a book, "In the Court of Public Opinion," arguing his case once again, and accusing Nixon and other Republicans of having attacked him in order to influence the 1948 and 1952 elections and discredit the Yalta agreement and the New Deal.
Hiss cooperated with many of the authors of the numerous books written on the case, including Weinstein, who, with the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act to get access to Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department records of the Hiss case.
When the government finally began releasing the papers, Hiss used them as the basis for one more petition to the court, claiming prosecutorial misconduct. But Judge Richard Owen ruled in July 1992: "The trial was a fair one by any standard, and I am presented with nothing requiring a hearing on any issue. The jury verdict rendered in 1950 was amply supported by the evidence -- the most damaging aspects of which were admitted by Mr. Hiss."
Hiss appealed, unsuccessfully, to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. On Oct. 11, 1983, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, seeming to put an end to Hiss' last hope of vindication in the courts.
Meanwhile, Weinstein, who had started out believing Hiss might have been innocent, ended up concluding in his book that Hiss had lied. Though several earlier books had sided with Hiss, Weinstein's book was taken by many critics to be the most definitive account of the case.
In the book, Weinstein attempted to address each of the theories that had been floated about the case, from a half-dozen possible conspiracies to the suspicion that Weinstein said was held for a time by some of Hiss' own lawyers that Hiss was covering for his wife.
"We may expect that newer and perhaps more ingenious defenses of Hiss will soon follow, if only because none of the many theories raised during the past three decades has proved persuasive," he wrote. "There has yet to emerge, from any source, a coherent body of evidence that seriously undermines the credibility of the evidence against Mr. Hiss."
The 1980s brought a resuscitation of the reputation of Chambers, who Hiss' lawyers had tried to discredit during the second trial by calling as a witness a psychiatrist who had concluded from Chambers' writings and testimony that he suffered from a condition described as "psychopathic personality."
Chambers himself had gone on to write eloquently of his unhappy life in his 1952 best-seller, "Witness." He died of a heart attack in 1961 at age 60. In 1984, Ronald Reagan awarded him a posthumous Medal of Freedom. And in 1988, the Reagan administration declared the farm that had yielded the pumpkin papers a national historic landmark.
The Nixon Connection: Search for Smoking Gun
hen Nixon's image, too, improved in those years, he appeared at the annual dinner of the Pumpkin Papers Irregulars, a group of mostly neo-conservative followers of the case, and delivered a talk that he later published entitled "Lessons of the Alger Hiss Case."
Attention turned to the case once more in the early 1990s after the fall of communism. Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, a Russian historian in charge of KGB and military-intelligence archives, announced in 1992 that he had searched files and had found no evidence that Hiss had been a Communist spy.
"You can tell Mr. Alger Hiss that the heavy weight can be lifted from his heart," Volkogonov said, responding to a request for information from Hiss and his supporters, who say a half-dozen other Russian archivists have told them they, too, found no evidence that Hiss was a spy.
But when American historians questioned whether Volkogonov's certainty was realistic, given the voluminousness and complexity of the Soviet archives, he conceded that he could not rule out the possibility that some records had been missed or even destroyed.
The following year, Maria Schmidt, a Hungarian historian doing research on the Hungarian secret police, said she had discovered a stack of documents among the restricted files of the Interior Ministry in Budapest, Hungary, that seemed to implicate Hiss as a Communist spy.
The documents included statements by Noel H. Field, who had worked with Hiss at the State Department in the 1930s while spying for the Soviet Union. Field, who later fled to Hungary and was imprisoned, had told the secret police that Hiss had tried to recruit him as a spy.
Hiss' detractors pronounced the Hungarian papers the "smoking gun" that finally validated their view and closed the case. But his supporters cited evidence that Field's statements had been coerced.
Then earlier this year, the National Security Agency released a collection of newly declassified documents, including an intercepted message sent by a Soviet spy in Washington to Moscow in 1945, identifying 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 continuously 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 Ales was "probably Alger Hiss."
Once again, Hiss' detractors said the document was new proof that he had been a spy. And Hiss released a statement denying he was Ales. Yes, he had spent a night in Moscow after Yalta; but he said he had gone there mainly to see the subway system, he said.
By the time he died, Hiss had outlived most of the people in the case. His first wife had died in 1984. In addition to their son, Tony, of New York City, Hiss is survived by his second wife, Isabel Johnson, of New York City; a grandson, Jacob Hiss, and a step-son, Dr. Timothy Hobson of San Francisco.
In addition to several dozen books, the case had inspired a documentary film, a television miniseries and at least one play. A novel based on the case was published earlier this year. A new biography of Whittaker Chambers and a new edition of Weinstein's book are due out in 1997.
Looking back, those who believe Hiss was not guilty insisted he would never have accepted their support all those years had he not been telling the truth. In his long insistence, they found their final proof: They said he had lived out his life like an innocent man.
As for those who believe him guilty, some said they had long ago given up their hope that he would come clean. As William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, put it recently: "It's probably understandable that he would feel that he had let too many people down."
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