![]() Hiss, according to Chambers, was a dedicated Communist engaged in espionage, even while working at the highest levels of the United States government. Time and time again the two men would tell flatly contradictory stories about Hiss's allegiances during the period from 1933 to 1938 to congressional committees. Whittaker Chambers was a short, stocky, and rumpled Columbia drop-out and confessed former Communist from a poor and troubled Philadelphia family. Alger Hiss was a tall, handsome Harvard-trained lawyer with an impeccable pedigree. They featured two men who could hardly be more different, sharing only impressive intelligence. The case catapulted an obscure California congressman named Richard Nixon to national fame, set the stage for Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious Communist-hunting, and marked the beginning of a conservative intellectual and political movement that would one day put Ronald Reagan in the White House.Įven without its important influence on American political debate, the trials of Alger Hiss for perjury have the makings of a great drama. Even after his death, scholars continued to debate the issue and no definite resolution now seems likely.No criminal case had a more far-reaching effects on modern American politics than the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers spy case. No confirmation from Soviet files ever showed that Hiss had ever been an agent for any intelligence agency of the Soviet Union.Īlger Hiss died on 15th November, 1996. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, attempts were made to obtain information on the case from the Soviet intelligence files. In 1988, Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB defector, identifed Hiss as Ales. Because Hiss was with Roosevelt at Yalta, it has been claimed that he was the Ales referred to in the cable. Roosevelt to the 1945 Yalta Conference and then flew to Moscow. It said that Ales accompanied President Franklin D. One such message from March 1945 refers to an American, code named Ales, who was a Soviet agent working in the State Department. The National Security Agency did release transcripts of certain World War II telegraph cables between Soviet agents in the United States and Moscow. government, under the Freedom of Information Act, to gain access to FBI and State Department files about the case. In the 1970s he unsuccessfully sued the U.S. His first trial in 1949 ended in a hung jury, but the following year, a second jury found Hiss guilty and sentenced him to five years' imprisonment.Īfter his release from prison in 1954, Hiss tried repeatedly to clear his name. However, Chambers had produced damaging, if circumstantial, evidence and Hiss was charged with perjury. In a federal grand jury investigation of the case, Hiss denied Chambers' accusations. ![]() In August 1948 one Whittaker Chambers appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and testified that Hiss had been spying for the Soviet Union. In 1949 Hiss became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss also played a role on the international stage as Roosevelt's adviser at the Yalta Conference in 1945, and later, briefly as secretary general of the United Nations. Supreme Court, before serving in the Roosevelt Administration in the departments of Agriculture, Justice and State. ![]() Hiss clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes, a justice of the U.S. He received a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University and a law degree from Harvard in 1929. For those on the Right, Hiss represented the sort of soft-headed Eastern intellectuals who could not be trusted in matters of national security.Īlger Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 11, 1904. That Richard Nixon's career benefited by the case made it even worse. To those on the Left, the Hiss case was an example of persecution by irresponsible anti-Communists. His trials for perjury in 19 divided the country. Alger Hiss was a controversial figure in American politics following World War II.
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