![]() Another former Soviet official-turned-historian, urged on by an appeal from a longtime Hiss supporter, at first announced in 1992 that his review of KGB files had turned up nothing on Hiss. Memoirs by two leading Soviet intelligence chieftains, published in the past decade, both asserted Hiss’s complicity as an agent. Richard Nixon’s return to prominence as a policy advocate during the 1980s brought periodic reminders in the American and global media of Nixon’s initial fame as Hiss’s main pursuer in the televised 1948 House committee hearings. Alger Hiss’s late-1970s appeal for a new hearing based upon allegations of unfair prosecution tactics at his original trials was denied in July 1982.* Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, died in 1961, but Alger Hiss continued to profess his complete innocence of Chambers’s allegations until his death in 1996. ![]() Public debate over the case has resumed over the past several decades. Did Hiss become an undercover Communist while serving as a New Deal official? Did he turn over classified State Department files to Whittaker Chambers, a self-confessed former underground agent for the Communist Party? Or did Chambers, for obscure and malevolent reasons, deliberately set out to frame and destroy a respected public official? And although more than a half-century has passed since the jury at Alger Hiss’s second trial pronounced him guilty of perjury, the case remains controversial and the verdict leaves questions unanswered. When the Hiss-Chambers case broke open, its main characters and events seemed more appropriate to spy fiction than to the realities of American life in the late 1940s. As a result, the Endowment president spent forty-four months in jail and became a cause célèbre the magazine editor resigned and died a decade later, still obsessed with the case the prosecutor became a federal judge the director of the FBI lived to guard the republic against real or imagined enemies for another twenty-five years and the young congressman left obscurity behind to become the thirty-seventh president of the United States. The Time editor made his charge stick, aided by an obscure young congressman from the House Un-American Activities Committee, a tough federal prosecutor, and the director of the FBI. The truth emerges as the story unfolds, based in part on grand jury records unsealed by court order in 1999, leading to the conclusion that the stories Whittaker Chambers told the authorities and later published about himself and Alger Hiss in the Communist underground are completely fraudulent.Once upon a time, when the Cold War was young, a senior editor of Time accused the president of the Carnegie Endowment of having been a Soviet agent. The main focus of this narrative concentrates on the early months of the affair, from August 1948 when Chambers appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and denounced Hiss and several others as underground Communists, to the following December when Hiss was indicted for perjury. Hiss was not charged with espionage because of the statute of limitations. Hiss denied the charges but was found guilty at his second trial (the jury could not reach a decision in the first). ![]() Chambers claimed that Hiss had passed classified State Department documents to him in 19 for transmittal to the Soviet Union. ![]() This is a consensus challenging history of the Alger Hiss–Whittaker Chambers controversy of 1948 to 1950, a criminal case in which Hiss was convicted of perjury after two long trials.
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